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Part of the problem may be that people assume that the problem is solved. After all, we have understood human thinking since the early twenty first century, and we can even program computers to reproduce many aspects of it. The problems that remain, most notably consciousness, have not impeded the progress of psychology or computer science, and so little work has been done to resolve them.
We know that human beings do science by building ever better mental models of the world, and we know that the power to simulate is the fundamental feature of those models. We have good arguments that all creatures must work in roughly this way, and the success of mixed human/dolphin teams suggests that they, at least, do. Thus, one might ask where the problem is.
The problem is that we do not have the first idea how cetacean mental models work. Indeed, we don't even know whether orcas and dolphins think the same way, although I will assume, for the purposes of this overview, that they do. A little thought makes this clear.
The fundamental feature of human mental models is the object: a collection of properties that represents a particular thing. These objects are rigidly separated from each other and from the simulating subject. One of the few things that is known for certain about the way that cetaceans think is that they do not categorise the world in this way: they do not have the subject/object distinction in the same way as humans, and their view is more holistic.
It should also be remembered that, before this feature of human thought was discovered, practically no progress had been made in understanding it. Since the equivalent feature of cetacean thought is a complete mystery, the assumption that we have the faintest idea of what they are doing is almost certainly false.
The solution to this problem is not as simple as asking a cetacean. Although most humans will report that they think in this way, this is simply because the theory has become part of popular psychology. Cetaceans often talk in this way, in fact, but they express far more reservations than humans ever do. Recall that philosophers had worked on this problem for centuries without progress before the breakthrough, and it will become apparent that this is a major task.
The first stage, and the one on which I am working at the moment, is to gather more information on the way that cetacean scientists work. I hope that the data I gather will allow me to generate a good theory of cetacean thought. This may seem over-ambitious, and probably is, but we should not forget that the breakthrough work on human thought was a doctoral thesis.
Copyright Jerome Shurz 2199/SP 99
Copyright David Chart 1995-1998