Hi Folks,

 

  I recommend folks interested in animal intelligence and communication patterns check this article out:

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/are-we-on-the-verge-of-chatting-with-whales/

 

Cool discussion and it would be SOOO cool if animals like whales actually talked in a way that is close to what we mean by the term. I am skeptical but hopeful. It is very plausible to me that there is much more to the communication pattern than we understand. But that is still a long, long way away from human symbolic syntactical propositional speech that evolves in to systems of justification.   

 

Also, the concluding paragraph reminds us of the Enlightenment Gap and the need for clear language:

 

The name of the CETI project evokes SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which has scanned the sky for radio signals of alien civilizations since the 1960s, so far without finding a single message. Since no sign of ET has been found, Bronstein is convinced we should try out our decoding skills on signals that we can detect here on Earth. Instead of pointing our antennas toward space, we can eavesdrop on a culture in the ocean that is at least as alien to us. “I think it is very arrogant to think that Homo sapiens is the only intelligent and sentient creature on Earth,” Bronstein says. “If we discover that there is an entire civilization basically under our nose—maybe it will result in some shift in the way that we treat our environment. And maybe it will result in more respect for the living world.”

 

In UTOK, sentience refers to Mind2, subjective conscious experience, the base of which is pleasure and pain and thus is essentially guaranteed to be present in whales. Also, intelligence refers to functional awareness and responsivity to novel problems, and thus clearly many animals exhibit intelligence and whales are among the brightest animals on earth. So, it is poorly framed (although it is admittedly part of the Descartes animals are machines history from our misguided Enlightenment past), in that sentience and (animal) intelligence correspond to Mind. The issue is if whales have emerged into the next dimension of complexity of self-consciousness, Culture and personhood via symbolic syntactical language. Seems unlikely, but since it happened with us it certainly is within the realm of the possible.

Best,
Gregg

 

___________________________________________

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
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Check out the Unified Theory Of Knowledge homepage at:

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