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Library of Congress CCN 67-10417 CHAPTER 07 |
In this pool they were in a relatively protected part
of their own ocean. Every night, every day, twenty-four hours, 365 days
and nights a year, their whole lives were spent in the sea. They cannot
afford fear of wind, fear of the waves, fear of the darkness. fear of
the depth. Tbe dolphins must stay at least half awakeall of the time.
This is their usual, everyday, evcrynight life. We will not get very
far projecting our own fears and states of mind into the mind of the
dolphin. We will get It is an uplifting experience to imagine the seas and
the oceans of this world of ours as a vast house of dolphins and whales.
Audacious in the extreme is this featherless biped walking on the dry
land which is my species. His little, dry spirit has a great deal of
gall to try to push his way mto the primal soup. In the face of the
dolphin's necessities, one quickly loses one's self-esteem. Perhaps
we can brave out the terror of the deep but we are still not built nor
equipped to live in it free as a dolphin. Their appropriateness of body
for their life in tbe sea must be matched by their minds and their brains
built aud equipped for this lifc. Their freedoms are our prison walls;
and vice versa, our frredonts are their prisons. Every time I walk away
from a dolphin in a pool, every time he swims away from me, I feel this
reciprocity of freedoms-prisons. We must assume that dolphins have their own principles, their own assumptions, their own postulates, and their own actions for their mental lives. It is probable that any large computer (such as their brains) has huge alien programs. At the very least, in our search, we can see if they act as if they do have consistent logical bases on which they operate. By living with them and forcing them to live with us, we can discover many of these things by behavioral methods. At the very most, we some day may be able to ask them and see if their replies show familiar forms or whether we come upon only unknowu alien forms of thinking and of philosophy. Between these two extremes there are many other possibilities. For example, wc may ask questions vocally or nonvocally, verbally or nonverbally, and receive answers in these modes. The answers mav be smnev hat t comprehensible or totally incomprehensible. Our thinking and speaking are only human. Their thinking. their speaking so far are oniy delphinic. |
