British biologist and documentary filmmaker Tom Mustill nearly died in 2015 when a gigantic humpback whale lifted up over his whale-watching kayak. A shocking video, with the final flip of the whale falling to avoid killing it, went viral. Mustill had a myriad of questions. One sounded intense: What if humans and animals could talk to each other? The result is Cómo hablar balleno (Taurus), a book that explores the possibility of establishing real contact with animals thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and how it would change the way we see them. His book is part of a renewed editorial interest in the animal world, from its dreams ( Cuando los animales sueñan , Errata Naturae, by the philosopher of the University of San Francisco David Peña-Guzmán) to its rights ( Justicia para los animales , by Martha Nussbaum, in Paidós); their coexistence (George, Errata Naturae); the stories of care and loss of Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia Plath, with herons, crows and owls, and even her rebellion (Insurrección animal, by Sarat Colling).
In Mustill’s case, he wanted to understand. And he discovered a new world. “I was able to learn a lot more about the whale that jumped on me, who it was, who its mother was, where it was born, how old it was, which whales it spends its time with, through AI, which can recognize patterns of the whale’s body in the images. I heard from my whale that he was seven years old. And last year it was re-identified by scientists in Mexico from a ship thanks to these AI tools. They are very powerful for understanding nature and connecting with it, listening to it.” If when Cousteau recorded videos they talked about the silent ocean, he says, now we have its many sounds.
After the success of AI with human languages, today it is applied to animal language with major projects such as CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative). “Today you can distinguish the differences between individual whales, between the voices, the different populations, the dialects, sometimes with great differences, such as between Catalan and Basque. Dolphins who hunt in cooperation with fishermen in Brazil have different voices than those who do not. When you compare the differences in their voices, you see differences in behaviors. different cultures Whales are taught different ways of behaving”, he points out, in the same way that not all of humanity is Chinese. An AI that has served to know that “sperm whales have patterns in terms of their clicks, vowels and consonants, a phonetic alphabet”, but also that 20% of humpback whales have disappeared due to starvation due to warming global
“Can we ever understand them? They have been talking in the sea for millions of years. It could be that the AI ??proves that they have a language and we struggle to understand what it means to a whale. At the same time, they have many challenges similar to ours. Having babies to feed with milk. To breathe. Talk and teach each other things. Build relationships and learn to trust. Maybe they are understandable”, he reasons. And explain that there are surprising facts that change your knowledge about them and us. Like the whale breeding whose birth was registered by CETI. “She was surrounded by her mother, sister, brother, grandmother, and even other species, dolphins arrived, all communicating. When she was born, they lifted her onto her back and helped her breathe. It felt like the different whales were talking, the different individuals with their personalities and relationships with the baby. And they heard the baby speak alone for the first time, learning to use the voice. And now they can follow him throughout his life. Maybe listening to this baby whale can teach us to speak sperm whale and make the first subtitled animal film”.
“Whales – he explains – have a very intense social life. They do things for fun. One orca started wearing a salmon as a hat, and all the females in her group imitated her, as if it were a TikTok craze. Dolphins have names that they learn as babies. Some dolphins, ten years after being separated, called their names and played. Perhaps the whole world is full of individuals where we only see a kangaroo or a whale. And AI is helping us to know that.”
Animals that, adds the philosopher David Peña-Guzmán, in addition to talking, dream. The interest in the animal mind, in the difference between living beings and sentient beings, in the position of animals in our culture and our homes, led him to his dreams and, from there, to the political sphere and ethical “Animals have an inconsistent position in our society, there are many similarities between a dog and a pig, but the treatment is very different. It’s arbitrary which animals we love, eat or use in laboratories,” he says, “and dreaming implies a kind of consciousness, of sensitivity, that most of us recognize as very important from a moral and legal Since one knows that an animal dreams, you can conclude that it has the kind of sensory, perhaps even cognitive, experience that requires a legal and moral change in our view of animals.”
And, he says, evidence indicates that many animals dream. “Neuroscientific experiments show sleep brain activity patterns associated with very specific behaviors that have a functional value in the life of this animal. Seeing an animal of the same species, an enemy, neural patterns linked to the act of singing or eating. And in their dreams there are physiological signals of the activation of feeling. With certain dreams the blood pressure rises. They have a dream that means something to them, with an emotional side. This act requires mental faculties that we had not thought of in non-human beings, because dreaming typically has to do with past experiences that we have lived: animals have the ability to remember the past, they carry events that they have already experienced, and they have the power to activate them in the present. A second capacity is imagination, because dreams are never literal renderings of the past. And the emotion is there, there is always a sentimental side to the dream. Memory, emotion and imagination are the bridge that takes us from the act of dreaming to a change in the way we see animals that has to do with the law, with morality, with ethics”.
The problem, he says, is that Western philosophy has been fetishistic about reason, defined as abstract thought, calculation and language. “A very rigid conception of reason that has been put on a pedestal. This has caused many dimensions of experience and existence, even human, to fall. That is why emotion has been denigrated, the body put in a lower position than the mind, and this has translated into a misogynistic system of thought, with women associated with the body and emotion, and to non-Europeans since of the Greeks they have considered them individuals without reason. Now the paradigm of how we think about animal life is changing, but we are very far from the kind of practical change that is reflected in the discourse”, he says.
