To engage the whales in a more extensive dialogue will be a challenge of a different order. Its difficulty has long been understood: Even when Jonah was in the whale’s belly, he did not address his captor directly. He beseeched the Lord to speak on his behalf. Project CETI is beseeching AI.
HOW FIRST CONTACT WITH WHALE CIVILIZATION COULD UNFOLD
The age-old desire to talk to animals gets a little closer.
The article runs through the various ideas on what to ask them. I would like to know what it is like to hunt giant squid. That must be a mission with a lot of drama.
Richard Moore, a philosopher of language at the University of Warwick, in England, told me there is reason to believe that we could have a richer dialogue with sperm whales. He said that we have more evidence for syntax among their calls than among the gestures and sounds of bonobos, and that he wouldn’t be surprised if whales are capable of communication that is “vastly more complex” than we’re anticipating, or even comparable to human language. That doesn’t mean we can expect the whales to have the linguistic creativity of the average adult human, who knows tens of thousands of words and can arrange them into an endless variety of statements. We will always be able to say things that no whale can understand. But to say anything at all to them could be as wondrous as landing on the moon.
The analogy of the Arrival film can not be overlooked. A sperm whale mind may be as alien as anything in science fiction, if not more so, and all the more reason to find out.
It strikes me as well that some movies are loaded with symbolism I completely miss out on.
I was clueless. More under the Youtube channel.