The Dolphin Question
Now that there are some more people on here I think the hour has dawned to unleash the DQ: the Dolphin Question.
Dolphins give each other names, and orcas (which are a kind of dolphin) communicate using different dialects/languages based on where they live on Earth. No one has yet been able to crack cetacean communication, although research is now underway to crack both dolphin and sperm whale communication using LLMs.
Many animals display the signs of pretty advanced communication, including Prairie Dogs, which can alert others to the color, size, and shape of a predator, and even if a human is holding a gun. Dolphins, however, seem to have the most advanced form of communication out of any animal other than humans (even more than chimpanzees). Studies have shown that they are able to coordinate together on opposite sides of a wall using only a microphone to inform another dolphin how to complete puzzles (over 90% success rate) (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-0858-2_49).
The US, Soviet/Russian, Ukrainian, Israeli, and Iranian navy currently use dolphins to detect naval mines. Some claim that these military dolphins have been, at various periods, trained to use harpoons and other weapons in order to kill. Despite attempts to replace military dolphins with drones, trained dolphins remain more efficient than any autonomous system underwater.
A popular way to measure intelligence physically is using encephalization quotient (EQ), which is a measure of the ratio of brain mass to body size, weighted to account for the allometric effects of larger body sizes. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops) have the second highest EQ after humans.
All of this is interesting to me, and it was interesting to researchers in the 1970s until the dolphin craze wore off after some time. Dolphins are less intelligent than humans, but they certainly aren’t totally retarded and some interesting stuff can absolutely be done with them.
This brings me to a point that was made in the Biosingularity thread a while back (https://sofiechan.com/p/1187) regarding the power of social coordination as opposed to concentrating solely on IQ or biological intelligence. Given the ability of dolphins to organize socially and communicate abstract concepts in a manner that is second only to humans, is there, let’s say, hope for the dolphin race?
Is language and relatively low IQ (compared to humans) enough to be taught to organize in a way that is conducive to increasing intelligence and building civilization?
This also poses many questions regarding humanity’s ascent to civilization. Language was likely baked into the human brain for a very, very long time.
I also would like to add that there was an article long ago about Octopus intelligence by Bismarck Analysis’ Marko Jukic for Palladium that I enjoyed (https://www.palladiummag.com/2019/04/01/its-time-to-take-octopus-civilization-seriously/)
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It's obvious we have to uplift and secure the existence of our dolphin brothers. Old treaties must be renewed. We will be their hands and they will be our fins. But we must learn some lessons from the failures to uplift lower humans. The dolphin is not a man, and never will be.
I think dolphin civilization won't happen. Civilization is inherently too unitary. But they might join parts of our civilization. I think the Japanese should reclaim their glory as a whale-herding whale-eating aquatic samurai race. They will have dolphin whale-herding "dogs", occasionally armed with swords and explosives for special military maneuvers.
The wishes of Orcas to protect Europe from hostile migration (they try to sink the migrant boats) must be recognized and returned with roving piracy against any who would mess with whales, especially the Chinese. The Sea Shepherds pirate organization should be revitalized by uniformed mannerbunds of bodybuilder-activists in black and white body paint. The ancient treaty between vedic man and whales must be renewed.
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>>1390>to the advances of the Chinese playboys that she saw driving supercars up to her friends' parties>the more clearly traditional elements of Chinese culture>>1391>I think the Japanese should reclaim their gloryUgh, the damage that the "CCP princelings" and their ilk have done to the reputation of Chinese civilization and culture is actually criminal. In all fairness the decay had been going on for at least a millennium, but there was once a civilization able to persuade peoples at the edges of their known world to be more like them almost entirely by *charm* (see Japan missions to Tang China). Now the people there have the unenviable, but justified, reputation of being associated with tiger parenting and other petty bourgeois fashions. One sometimes wonders what would have happened had Japan established the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and purged the dominions of the spreading materialism.
Imperial Japan does have some good ideas.
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>>1393 (hidden image)
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I should engage with this in a more serious way, but let me admit that I feel no guilt about eating them. The only deterrent is that they are not delicious enough to forgive all the mercury and cadmium in their flesh.
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I am not certain intelligence in the anthropocentric sense is what makes for civilization. I think dolphins are missing specialization among themselves. In this way, I’d see beehives or ant colonies as more likely to hit on the special sauce than dolphins, unless there is some evidence to the contrary among dolphin society. Communication and individual “IQ” among bees and ants are both laughable relative to dolphins, but they’ve give up their agency in a devil’s bargain to form the superorganism. That being said, if the bugs can do it, why shouldn’t the dolphins manage?
