I agree. I’m a fan of Stanislaw Lem’s ideas about how it’s pretty presumptuous that we could even know alien life when we see it much less communicate with it. So also, while humans and dolphins both are mammals with brains, considering the 100 million years of separate evolution, I’m skeptical that we can presume that they communicate with concepts such as “words” and “sentences”.
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My dog will sometimes give me a certain blank stare when I’m reading or typing away at my laptop. A stare that implores: how does your species survive when none of you do anything?
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I read something similar about cats. 5 things your cat knows about you: you are slow, you are heavy, you have an endless supply of food, you don’t sleep enough, and you leave a lot.
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The real breakthrough will come when scientists finally discover a topic worth discussing with the dolphins. Something a little more profound, I imagine than, “please let me out of this cramped smelly echo-ey tank and let me live where I belong”
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Really, we should be asking ourselves: is there any reason to believe that our non-human companions don’t have the impression that we’re the dumbest sentient beings on the planet?
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“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”
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Intriguing. Can you think of an example of that? Perhaps in some speculative fiction you might have read?
Only one that jumps to mind is a sci fi I can’t remember the name of, where explorers have found this planet with a huge ocean and these giant floating mats of seaweed. No intelligence apparent anywhere. They detect unusual electrical activity in the seaweed, and on further investigation figure out they are biological computers, with a virtual civilization of billions of sentient individuals existing solely as electrical impulses within the seaweed, not even realizing there’s a physical underpinning to their existence.
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Well, of course, its impossible to give an example of a form of cognition that humans can’t conceive of, but the closet approximation I’ve come across in speculative fiction is China Mieville’s Embassytown, which revolves around communication with an alien race:
“Few people can speak the language of the Hosts (referred to only as “Language”), as it requires the orator to speak two words at once; those humans (Terre) who can are genetically-engineered linguist twins known as Ambassadors, bred solely for this purpose. The Ambassadors speak with two mouths and one mind and as such can be understood by the Ariekei (who do not recognise any other form of communication) allowing for trade in their valuable biotechnology. The Hosts’ Language does not allow for lying or even speculation, the Language reflects both their state of mind and reality as they perceive it; they create literal similes by recruiting individuals to perform bizarre ordeals that can then become allusions in Language. Avice herself serves as a human simile, “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her”. Ariekei compete at Festivals of Lies to see who can most closely approximate speaking an untruth, an act both thrilling and highly taboo."
What really get me thinking, though, are examples from the real world; bees communicating through aerial dance, fireflies through their flash patterns. Plants, apparently, have a lot more behavior than we’ve been giving them credit for because what they’re doing is slower and less obvious. The coral reefs, it turns out, are spectacularly luminescent, but we hadn’t noticed because we’ve been 1.) shining light on them and 2.) not accounting for the color shift of light under water. And let’s not forget variations within the human race, like synesthesia, ASMR and tetrachromacy, that have only recently been identified. The more we figure out, the more I wonder what else we could be missing.
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Two fish in a bowl start a discussion. Fish 1 asks, “Is there a God?” Fish 2 responds, “Of course there is. Who do you think changes the water every week?”
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According to Cracked (I know, really authoritative source), the real reason that cats bring you dead prey is that they’re trying to teach you to hunt.
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That’s no argument for cats’ intelligence. If they were really smart, they’d bring me the can opener.
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They force you to get it for them. Who is in control here?
While you are working hard earning money to feed them, they sleep all day, keep you up at night and secretly run up your credit card bill.
So who is really the smart one here?
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