> You do not think this is possible.

Not at all.

I believe just throwing a corpus of dolphin-dolphin vocalizations at an LLM will fall very short.

I quote myself again -- 'But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means".

Note the emphasis on the word alone.

What needs to happen is to build shared experiences, perhaps with a pod and incorporate that into the ML training process. If this succeeds this exercise of building shared experience will do heavier lifting than the LLM.

Had you spent less effort in coming up with insults and used the leftover processing bandwidth to understand my position it would have made for a nicer exchange. For restoring civility to our conversation I indeed do not hold high hopes.

> shared experiences and emotions

I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.

Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.

The word is just a 'pointer' to the underlying shared experience, so I don't think you could; the kid would come away thinking red is the same thing as the feeling of splinters or the warmth of a sunset, which isn't what red is, those are just feelings maybe associated with red. That said - I'm actually pretty confident we'll be able to have basic "conversations" made of basic snippets of information with dolphins and whales in my lifetime. Maybe not complex grammatical structure we identify with, but small stuff like: "I'm hungry". I'm not sure if dolphins could understand "fish or octopus for dinner?", because they might not have any idea of a logical 'OR', and perhaps they might don't even differentiate between fish/octopus.

We do share (presumably) experiences of hunger, pain, happiness, the perception of gradations of light and shape/form within them, some kind of dimensionally bound spatial medium they exist in as an individual and are moving through - though of course they might not conceive of these as "dimensions" or "space", they would surely have analogs for directional words - although given they aren't constrained to live on top of a 2D surface, these might not be "up", "down", "left", "right", but something in the vein of "lightward" or "darkward" as the two main directions, and then some complicated 3D rotational coordinate system for modeling direction. Who knows, maybe they even use quaternions!

That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics.

Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience.

It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it.

It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning.

Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger.

There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.

imagine thinking qualia can be described and understood... with words! lol lmao