Recently the American Association for the Advancement of Science has decided to consider cetaceans as non-human persons and protected by their own Bill of Rights. Truly a generous gesture of mankind, that is if at least this would be substantiated. But I'm afraid the gesture is as flimsy as the evidence produced. A lot of emphasis has been laid upon the self-awareness of dolphins, featuring the observation that they seem to recognise themselves in a mirror.
I'd say this line of inquiry is exemplary for the scientific colonialism I mentioned before in Dolphin Address 3.
So dolphins see themselves in a mirror and seem to recognise their image by contingency checks, but what are we checking? We take it for granted that they see what we see. So far so true.
But what about this: the dolphins awareness is foremost defined by its hearing. That does not rule out their ability of visual recognition, but it does cast a question upon the nature of their awareness. When they sonar their image in the mirror the resulting flat surface does not match what they see.
So are they just watching themselves and are they content with the echo's of their social sounds or are they wondering why they do not hear the sonic image that should be part and parcel of their visual perception of another dolphin?
And here the plot thickens: do they have a sonic profile of themselves at all? Recent research found they have individual names, in that they identify themselves by signature whistles. A name they call themself. But a sonic image of themself by definition would be inconceivable. Such an echo can only be heard from outside the body. Which suggests that dolphins can and most probably do have sonograms of each other. So it would be interesting to know if, and particularly how they communicate these.
This question sounds familiar. How do dolphins communicate? There is no doubt about the practice of clicks, whistles and sound bursts, but because of its unique location echo-tracing is only effective to the sender. But can an echo-profile be reproduced for communication?
And then there is something else to consider. There is a difference in perception mode between sound and vision. You can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears. Contrary, sonar involves the act of producing sound, whereas seeing is only about receiving images.
The above considerations suggest that dolphin awareness may be quite a bit more sophisticated than we can discern. So we might better work a bit on our own awareness.