[blaze33]

I once read that whale's songs could be used to transmit a 3d image from one whale to another which doesn't sound so crazy considering that echolocation can activate the visual cortex.

I don't remember the article and anyway there wasn't much more detail but I always found this idea quite interesting. Could be that looking for words, sentences or grammar in a whale's song is a misguided and anthropocentric approach to the problem. They may instead have a visual language that just so happen to be transmitted by sound.

Like, do you see what I mean? But, literally.

[dinkleberg]

That is a fascinating idea. We do have a tendency (understandably) to try and understand the universe through our own lens. Our thinking is heavily tied to our sensory input, so it is challenging to imagine what having echolocation or magnetic senses might be like.

But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.

[totetsu]

It’s hard even to imagine how other humans, from another time or culture think. While we have similar sensory apparatus we the world we experience is constructed within our own consciousness, with all kinds of emotions and memories mixed in with the senses. If you think about your own mammalian physiological and emotional .. affective experience .. how it feels to run fast, be surprised, see something you want to eat.. then I think we can start to appreciate what it is like to think like a whale or a bat. Even though their sensory input is vastly different to use, they still construct their world with the same kind of equipment that we do

[firecall]

Which reminds that I once read there is a tribe in of people who conceptualise the future and past differently to western society…

The past to them is physically looking straight ahead, as that is what they can observe.

The future is conceptually and physically them looking over their shoulder behind them, as that is what they can’t see.

I might be mangling it somewhat! :-)

[WalterBright]

> But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.

The reason is how far back their line diverged from ours. The nearer the point of divergence, the more reasonable it is to apply how things work for us.

[_nalply]

Interesting.

I talk a Signed Language and I know how to give a 3d image, for example when asking for the location of the toilet, like this: go through this door, then you see the stairs to the left, go down there and then from your point of view return but just one leve lower and the door will be to the right (from your point of view of now).

When asking for directions I am sometimes frustrated by the inability of people to tell me detailed directions. I know their language has limits and they just can't.

Another example, when my boy got on a chairlift the first time, I could tell him in detail what will happen including the change in speed and could include even the typical rattling when taking off. He was then very confident in taking the chairlift.

But I have difficulty imaging how whales communicate 3d situations... Probably by imitating what they experience by sonar and simplifying to the essentials?

[BiteCode_dev]

We convey meaning using words, but it doesn't have to be that way. They may have sounds that map directly into spacial descriptions in a way that light works for us.

[fouc]

That's really cool, I'm curious if other people that speak in ASL or other signed languages are good at that in general? I feel like even if I was fluent in sign language I wouldn't necessarily be as descriptive but perhaps I'm wrong there.

[nborwankar]

Here’s a thread from biology stackexchange about this which also refers to CETI.

https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/108499/can-whale....

[Figs]

I remember commenting on an article related to that here so I went digging through my comment history and found this post about dolphin visual language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314056

Given that that was all the way back in 2011 and didn't lead to any big world changing events I assume it was just cranks being cranky and a lot of people getting their hopes up.

[goatlover]

There are visual thinkers among humans. Temple Grandin being a famous one. She's written about how she thinks in pictures and had to learn to translate that to words growing up. Also how she believes animals think in pictures. Although I wonder if smell might be more the case for some like dogs.

[twobitshifter]

People without sight can also use echolocation. With the right head location sensors and a set of headphones you could describe objects to them with sound.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtVOK04XvA

[d-lisp]

I heard the same about dolphins few years ago but alas I cannot source scientifical evidences yet.

I heard also that while the major part of our brain is dealing with semantics, dolphins brain is dealing with acoustics; some kind of study was sourced in the radiophonic show I was listening which was telling about the different eras of brain growth in the history of humans and dolphins, trying to find some comparison points to better explain how similar cerebral masses could be specialized into different operations and a lot of different things I don't remember.

[mjan22640]

The shrew like common mammalian ancestor was a night animal and could echolocate. The 3d perception could have been the driving force behind the evolution of the large brain.

[raincole]

Reminds me of Arrival (the movie).

[ilkke]

I read this speculation about dolphins. I'm oversimplifying here, but they use their nostrils independently to produce 2-channel sound and some measurements consistent with 3D transformations have been observed.

[engineer_22]

That's fascinating!

In the thread of this thought, to search for intelligent life off-planet sort of misses the point, doesn't it? Here we have an intelligent species with a common ancestor, which we may assume to be easier to communicate with than an extra-terrestrial being. And we have hardly begun to attempt to communicate with our earthly neighbor in a meaningful way, but we have projects probing the cosmos for signals from space.

[proamdev123]

Following that thought even further, if dolphins or whales were as intelligent as humans would they even be capable of developing the ability to make instruments that can transmit electromagnetic signals?

Given the limitations of their physical bodies, would they even be capable of developing any sophisticated instruments at all?

Point being, intelligence may not be the limiting factor for extraterrestrial communication at all.

[rcme]

Don’t words transmit 3D images?

[Retric]

They are no more optimized for 3D images than taste or smells.

Try and describe your chair or oddly shaped rock as a 3D object without referring to it by classification and ask yourself how many people would have used the same sounds in the same order. There’s no direct mapping between 3D objects and the sounds used to describe them,

[hugh-avherald]

This suggests not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem

[mcswell]

If you (think you can) make the case for 3D, then you can make the case for 4D, because we can talk about time--past, present, future, yesterday, five minutes ago...

[pyinstallwoes]

Cymatics is very interesting.