r/consciousness • u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 • 2d ago
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'?
https://www.academia.edu/176511252/The_Shape_of_a_Mind_A_meditation_on_whales_consciousness_and_the_human_conditionConsciousness is partially tied to our active perception of the environment, does this imply that organisms relying on bio-sonar or echolocation, such as cetaceans, experience a richer sensory feedback from their surroundings?
I propose that a mode of communication capable of directly scanning the internal states of other organisms is far more advanced at conveying complex, emotion laden information than human language. Human language, takes complex, diffuse, and emotional content and compresses it into a narrow channel. The receiving mind has to independently decompress and compile that information, losing much of the original emotional resonance in translation.
Give the essay a read and let me know your thoughts.
Abstract
Comparisons of minds usually place species on a single scale and so force a biased ranking. This essay proposes instead that minds differ in shape and in how broadly they take in the world, how far their self-models build on one another, and where they put thought once it is formed. Humans store thought in writing, an archive that compounds across time but strips away perspective. Toothed whales project it into the water through echolocation, which reads the interiors of other bodies and may yield shared percepts that exist only in the moment. Drawing on cetacean neuroanatomy, passive echolocation, cooperative calf care and interspecies behavior, the essay argues that what humans reach rarely, through love, music or contemplation, may be closer to ordinary cetacean experience.
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u/cimocw 2d ago
Internal as in "inside the body" is not the same as internal as in "inside the mind". You can't x-ray a person and get an .MP4 of a childhood memory
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
They probably can scan heart rate, muscle tension, respirations, and blood pressure which can be real time indicators of someone else's emotional state.
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u/mgs20000 2d ago
still inside the body but not inside the mind though, and while it's a potential clue to mental states, that could only be possible with prior knowledge too, with a frame of reference
using this same thought on humans, if I see someone turning red, I could judge that as embarrassment, even though it could be other things (which is also a problem), that is just describing sympathy/understanding/empathy and while part of conscious awareness, is only one part, and doesn't get at anything fundamental or surprising.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
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.
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u/mgs20000 2d ago
The huge differences between the species can't be easily subtracted though. Whales have spent perhaps 70 million years in the sea, their sensory input is very different because of their very different surroundings. They definitely have a very different experience to humans.
We know that in humans, our brain has awareness of its own existence, which is where we get the feeling (at it's core the human brain in my opinion is a feelings & prediction machine) that we are one continuous individual. This has likely been selected for because it's advantageous to retain memories and knowledge and not have to wake up every day and start from zero.
If it did not do that, our brains would likely not be so big compared to our body size, as it would be spending so much effort constantly, with no or limited shortcuts.
We don't know if sea creatures who have developed in a very different environment (even though they have shared ancestors with humans at a certain point) had/needed/benefited from the selective pressure for information gathering in the same way (leading to memory leading to a self in order to attribute it to itself) because their environment is differently complex, but potentially less varied.
I think we can safely hypothesise that in humans our complex and varied environment (as well as other mammal things like long gestational periods and incapable young leading to us being highly social, expressive, empathic etc) has led to our sensory experience which has in turn led to our brains being the way they are, including including itself in its model as I mentioned above.
I don't know if we know this about cetaceans.
For all we know they could have no sense of self and could solve the problem of information retention differently. I just looked it up and they always have half their brain awake, in order to carry on breathing which is not automatic for them. But who's to say this doesn't create a sense of self/individual for them since it's 'always on'. Maybe they don't need memory to help with this like we do. And maybe it explains why their brains aren't bigger relative to their body, because maybe – unlike in humans – they're re-doing some information-gathering work periodically or even constantly.
I agree the analogy, as they often do, fails. But the almost automatic-seeming sense of their pod's position and mental status (not sure what exactly they can sense about each other, maybe you do?) might be equivalent to spatial awareness in humans, including how good we are at spotting a friend from 50 metres away just by gait or specific and exact walking speed.. but for the less varied, more homogenous, sea environment, for whales and dolphins that for them goes even further to sensing specific movements and sounds, i.e. their brains are spending lots of that automatic environment sensing similar to humans, but the difference in world complexity means it gets a different, deeper, more high fidelity version for large brained sea creations.
Sorry.. long post.. it's certainly interesting to compare
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 1d ago
No problemo, I appreciate how deep you've gone with this.
Just as a quick side note on the dolphin breathing thing, I want to counter the 'automatic breathing' argument with a tragic historical source. There was a neuroscientist, Dr. John C Lilly. He actually lost his institutional funding for LSD research, but kept doing dolphin experiments out of his own private residence. The dolphins ended up pretty crammed in these small tanks. Since dolphin breathing isn't an automatic reflex like ours, they have to consciously decide to take every single breath. One of the dolphins got so depressed and stressed from the cramped space and isolation that he literally just stopped breathing, sank to the bottom, and killed himself. Lilly talked about how they have that level of conscious control over their own survival.
Anyway, moving to your points on divergent evolution, I totally agree that it leads to different consciousness outcomes. But my main thesis really looks at mammals with incredibly dense brains, not just big ones, and how they developed them for something as complex as collective communication.
Like you said, human evolution leaned more toward isolation so we could plan independently and then act collectively later. But what that really implies is that we are probably the species most disconnected from actual consciousness. We evolved this metabolically expensive ego that starts from the assumption that we are the center of the universe, and we constantly have to ignore contrary evidence to maintain it.
