And hell, let's say we can prove whales do have communication just as complex as ours. Suddenly their intelligence and sentience is as proven as our own. What rights do whales have? If they're as intelligent as people, they'rd not just animals. They simply are people. An animal as intelligent as a person is simply a person. Full stop. We have to adjust our model of the world to be one where we just have people swimming around in the ocean. Let that really sink in to your world view. There are just people out there living amongst the waves. And like all people they have certain natural rights. What rights do they have? Can they sue us in our courts for polluting their waters? Do we owe these people reparations for what our ancestors did to them? Do we need to start negotiating treaties with them, the same as we would any other population of people?

My first thought on contemplating the idea of whales truly being as intelligent and aware as we are? I immediately think, "my god, what have we done?"

[–] turdas@suppo.fi 3 points 10 hours ago

Human communication is pretty damn complex, so I'd say it's extremely unlikely whales are going to have the same level of language.

Perhaps they could be at the level of some earlier hominids, but to me it seems more likely they're going to be something different altogether. Human language evolved extremely quickly, so evolving it in the first place was likely a sort of an evolutionary threshold after which further development happened very rapidly. Whales on the other hand have been, from what we can tell, relatively unchanged for a long time.

Humans of course have hands and are therefore capable of making tools whales could never, and language development and technology appear to have been intertwined in human evolution. It could be that technology is what creates the evolutionary pressure necessary for developing complex language, and if so, then whales would not have had that evolutionary pressure.

[–] guy@piefed.social 3 points 8 hours ago

Our track record of treating persons slightly different from ourselves isn't that great. I'm sure we can come up with a reason why we should not have to consider them as persons, I mean just take human rights