I still need to finish that book.[0] Well, and move back to Holland, I suppose! They have pretty good float tanks there, among other things :)
That's funny about Feynman, I didn't know that.
I've read bits and pieces of Lilly. The most interesting thing I remember is that he was trying to establish two-way communication between humans and dolphins. I recall he was building some kind of computer system for the purpose, but I guess he was about half a century too early.
I guess in our age the more pressing question would be learning to figure out how to communicate with the machines. That's probably going to turn out to be more important in the long run.
[0] The bit that stayed with me is the one that he repeated in interviews. The physical body imposes definite limits. That always seemed a little arbitrary to me, from the point of view of pure consciousness, it's not clear to me why it should be that way. Or to flip it around, you can transcend the limits of the mind, but then what effect does that have on "external" reality? Does it just make you less bad at decision-making, or is there a deeper effect?
(And while I'm at it... Something that bugged me about simulation theory, if the outside is probably simulated, why wouldn't the inside be too? Sounds a lot cleaner than having a bunch of brains floating around in a data center.)
He was obviously a brilliant man but the hubris that comes from that often leads to folly.
As to the dolphin communication -- it seems like LLMs would be the perfect tool to study that now. A search came up with these active projects (courtesy of Gemini):
Scientists are actually using LLM architectures to decode animal communication right now. Here are the three main projects to explore:
* DolphinGemma -- https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/dolphingemma/): Google and the Wild Dolphin Project are training AI to predict dolphin sounds and attempt two-way communication using an underwater device.
* Project CETI -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_CETI: An initiative using machine learning to decode sperm whale clicks, recently discovering a phonetic alphabet and rudimentary syntax.
* Earth Species Project -- https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/can-generative-ai-he...: A non-profit using generative AI to map the communication of multiple non-human species, searching for universal language structures.