Amanda Scott

I just needed to let the puppy see some people and I hadn't realised it was a Saturday before Christmas.

And I just watched hordes of people.

exhibiting Brownian motion, as far as I could tell.

And so if I stopped any of them and suggested to them that they were part of an integrated ecosystem around the world, they would look at me like I was crazy.

I had this image of myself as one of the old-time preachers standing on an orange crate in the middle of a town preaching stuff that was innately obvious to me and was completely not obvious to them.

And I still don't know how we get us over that threshold.

But one of the ways, it seems to me,

is language i was really interested in you have a whole chapter on language and we probably haven't got time to do it justice but i was also over the weekend um part of a webinar about animal communication and i i teach shamanic dreaming it's my thing and the thing that seems missing from the human attempts to communicate with other species which are amazing and and a lot of them are ai driven

is we're doing it with our heads and we are assuming that language is a linear thing.

And in the book you say it's not, that whales almost certainly are communicating not just by sound, but they're also communicating by weight pressure.

I don't know if you're aware, but Marilyn Sheldrake came and gave us a lecture while I was at Schumacher, and he was part of an experiment where they put a petri dish of...

either highly purified water or vodka, and I can't remember, under a microscope, and then they put sound waves across it, and it created a standing wave pattern, depending on the nature of the sound waves.

And they had a dolphin in a tank, and they showed it certain symbols, and there was a triangle and a cross and a human shape.

And they recorded the sonar that it was making and then they played it across this plate and it reproduced the shapes that the dolphin had been looking at.

And I thought, oh, that is so exciting.

And if you put, oh, this was something about if you put different compounds into the dish, it made different shapes.

And I really wanted to start looking at homeopathic

things to see what shapes it made and that was shut down very quickly because homeopathy is dangerous and bad and we don't talk about it which was quite distressing but that aside the dolphins were communicating in sonar that was reproducing the shapes they were looking at and in the book you have dolphins that have incorporated a click that they have been taught means something and dolphins were amongst the first animals that we worked with in terms of positive reinforcement and and some of the stuff that was happening there was extraordinary but

At no point, as far as I can tell, have we connected the people who are using AI to try and decode whale linguistics with the people who are doing animal communication and connecting with the whales.

Because one is science and the other is considered science.