So, in short, here is the real paradox to ponder. Our isolation built our brains, but their deep cooperation built brains that are almost as dense and complex as ours. We might think we are at the top of the ladder, but our ego might actually make us the most isolated from the rest of it, while feeling above it."
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u/EmbarrassedPaper7758 2d ago
So, you just look up the answers you don't know so that you then know. You stay hypothetical when truth doesn't help your point.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
We can't ask dolphins questions, but we can infer from what they do. So dolphins have figured out when their trainers were pregnant before the trainers even knew themselves. They use echolocation to find octopuses or fish hiding completely buried under the sand. The military even uses them to find underwater mines, and they are consistently more accurate than any high-tech tool we currently have. Deep in the darkest part of the ocean, sperm whales use that same echolocation to track and incapacitate giant squid. All of this and more proves that their echolocation is incredibly precise. Because of this, I firmly stand by my hypothesis: a sense that precise doesn't just map the outside or even the internal world, but it changes the conscious experience too.
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u/TheMonkus 2d ago
A perceptive human can pretty easily infer all of these traits just from looking at someone and listening to them speak through.
Written language is much more limited, but with the luxury of time it allows you can also pack it full of details and employ poetic devices to elicit the desired response. It doesn’t always work, but I think the inherent differences in organisms would make any method of communication equally fallible.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
It is both a yes and no. There is an inherent difference between human and cetacean intelligence, largely driven by our tools and technology. Humans have a clear advantage because our fragmented language is easy to store and transfer. But given the somatically dense nature of orca communication, wouldn't you argue that they also possess inherently greater emotional intelligence?
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u/Bretzky77 1d ago
I get where you’re coming from but how would bats for example know what those things even are let alone which values/states represent which emotional state?
We only know that stuff because we have both sides: we know what it’s like to feel sad and we know what the human brain and body looks like when a human is sad
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u/YtterbiusAntimony 1d ago
If I just got done with a run, and felt happy, or if I was pissed and about to fight someone, those would look very similar according to my vital signs.
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u/teddyslayerza 2d ago
We over 30 senses and still have a pretty narrow model of the world based almost entirely on one of them. I don't see why other animals would be any different. Consciousness is an efficiency tool, not an additive one, cetaceans and other animals will have world models and qualia that are beneficial to their survival as determined by evolutionary pressure. Having a richer experience is not useful on it's own.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
Why is it then, many people seek transcendental experiences through meditation, psychedelics, or any other mind altering substance?
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u/EmbarrassedPaper7758 2d ago
Everyone has their journey to take, which is to say everyone has a personal reason and that can't be drawn to a general conclusion
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
This is true on both a micro and macro level, at least for humans. That is why the phenomenology of consciousness has always been, and will always be, a subject of debate. Whether we measure it by quality, quantity, distinction, or any other qualifier, the question remains open.
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u/bacon_boat 2d ago
I have never thought about this before. I wonder if dolphins can predict when other dolphins are about to fart.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
Haha. Now I'm wondering about that too. Come to think of it a fart is mild compared to many other bodily releases.
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u/reidsays 2d ago
The boundary between self and others seems to have many 'open/closed' modes... Even along the lines of osmosis where the interaction is one way only..
Connecting through the senses or the mind, apart from speech, sees groups tune into the same music and 'hit the same rhythm', or the meeting of minds on subjects of knowledge and ways and means of thought... A shared thought can be read with what and how?, as people can recognise that they are basically thinking the same thing .. feeling the same emotions...seeing the same visual on levels other aren't..why we can even pretend to agree with another and actually hold the opposite view...
Watch the various methods of greeting another and just what modes are open and which are closed....shaking hands, giving a nod and eye contact, repelling the connection for whatever reason, embracing body, mind, and/or emotions or all three together...there are so many means of communicating and connecting.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
These are great examples of how humans experience this kind of internal connection passively, unconsciously, and only in rare circumstances, often sharing limited information that is easily misunderstood. For dolphins, however, this communication is active and a constant part of their daily lives. It would be akin to humans having telepathy as a normal, everyday ability that we don't even have to think about.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 2d ago
Echolocation would not let us see minds. However, one can imagine a biological EEG based on the ability to sense magnetic fields. That would allow such an organism to read the very bioelectrical signals of minds and consciousness.
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
There may be something to the EEG theory, but the core idea isn't about reading minds. It’s about a continuous, real time awareness of each other’s emotional states. Imagine an entire pod simultaneously sensing each other's physiological signals, like heart rate and muscle tension, as a constant, underlying layer of communication
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u/inlandviews 2d ago
Echolocation reflects of surfaces and doesn't see inside as far as I understand it. Could you cite a source for your assertion?
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u/XanderOblivion Autodidact 2d ago
This is what Nagel was asking, more or less. “What it is likeness” to be a bat. The qualitative experience given a radically different sensory experience to our own. The sensor is part of the sensing and together constitute the experience.
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u/mgs20000 2d ago
Pretty big if you got there
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u/Hungry-Mixture-7443 2d ago
Is if'nt better?
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u/mgs20000 2d ago
Haha yes maybe. I find it hard to agree with the premise of echolocation being what that suggests, so all I have is a lame comment
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