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I feel like we’d be communicating with them by now if that were the case. The dolphin-socrates would have a YouTube channel campaigning for dolphin rights or so

I feel like we’d be communicating with them by now if that were the case. The dolphin-socrates would have a YouTube channel campaigning for dolphin rights or something, via a human translator and camera crew. Our world would look like that Netflix movie “Bright”, with multiple intelligent species living and working together. (The movie was bad by the way)

FredPret 5y ago
While that would be awesome, these foreign intelligences might have too little in common with our wiring to communicate in any way. Also, we’ve been shaped by our tools since day one, and these animals use little or no tools.
- babesh 5y ago
  We already talk to gorillas via sign language.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    We’re pretty close to gorillas. We’re very different animals from dolphins and elephants. We may have nothing at all in common with extraterrestrial beings. An overlap of concepts is needed for two entities to communicate.
cetalingua 5y ago
Motivation could be an issue. What if they do not want to communicate with us? What if we are too slow for them? Dolphins produce burst pulses that have interclick interval of just few milliseconds. We cannot even hear these individual clicks and for us the burst pulse sounds like a creaky door. But they, supposedly, can hear individual clicks. We do not understand or use echolocation, they do, so their "dolphin-socrates" probably would have their own allegory of the cave that is not based on what individuals can see.
humaniania 5y ago
Humans have the computers and machine learning experience. Why aren't they making software to figure it out? And dolphin/machine interfaces? Touch screens for elephants?