Re: OT: Dolphin intelligence (Re: Origin of names (WAS: Re: Proto-Uralic?))

Quoting Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>:

> >That people are prejudiced, and have been so in the past, is no
> >revelation.  But you cannot simply assume that something is true on
> >the grounds that those who disagree might in principle be arguing out
> >of prejudice.  That is the mentality of the conspiracy theorist.
>
> This is true for me as well, though knowing that humans as a species
> seem to
> enjoy practicing prejudice came forewarn someone that tests of any kind
> and
> the evaluations of those tests are also subject to prejudices,
> narrowness of
> concept, etc. ::shrug:: Can we as a species evaluate non-human
> intelligence
> not based on environmental manipulation (e.g. tool making)? For me,
> this
> wanders very close to my perpetual question as to whether I can conceive
> of
> a truly non-human language-concept.
This is related to why I scrapped my then chief coniverse in, IIRC, 1997, and
started the one in which most of my conlangs are spoken in. The old one
contained several intelligent extraterrestrial species, and I eventually came
to feel that they failed to live up to my modest demand for plausibility in
two ways: 1) the existence of several alien civilzations at roughly the same
technological level as we but none significantly more advanced must be
essentially nil, and 2) no matter how alien I tried to make the
extraterrestrials, they still seemed way to human.

Should we one day meet 'intelligent' extraterrestrials, we might very well be
able to discuss maths and astronomy with them, but I'd be quite pessimistic
about the possibilities for meaningfully discussing things involving emotions
and Weltanschauung. Dolphins may be a better bet, since they are not too
alien - their brains, as far as known, work much like ours - but I still
expect their minds to be quite different from ours, perhaps to the point of
making communication deeper than "the fish is over there" pointless.

I've never tried to make any of my conlangs 'truly non-human', not even
Yargish, which is supposedly spoken by non-humans, because I do not believe I
could possibly succeed. Anything I create will be either a human language, or
not a language at all.

                                                         Andreas