Dolphin Phenomenology

Dolphin Phenomenology

Dolphins have a highly sophisticated echolocation sense as well as high intelligence (and amazing motor abilities).[1] They can spot the location of fish buried under sand on the sea floor using this sense. They insert their snouts in the appropriate place and dig out the fish. What is going on in their minds? That we don’t know, minds being what they are (they are not detectable even by echolocation). Evidently, dolphins construct a mental map of the terrain and store it in memory; this guides their actions. It is very tempting to think of this map in visual terms. Three theories suggest themselves: the dolphin’s echolocating mind contains only auditory sense data, or it contains only visual sense data, or it contains neither but a new kind of sense data not known to us. I want to suggest a fourth theory: it contains both auditory and visual sense data, but nothing radically new. More specifically, auditory sense data elicit visual images of the layout of the ocean floor and the position of the fish buried beneath it. They have a visual representation of the environment caused by the sounds they produce and hear. Their state of mind is like ours when we hear a sound and it prompts a visual image in us—for example, hearing the sound of a motor car and forming a visual image of a motor car. That is the nature of dolphin phenomenology; it is a combination of the auditory and visual.

Thus, it is a phenomenology familiar to us, if not in exactly the same form (we don’t use echolocation). Imagine walking through a room and hearing sounds emanating from behind things, these eliciting visual images of the hidden objects. You can see a certain amount of the room with your eyes, but you can also “see” things not with your eyes, but with the aid of your ears and your ability to form visual images based on auditory inputs. The dolphin mind has in it (limited) visual information about its environment conveyed by its eyes, auditory information conveyed by its ears (caused by itself or other sources), and visual information derived from images generated by the auditory information. The last is of particular interest because it involves cross-modal information processing: the dolphin’s brain can synthesize a visual map based on auditory inputs and add it to the visual map that derives from its eyes. It sees the surface with its eyes and the sub-surface (where the fish are hiding) with its ears, this being fed into a device for constructing a visual map of the sub-surface. In short, the phenomenology is both auditory and visual—with two layers of visual, one superimposed on the other. It really does see what its ears reveal, because it constructs a visual map (an image) of the sub-surface terrain. It visually images the underground fish, like X-ray vision. There is no third sense involved with different qualia. So, we do know what it’s like to be a dolphin—roughly, anyway. It’s like hearing the sound of a bird and picturing the bird in one’s mind’s eye. Dolphins are just really good at this.[2]

[1] My main source for this paper is a documentary by David Attenborough on sound in the animal world on Netflix, which I enthusiastically recommend.

[2] You might think the ear-caused visual representations are more in the nature of percepts than images, but I think it is unlikely that this is the case; the representations are really in the nature of mental images, though they could be very detailed and vivid. For the distinction, see my Mindsight.