8 years ago
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Beyond humans, what other kinds of minds might be out there?
From algorithms to aliens, could humans ever understand minds that are radically unlike our own? By Murray Shanahan.
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It seems pretty obvious that dolphins, whales and elephants have fairly complex minds. We'll need to figure out how to communicate with them before we even think about communicating with a hypothetical alien intelligence.
theres 2 major attemps to develop a language with dolphins. one was a guy back in the 70s who did wonderful research on it and the current one is a woman who is associating sounds with pictures of toys to teach the dolphin pod words. the machine lets off the sound when you touch the picture button. the pod can request which toys they want and id them and all sorts of things. the hope is to find out if they will teach other dolphins the word.
the further hope being that if she showed them a new picture of something they know they might be able to isolate the "word" they call it and from there develop a human/dolphin translation software. It's super interesting
If they're smart enough, they might not actually want to communicate with us.
I agree. And then there are prairie dogs too.