Civilization, human society, seems to be a sort of soft eusociality, or something on the path to it. We didn’t land on the biological eusociality of our brother mole rats or our sometimes-enemies in ant, termite, and bee land, but we did somehow figure out deeper and deeper forms of specialization. Adherence to the doctrine of caste is in its way an aspirational bugmanism in that it makes the social biological. We don’t ever seem to make the full bargain though, and the constant tension between the man as an individual and the man as one of many is maybe what turns a social animal into a civilizational animal.
What happened to we apes to make us so buggy, and can it happen to dolphins?
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>What happened to we apes to make us so buggy, and can it happen to dolphins?
Somewhat theorizing here, dolphins eat a variety of other sea creatures, while our ape cousins tend to eat a lot of fruit (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0112). This seems at least somewhat plausible - if it's advantageous to eat fruit, it's also advantageous to develop good eyesight and dexterity to find the fruit. The megafauna extinctions associated with human migrations suggest that there was probably selection pressure for hunting and eating meat. My guess is that alternative ways of feeding the population motivated early civilizational structures. The interesting cases to consider might be recently peopled areas of the world with recent megafauna extinctions, those might have interesting data with regard to dietary changes and social structure at the transition from a more nomadic to a more sedentary lifestyle. These forcing functions might be something to consider for various species.
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Given how disastrous the our first attempt at uplifting with the Bantu through hybridization as seen in America went we would need to fully review everything that went horribly wrong with that. This includes how the ones who were subjected to repeated hybridization for the greatest intellectual gains proved to be the most resentful.
We also have to consider their dramatically different social arrangements and how this will affect their mental health. Orcas in particular have extremely tight matriarchal bonds that are tighter than any other in the animal kingdom and subjecting them to our habit of atomization in our civilization would likely have even more profound negative effects than the already significant damage it does to hominids.
Rather the tool of uplift that should be perfected and applied on ourself is enhancing our own mental hardware through genetic curation. This will hopefully enable enhancements in social theory and technology to better adapt others for uplift. Also to consider why we're uplifting them, if they are just more grist for the machine of civilization to do drone tasks or if it is to foster greater heights of social theory and social technology. For the latter we still have yet to establish a solid foundation that can be built on.
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>>1414Wise cautions, my friend. We should uplift ourselves and the best first. We should reconsider how the charitable impulse has backfired by reinforcing both the social advantage of being wretched and the moral principle that anyone being wretched is our responsibility to fix.
Wise cautions, my fr (hidden)
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Most humans could learn from the dolphin's spirit of play, and their capacity for evil.
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>>1420say more about the latter? I've never heard of evil dolphins.
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>>1427>One of the distinctions separating humans from animals is that we are a species capable of morality.>Animals are amoral.>The dolphins forcing themselves onto unwilling females, and killing the young, isn’t wrong.>Of course, when humans do such things, they are judged rightly as monsters. That is because we are exceptional.What a strange perspective. I guess we accept that dolphins will not abide by our civilized social codes. We also do that with some people, both above us and below us. To draw such a hard line seems weird for "evolution news", but I guess they don't want to come out in favor of amoral selective breeding warbands.
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>>1428Wesley Smith is with the Discovery Institute, which promotes "intelligent design." His particular schtick is "human exceptionalism."
The truth is that humans engage in just this behavior all the time. (I read a news article reporting such an incident in Pakistan just the other day.) In high-trust societies, we create social structures to suppress this behavior because we correctly see that it's bad for our women to be subjected to it.
The capacity for this behavior doesn't say much about dolphins, other than that they're like many aggressive social mammals, including humans.
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>I think dolphin civilization won't happen. Civilization is inherently too unitary. But they might join parts of our civilization.
This is valid and seems likely, with the only issue being that dolphins live in such a remote location relative to humans and communicate in such a unique way.
But yes, they will be reliant on humans for a very long time if they are to be uplifted and would ultimately adopt every advanced concept from existing human civilization until they became sufficiently intelligent to develop their own novel ideas.
>They will have dolphin whale-herding "dogs", occasionally armed with swords and explosives for special military maneuvers.
Based, but dolphins are much more intelligent than dogs. I also think East Asian cultures tend to view dolphins more often as food than as companions, which might be awkward. In any case, I agree that island nations like Japan probably have a bright future ahead. We are only beginning our interaction with the sea, and dolphins could play a very interesting intermediary role there.
>but let me admit that I feel no guilt about eating them.
Case in point.
