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Comment by IIAOPSW | Hacker News Reader

>They process sonar information in a visual way Which is certainly no harder than processing stero vision or stero sound, as pretty much every species with either two eyes or two ears does.

>When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?

You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO!

Given the bandwidth of 20 hz whale sounds, its preposterous to imagine them containing a more sophisticated depiction of things than that.

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>You don't really need 3d point cloud precision for this. Here, I can do it right now. KRILL ON MY LEFT BRO!

Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating.

If you're skeptical about the communication that's one thing, but the thing you're offering is a substitute is not remotely equivalent.

My understanding is that whales can interpret echoes of their own signals and read them as a map of physical features around them, and can exchange these signals with each other.

Linguistic abstraction is a different type of thing altogether, and I don't know what point would served by going up to whales and telling them that they "don't need" the form of communication they actually use.

>Okay but that completely misses the point of what they were communicating.

The comment I was replying to said

>When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?

To which I say this is preposterous because the amount of data that could possibly fit inside of whale calls is orders of magnitude smaller than the data it would take to make a 3d image of a swarm of krill. Whatever it is they are saying, it must be a significantly compressed reduction, perhaps similar to the "map" that is communicated when you ask a stranger on the corner how to get somewhere. Why should one whale take the time transmit a literal 3d terrain map for another whale when mere driving instructions would suffice?

I like to invite you to close your eyes and walk through your flat only using click sounds (link). Works surprising well, right? Now add some 50 million years on evolution on top, realise how good water transports sound and put some overtones on that 20hz base frequency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS3lvUt7vY

bats can do it with much smaller brains, and coordinate flying at the same time. there's no reason to think you need massive complicated brains to do it.

You are confusing social communication with echolocation. Humans have the former but lack the latter. Bro.

Yes, it's 3D point cloud precision.

(Source: I study echolocation in bats, and many of the classic texts cover echolocation in cetaceans as well.)

I'm not confusing anything. The comment I'm replying to states "When have you last yelled at someone to place the 3D image of a swarm of krill in their minds?". Well, irrespective of what whales actually understand of their 3d environment based on echolocation, they are certainly not "putting that 3d image in another whales mind just by yelling it." The bandwidth of their communication channel is to small for that. At best, they might be encoding driving directions to krill and/or mates.

Therefore the comment I was replying to was obviously and absurdly generous in its interpretation of whale brain capabilities. Even believing they do point cloud echolocation is a bit generous considering what whales actually need to accomplish. A low resolution 3d blob cloud (in contrast to point cloud) would be all the comprehension of the world they might ever need.

Unlike bats, whales don't have to track down and catch the krill after reaching them.

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