News Maybe the rosetta stone for dolphin language has been found

[C3PO]

Wow. Wow. Wow.

I wonder if in a few tens of millions of years, if it could be the descendants of the dolphins and not humans which will escape this planet and establish themselves as the representatives of earth in the cosmos?

They'll probably call our planet "Water" rather than "Earth" :lol:

 

[marooder86]

Wow. Wow. Wow.

I wonder if in a few tens of millions of years, if it could be the descendants of the dolphins and not humans which will escape this planet and establish themselves as the representatives of earth in the cosmos?

If they grow a pair of hands with opposite thumbs so they could build rockets then who knows:lol:

 

[Topper]

And here's one questions that pops out for me(guilty of not reading the article carefully) do the dolphins has to go through a learning process like we do. For example if dolphin A sends to a dolphin B a picture of a hammer nose shark will the dolphin B be able to interpret this information correctly if it never seen such creature before or it will be minigless for it. Because if not then then I don't see any superiority in such form of communication it is much like ours but just one language.

Maybe it's a learning process to learn the form of communication, but they don't need to learn all the words.

The scientist had created pictures of the sounds of the dolphins using a "cymascope". With this technology, they can see the objects the dolphins are talking about...

The "cymascope" has also been used in astrophysics for example:

http://cymascope.com/cyma_research/astrophysics.html

[Edit]
Oh I just also found an article over the dolphin language:

http://www.cymascope.com/cyma_research/oceanography.html

And here is a picture:

and the concept...

 

[boogabooga]

That's why I give it millions of years.

It seems for now humanity's advantage is it's thumbs as much as it is brainpower and language, which could be challenged in the long term.

 

[Topper]

Oh no, ... that's a petunia pot... And thank you for the fish!

 

[Andy44]

You can take a human living in a primative society and teach him higher-level concepts such as calculus, especially if you get to him very young. Can you do this with a dolphin?

I'm always skeptical when people assume dolphins are as intelligent as humans, or nearly so. It seems to me to be part of the anthropomorphization of animals that is common in human society.

 

[Kyle]

Makes a lot of sense - dolphins can "see" by hearing echos, so they could be able to say the "image".

If that's how alien the language of our neighbours on the planet is, then how silly it is to expect the extraterrestrials to speak english or make sounds at all.

Or as Mr. Spock would say..

 

[boogabooga]

You can take a human living in a primative society and teach him higher-level concepts such as calculus, especially if you get to him very young. Can you do this with a dolphin?

I'm always skeptical when people assume dolphins are as intelligent as humans, or nearly so. It seems to me to be part of the anthropomorphization of animals that is common in human society.

And I'm skeptical when people quote the inventions of the top 0.00001% of humans that are understood by the top 10% to prove that the human species as a whole is so advanced. We as a species owe a lot to a very few Newtons, Eulers, Einsteins, Motzarts, and Shakespeares. The number of people that have understood, say, calculus over the entire history of our species is low.

Lets ask instead how advanced dolphins are compared to say, paleolithic hunter-gatherers. People who were only trying to survive their environment and had no idea of science, math, literature, etc that were the inventions of the very few later on. The big advantages of the species were intelligence, language, and tool making. Well, dolphins are by most accounts intelligent and might very well have a sort of language. Inferior tool making can be attributed to lack of the biological structures useful for making tools, and the fact that they are a bit better adapted to their environment to be motivated to make them in the first place (i.e. you only need to make a spear if you are smaller and slower than your food. And shelter if your own environment is actually fatal. And from that, engineering.)


Anyway, I think this is exciting and on par with discovering extraterrestrial intelligence, if indeed we are on the verge of two-way interspecies communication. Not only would that change the way we view ourselves and the planet in a SETI-like sense, but I can imagine real-world applications as well.

 

[jedidia]

Anyway, I think this is exciting and on par with discovering extraterrestrial intelligence, if indeed we are on the verge of two-way interspecies communication.

We can already communicate with bees pretty solidly (at least we deciphered the language and can replicate the parts of it that don't involve dancing in the air), so we crossed that verge some time ago...

This is cool stuff, but doesn't get me too excited. If your primary sensory organ is hearing, and your vocal apparatus is able to reproduce these impressions accurately, it seems pretty logical that it would be used as such. It doesn't say a lot about the actual inteligence of dolphins. So ok, they communicate in pictures. But are they able to abstract them? Are they able to form a concept out of a picture, or do they just see the object? We don't really know.

 

[martins]

As long as the "language" is just a reproduction (or time-inversion) of the echolocation sound they hear, there isn't necessarily much intelligence involved - it's copying, rather than interpretation.

Now, if two dolphins were pinging an object from different angles, and then exchanged their data between them to augment their own partial data sets to build up a more complete image of the object - that would be something. They'd have a postdoc position waiting here.

 

[statickid]

My :2cents:

"...chirps are often flower-like in structure, resembling the CymaGlyphs of human vocalizations. "


The interpretation that arises from their senses in their mind (an anthropocentric word to begin with with many implications) may not be so direct as the article seems to imply. I would compare it to the difference between being able to take an infrared photograph, make a chart about infrared data in braille, feeling infrared radiation with your skin, and actually being a creature that sees the infrared spectrum. All these are experietially different but interpret the same data in different ways. We don't know what happens in a dolphins brain when they receive their echos back. Maybe they "see" a picture, maybe they simply "feel" a shape. Whatever the case, I highly doubt this sound imaging technique emulates the actual sensation in any way. The only use this will give is being able to SORT our data better categorically, looking for patterns that may not be clear in a regular sonogram.

"There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic 'snap shot' of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium. We can therefore hypothesize that the dolphin's primary method of communication is picture based."

For this to work, they would have be able to PERFECTLY emulate ALL aspects of the echo with their organs. Personally, I doubt they can absolutely perfectly replicate the echoes they sense, so IMO the vocalizations they make would be more like approximations to get the general sense. If we go with the picture language description, it wouldn't be like sending HD video feeds to each other, more like general cartoons or caricatures with all the major important details.