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>>1402>Adherence to the doctrine of caste is in its way an aspirational bugmanism in that it makes the social biological.Very interesting point and I completely agree, which is also why I would expect dolphins to be able to produce civilization more than the octopus, which is also incredibly intelligent but antisocial. Ants and bees already display such complex behaviors that I wonder if we could reasonably perceive them as primitive civilizations in their own right. I also wonder if such insects could be bred for greater base biological intelligence... Regarding dolphins, obviously another issue is their lack of arms and hands to manipulate the world. Prosthetics likely needed.
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>Rather the tool of uplift that should be perfected and applied on ourself is enhancing our own mental hardware through genetic curation. This will hopefully enable enhancements in social theory and technology to better adapt others for uplift.Yes well this is kind of my whole point with this post. Is it the biological IQ or is it the social organization that makes “intelligent civilization?” I presume it is both and they play on each other. But if we can achieve success with humans, I think dolphins, or maybe some other species, also might have a chance.
>We should uplift ourselves and the best first. We should reconsider how the charitable impulse has backfiredAnother interesting point. I personally just think it would be cool and interesting to see another kind of intelligent life. This is probably the closest thing we can get to seeing aliens in the relatively near future. The fact that dolphins are also mammals like us makes me think we can probably exist together in peace as opposed to the hyper-doomerism that AI risk people get hysterical about or even if we were to uplift something truly alien like ants/bees.
>>1427I don’t think this shows that dolphins are inherently evil. If anything, this demonstrates that young male dolphins organize themselves in mannerbunds/koryos in a similar way as humans.
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>>1459>Is it the biological IQ or is it the social organization that makes “intelligent civilization?”I suppose one’s answer to this part of the dolphin question ought to also inform one’s opinion on immigration, especially “high talent” immigration of the kind many techies endorse as a “solution” to the so-called fertility crisis.
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>>1462>Is it the biological IQ or is it the social organization that makes “intelligent civilization?”Let's be wiser with the dolphin question than the H1B question. I think it's obviously both base biological nature and the social technology people are actually organized into that create civilization. Individual heroes matter and often drive events, aggregates of individual characters drive a lot of culture, and the difference between well organized and badly organized or well trained and badly trained is obvious. But even with organization, different kinds of people can't necessarily be organized in the same ways. No amount of people without scientific minds are going to create scientific progress. No amount of uplifting is going to make a dolphin into good land infantry. I don't care how you organize them.
The smart way to include different kinds of people (and uplifted cetaceans) in your society is to find different niches and social roles where they work well. Anglos in government, germans in philosophy and manufacturing, jews in physics, asians in engineering, dolphins in amphibious operations, scots-irish in military, etc. Let them freely sort, but don't be surprised and mad if some industry like airplane pilots is 0% dolphins. (And don't let any of the specialized non-ruling groups into politics or politically-adjacent roles like journalism and law.)
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Broadly speaking, one's role within a social cognitive network can be classified as:
Innovator - adduce new material to the stock of collective memory.
Repeater - absorb, maintain, and transmit the collective memory of your group.
Destructor - fail to perform either Innovation or Repetition, and inhibit the actions of either both the other categories, thus diminishing the social network's collective memory.
A rare fourth role, the Disruptor, combines all three, because they both add and subtract, and are largely responsible in and of themselves for the repetition necessary for the new structure(s) to reach fixation.
Every marginal increase in Repeater facility allows for increasingly rarer (thus higher variance, thus (the potential for) higher ROI) Innovator/Disruptor contributions to persist; robust Repetition is also a guard against Destruction.
Thus, the question for Dolphin Uplift via sociobiological rather than geneticopsychometrical means is whether they have enough high conscientiousness conformists capable and desirous of preserving the past, _in virtue_ of it being the past, and available to be preserved. Dolphins can be rather creative, but I am unaware of evidence for the yeomanlike doggedness that leads a critical mass of dolphins to say "my father swam this way, and so I will too, that his memory not be forgotten".
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>...whether they have enough high conscientiousness conformists capable and desirous of preserving the past, _in virtue_ of it being the past, and available to be preserved.>I am unaware of evidence for the yeomanlike doggedness that leads a critical mass of dolphins to say "my father swam this way, and so I will too, that his memory not be forgotten".For what it's worth, dolphins transmit culture and tool use across generations.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0500232102
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There will be space for many different species and subspecies of cetaceans, and therefore many kinds of dolphin culture, in our civilization. For instance, the Yangtze River dolphin and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin occupy different ecological niches. Respective navies will likely find the indigenous knowledge of their native dolphin species useful in particular niches. Also see: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Indo-Pacific/U.S.-Navy-to-identify-which-Indo-Pacific-shipyards-it-can-use-in-wartime
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