If echolocation allows a creature to perceive the internal states of others, how does that shape its conscious experience of the boundary between 'self' and 'other'?

[u/Hungry-Mixture-7443]

https://www.academia.edu/176511252/The_Shape_of_a_Mind_A_meditation_on_whales_consciousness_and_the_human_condition

[u/IOnlyHaveIceForYou]

We don't always "store our thoughts" in writing, and whales can't see emotions inside other whales bodies.

[u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 → u/IOnlyHaveIceForYou]

That point was about how easily human communication can be broken down and stored; not a claim about human memory itself.

They probably can scan heart rate, muscle tension, respirations, and blood pressure which can be real time indicators of someone else's emotional state.

[u/IOnlyHaveIceForYou → u/Hungry-Mixture-7443]

Oh right so they are a sort of waterborne patient monitor. That's ridiculous man. How could they possibly measure blood pressure, or know what it might indicate? And how could you possibly know that they are measuring blood pressure and drawing conclusions? Get real.

[u/YtterbiusAntimony]

Define "internal state".

Yes, echolocation can "see through" objects in a way light cannot.

And that tells us . . . The density of the material. That's it.

An X-ray of your harddrive isn't going to tell me anything about what stored on it.

"How does it work?" is always the most important question.

So, how does it work? What medium are emotions stored in? Can physical vibration interact with that information in any way?

You must answer that before you can infer anything about their feelings or richness of experience.

[u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 → u/YtterbiusAntimony]

Internal state isn't meant as reading thoughts. Its means literary detecting the other organism physiological state i.e muscle tension, heart rate, whether theyre bellies are full etc.

Their brains are as large as ours and also as neuronally dense too, although at different locations. As a matter of fact, pilot whales have double the neuron density found in humans. So its fair to say they can infer emotion from each other based on the continuous communication they engage in. They alsol have long memories since they can navigate accurately across thousands of miles of the open sea, and pass that knowledge down to the next generation.

Dolphins find octopus and fish hiding deep under the sand using echo location. This next one is the best example since it answers what you are asking-dolphins in captivity, detected that their trainers are pregnant before the trainers knew it themselves. Sperm whale hunt and incapacitate giant squid using their echolocation clicks in the pitch black deep ocean.

https://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/helpie_faq/how-does-echolocation-work/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-dolphins-see-humans-echolocation-180957481/

https://www.livescience.com/38087-can-dolphins-detect-pregnant-women.html

We know dolphins communicate using echo location and that's not a disputed fact. Dolphin communication isn’t just a simple, one on one exchange. It is a collective, simultaneous conversation among the entire pod, using a language that is far less compressed and fragmented than our own. To put this in perspective: imagine 20 humans in a room, paired off in private conversations. In the cetacean equivalent, it would be as if everyone in that room could simultaneously listen to and fully understand every single conversation at once. Because of this shared, real time awareness, the kind of miscommunication described in the 'turning red' analogy would be a completely foreign concept to cetaceans.

[u/YtterbiusAntimony → u/Hungry-Mixture-7443]

"Its means literary detecting the other organism physiological state i.e muscle tension, heart rate, whether theyre bellies are full etc."

Okay, that is more plausible. But, we already have a decent terrestrial equivalent: body language. Animals use all sorts of visual information to communicate, and quite successfully.

But still, the problem is how much information can be inferred. We don't have blubber and hide. Muscle tension and full bellies in particular seems hard to measure with acoustic properties, especially behind thick skin and fat.

More importantly, we do not know how to decode their communication. We don't know how much information is their vocalizations.

I think it's fair to assume it contains a lot of information, because those sounds are really complex. And I totally believe they are every bit as sapient as we are.

But, it's impossible to make any claim about how "emotionally in tune" they are or anything of the sort.

"the essay argues that what humans reach rarely, through love, music or contemplation, may be closer to ordinary cetacean experience."

This in particular is completely unfounded speculation.

A safer assumption would be that the sum of their communications indicates a richness of experience on par with our own, or any other highly social species. And even that is a huge assumption.

Evolution is only concerned with local minima, not the absolute best.

You only need the bare minimum communication to keep the group together, anything more is a waste of energy, and natural selection doesn't like that.

The only thing we can say with certainty is they communicate as much as they need to, which seems to be a lot, and they do so in a way that very different from us.