“These sardines need more salt”
“we’re losers of AFC East”
“Marino never won Super Bowl”
Simpsons were weirdly prescient; 5 words!
Omit needless words, wot wot?
Just like my ancestors said. “We should leave the Ukraine.”
Once we establish communications I hope we manage to convince them to avoid Japan this time of year.
Disappointing. They don’t seem to have difficulty finding food, so what else do they do all day with those big brains? What’s the fruit of dolphin ambition? Does invention – of technology, philosophy, literature, art – require scarcity and challenge?
Yes, yes, who’s to say they don’t have some of that. The bubble rings and the singing. But it’s not that amazing compared to what humans do, and there’s no durable physical evidence of anything more.
Dolphins. They clearly have a lot of potential, but they just aren’t applying themselves.
Unless they’re all enlightened.
They are just being animals, even if they smarter than the average bear. Animals are animals. They will eat or abandon young. They will kill other young so they can make with the mother. They never remember birthdays.
For the sake of our species maybe we should hope it stays that way.
“I believe I speak for the entire human race when I say, ‘Holy fuck,’” said Oceanographic Institute director Dr. James Aoki, noting that the dolphin has a cranial capacity 40 percent greater than that of humans. “That’s it for us monkeys.”
My good friend thinks that if you give whales (as a species) enough to time, assuming they are very intelligent, they will eventually build rockets they can board and launch into space. I think no matter how smart they are they are going nowhere without thumbs and having to live under water.
Were those five words “Let me call you sweetheart”?
The next step is figuring out where the verbs go.
Organic sign languages like ASL (as opposed to transliterations like Signed English) tend to use a spatial grammar. You can indicate relationships and inflections through position and motion.
This was originally a Fred Neil song. I mention it because I love that Neil, a classic folky singer-songwriter who Bob Dylan admired and Harry Nilsson covered (“everybody’s talkin”), spent a huge amount of his life working on a dolphin preserve. A happy mutant if there ever was one!
Yes. The dolphins, as a species, found Satori.
And now they will fade away from the physical plane with grace. And probably end up filling a lot of “tuna” cans.
What intrigues me is the possibility that they’re using those brains for something that we can’t even conceive of. We know to look for things like social behavior, language and tool use, but what if there’s some form of cognition that’s completely alien to us? Other organisms may seem more limited than they are only because we’re only able to observe the areas of overlap between their cognition and our own, but in fact there might be a whole lot more going on.
I’d wait until actual linguists confirm it’s a real language. They haven’t been very convinced that the handful of signs non-human primates have managed to learn actually comprise a genuine language as opposed to simple associations (which pet owners know from experience animals can learn).
