(I may be misunderstanding you or the OP. Also, I’m writing this when sleepy.)
I think that that’s true. But I don’t think that that’s an anthropic explanation for why we got there first, or an anthropic explanation for why there’s no other species with language. Instead, that argument seems itself premised on language being hard and unlikely in any given timestep. Given that, it’s unlikely that two species will develop language within a few tens of thousands of years of each other. But it seems like that’d be the “regular explanation”, in a sense, and seems to support that language is hard or unlikely.
It seemed like the OP was trying to make some other anthropic argument that somewhat “explains away” the apparent difficulty of language. (The OP also said “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which in that context seems to imply that a second species developing language would topple us or be squashed by us and that that was important to the argument.)
This is why I said:
If this is the case, then it seems like the fact we’re the only species that has mastered language remains as strong evidence as it seemed at first of the “difficulty” of mastering language (though I’m not sure how strong it is as evidence for that). (emphasis added)
Perhaps the idea is something like “Some species had to get there first. That species will be the ‘first observer’, in some meaningful sense. Whenever that happened, and whatever species became that first observer, there’d likely be a while in which no other species had language, and that species wondered why that was so.”
But again, this doesn’t seem to me to increase or decrease the strength (whatever it happens to have been) of the evidence that “the gap we’ve observed with no second species developing language” provides for the hypothesis “language is hard or computationally expensive or whatever to develop”.
Perhaps the argument is something like that many species may be on separate pathways that will get to language, and humans just happened to get there first, and what this anthropic argument “explains away” (to some extent) is the idea that the very specific architecture of the human brain was very especially equipped for language?
Perhaps the idea is something like “Some species had to get there first. That species will be the ‘first observer’, in some meaningful sense. Whenever that happened, and whatever species became that first observer, there’d likely be a while in which no other species had language, and that species wondered why that was so.”
I think this is the idea. You’re right that it doesn’t change our estimate of how difficult language is from the non-existence of a second species with language; the thing that it does is point out that “even if you observe 1 element of a rare set, you shouldn’t think the set is common instead of rare, because you were conditioning on observing at least one element of that set.” [That is, we’re not seeing any of the planets that have life but no language, or directly observing any of the 50 kiloyear time periods when Earth was one of those.]
(Not sure the following makes sense—I think I find anthropics hard to think about.)
Interesting. This sounds to me like a reason why the anthropic principle suggests language may been harder to evolve than one might think, because we think we’ve got a data point of it evolving (which we do) and that this suggests it was likely to evolve by now and on Eath, but in fact it’s just that we wouldn’t be thinking about the question until/unless it evolved. So it could be that in the majority of cases it wouldn’t have evolved (or not yet?), but we don’t “observe” those.
But I thought the OP was using anthropics in the other direction, since that paragraph follows:
If language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire, why don’t we see more animal species with language? (emphasis added)
Basically, I interpreted the argument as something like “This is why the fact no other species has evolved language may be strong evidence that language is difficult.” And it sounds like you’re providing an interesting argument like “This is why the fact that we evolved language may not provide strong evidence that language is (relatively) easy.”
Perhaps the OP was indeed doing similar, though; perhaps the idea was “Actually, it’s not the case that language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire.”
But this all still seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which is true, but in context seems to imply that the argument involves the idea that we shouldn’t see a second species to evolve language while we have it. Which seems like a separate matter.
(I may be misunderstanding you or the OP. Also, I’m writing this when sleepy.)
I think that that’s true. But I don’t think that that’s an anthropic explanation for why we got there first, or an anthropic explanation for why there’s no other species with language. Instead, that argument seems itself premised on language being hard and unlikely in any given timestep. Given that, it’s unlikely that two species will develop language within a few tens of thousands of years of each other. But it seems like that’d be the “regular explanation”, in a sense, and seems to support that language is hard or unlikely.
It seemed like the OP was trying to make some other anthropic argument that somewhat “explains away” the apparent difficulty of language. (The OP also said “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which in that context seems to imply that a second species developing language would topple us or be squashed by us and that that was important to the argument.)
This is why I said:
Perhaps the idea is something like “Some species had to get there first. That species will be the ‘first observer’, in some meaningful sense. Whenever that happened, and whatever species became that first observer, there’d likely be a while in which no other species had language, and that species wondered why that was so.”
But again, this doesn’t seem to me to increase or decrease the strength (whatever it happens to have been) of the evidence that “the gap we’ve observed with no second species developing language” provides for the hypothesis “language is hard or computationally expensive or whatever to develop”.
Perhaps the argument is something like that many species may be on separate pathways that will get to language, and humans just happened to get there first, and what this anthropic argument “explains away” (to some extent) is the idea that the very specific architecture of the human brain was very especially equipped for language?
I think this is the idea. You’re right that it doesn’t change our estimate of how difficult language is from the non-existence of a second species with language; the thing that it does is point out that “even if you observe 1 element of a rare set, you shouldn’t think the set is common instead of rare, because you were conditioning on observing at least one element of that set.” [That is, we’re not seeing any of the planets that have life but no language, or directly observing any of the 50 kiloyear time periods when Earth was one of those.]
(Not sure the following makes sense—I think I find anthropics hard to think about.)
Interesting. This sounds to me like a reason why the anthropic principle suggests language may been harder to evolve than one might think, because we think we’ve got a data point of it evolving (which we do) and that this suggests it was likely to evolve by now and on Eath, but in fact it’s just that we wouldn’t be thinking about the question until/unless it evolved. So it could be that in the majority of cases it wouldn’t have evolved (or not yet?), but we don’t “observe” those.
But I thought the OP was using anthropics in the other direction, since that paragraph follows:
Basically, I interpreted the argument as something like “This is why the fact no other species has evolved language may be strong evidence that language is difficult.” And it sounds like you’re providing an interesting argument like “This is why the fact that we evolved language may not provide strong evidence that language is (relatively) easy.”
Perhaps the OP was indeed doing similar, though; perhaps the idea was “Actually, it’s not the case that language isn’t a particularly difficult cognitive capacity to acquire.”
But this all still seems disjointed from “Since we shouldn’t expect to see more than one dominant species at a time”, which is true, but in context seems to imply that the argument involves the idea that we shouldn’t see a second species to evolve language while we have it. Which seems like a separate matter.