Month: October 2018

The podcast explored the unusual story of an animal research lab in the 1960s. It was theorized that dolphins could potentially learn English and perhaps even vocalize with their blowholes. A young dolphin who had not yet reached maturity, Peter, was selected for the experiment. An apartment style arrangement was made so that he could live with a female researcher (who was interviewed in the podcast). The apartment was partially flooded, and the two lived together for nine months. The research showed promise. Audio recordings seem to suggest that the dolphin was doing more than just trying to mimic sounds (such as what a parrot would do). When given prompts to say words, he would attempt to say only the words while omitting the prompt. The research began to run into trouble when it was revealed that the head researcher had been giving psychadelic drugs to several of the dolphins in the lab (though not Peter). More notably, a tabloid had gotten wind of certain unorthodox training methods being used with Peter. As he was beginning to reach sexual maturity, he began developing strong sexual urges, and Margaret (the female researcher) started pleasuring him in order to keep him focused. She did not think very much of this, but the bad publicity ultimately doomed the project.

Thesis: my project is meant to take the idea of a dolphin roommate to its anthropomorphic extreme, constructing a messy, horny, aquatic college student, passed out on a beanbag chair and surrounded by open pizza boxes.

Animals have more similar cognitive abilities to humans than we are currently aware. Part of these advanced cognitive abilities are related to social relationships among certain animals. Animals have more in common with humans than was previously thought, and likely more than we know currently. Therefore, it is important to respect and protect animals as intelligent creatures.

Inside Animal Minds: ‘Who’s the Smartest?”

Nagel argues that, “the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” He then lays out that this would mean there is something it is like to be a bat and asks you to imagine being that bat. From there he argues that you would never be able to answer that question because you are not a bat so you are limited by the restrictions of having human senses in so far as you cannot even fathom what the experience would be like for the bat. He takes it further by arguing that, “Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like.” Nagel is considering this thought experiment with the motivation of answering the mind-body question. However, the main points he discusses are that even though some people may attempt to figure out how other animals’ minds work, we will never be able to truly connect to them on that level because there is simply too great of a distance between humans and animals. -Karnes