Hacker News Reader

Comment by meristohm | Hacker News Reader

> "I very gently approached, just breath-hold diving, swam down. She saw me and then actually closed her eyes. I mean, she was so relaxed that I could enter into that world. I was being allowed into her world and could make these pictures."

Free-diving with minimal equipment sounds like the best way to earn trust from long-lived non-human people who, I like to think, have a rich oral history. I reckon they have significant generational trauma. One of my daydreams is that we learn to understand some cetacean languages. Know anyone working on that?

View on HN

This comment jogged my memory about reading something about a NASA funded experiment in the 1960s to communicate with dolphins.

Essentially a woman, Margaret Lovett, literally lived in a watery house with three dolphins for several months.

Apparently things did not end well.

Here's the article I read about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...

Perhaps, fifty years later, we might go about things differently.

The story has been submitted a few times to HN and was actually discussed once about 2.5 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490746

That article just keeps escalating, what an unreal read.

Living with a dolphin in the same room for 6 days a week, trying to teach it English, letting him release its sexual urges on the researcher, injecting it with lsd and then after the experiment was over he commits suicide by drowning himself which apparently dolphins can do.

An utterly bizarre and twisted story that yet somehow feels wholesome?

I think you can feel empathy for the researcher and dolphin involved, but it isn’t wholesome; the experiment was traumatic and kind of insane. However, you can see that the caretaker really did try to do her best for Peter.

Fair point, I certainly don't endorse something like this happening again. It was more the human/dolphin friendship and bonding that led me to that conclusion.

The concept of human/animal communication is an interesting field when it doesn't involve abuse.

Thanks for sharing that article. Reading that awhile back contributed to my interest in “non-destructive testing” on animals, or rather, learning through observation and safer, more-ethical interaction. Learning dolphin languages rather than imposing ours feels better, and if we go into it thinking beyond our own lifetimes we might reduce ego and ecological disruption, and be more patient. Too often we investigate on our terms, in our controlled settings, rather than going to their natural environment. We do this to ourselves, to, with IQ tests and other standardized tests that value X over Y, when Y might be something my culture reasonably valued as intelligent.

> One of my daydreams is that we learn to understand some cetacean languages.

Me too!

I sometimes think about the devices described in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos that enabled the wearer to talk to dolphins on the planet Maui-Covenant[0].

I am sure this is possible today, using a library of recorded dolphin sounds and perhaps also movements, environmental conditions and apparent stimuli to train a neural net that can infer meaning.

I did find this article from 2011 about a future test of a dolphin communication device [1].

[0] - https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Maui-Covenant [1] - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028115-400-talk-wit...

> Maui-Covenant's original human settlers lived on a beautiful ocean world whose most notable features were the motile isles which migrate to the equator every summer. The isles were herded by dolphins saved from extinction during Old Earth's final years.[0]

Good reason to take care for the dolphins now, eh? Science fiction is great for reflecting, and for exploring what might be, to help guide us into the future. And it can just be fun, of course.

Caring for another group can have long-term benefits (but is not the primary reason to do kind things, I feel), a recent example of which is the many Irish people who donated to the Navajo COVID-19 Relief Fund[1]. Blindboy (from Limerick, Ireland) on his podcast remembers his dad telling him the Chocktaw gave money to the Irish during the famine in the 1800s.[2] Curious, I looked and found numerous articles about this, including [3].

[0] https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Maui-Covenant

[1] https://www.gofundme.com/f/xjgrfa-navajo-amp-hopi-families-c...

[2] first ten minutes of episode 136: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-blindboy-podcast/i...

[3] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-america...

Reminds me of The Great Silence by Ted Chiang, a short story written from the point of view of a parrot inhabiting the tropical forests of costa Rica :

"The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they've created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren't they interested in listening to our voices? We're a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren't we exactly what humans are looking for?"

https://vimeo.com/195588827

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

There are plenty of people who do pay attention to parrots. I'm sure they will tell the rest of us when the parrots got anything interesting to say.

Awesome short story by arguably the form's greatest living master. Highly recommended!

I've not read the article, but this came into my inbox today, which you might be interested in. An in-depth look at Project CETI, a research effort that seeks to use AI to understand the vocalizations of sperm whales off the coast of Dominica.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/scientist...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com