I am so happy to have the brilliant and compassionate Howard Steven Pines on today’s episode.
Howard is a retired communication’s engineer whose career spanned over 25 years conducting digital speech and software engineering in Silicon Valley. Twenty years of three to four-hour commutes from Berkeley to Silicon Valley gave Howard lots of time to think about the potential for language and intelligence in big-brained humpbacks. Upon retiring ten years ago, Howard has had the time to pursue his passion and curiosity, combining his knowledge and analytical techniques used during his digital speech career to study humpback whale songs. In doing so Howard has discovered striking similarities in the phonetic and sub-unit architectures of human speech and humpback vocalizations, revealing, as he puts it, “stunning, quantitative evidence for the basis of a potentially complex language”. Howard has presented his research at the last two West Coast meetings of the Acoustical Society of America in Victoria, Canada and San Diego, California. Based on his research findings Howard has written a science-based, marine-mammal protectionist novel about a first-contact breakthrough with humpbacks. He self-published “The Whale Song Translation,” aka TWST, in 2013 on Amazon and a revised edition in 2019 on Amazon Kindle.
In our conversation Howard takes us through his journey and shares with us his Soul Project, an incredible idea to implement a technological device that can allow Humpback whales to communicate with humans.
As Howard puts it “Because of our cognitive minds and symbolic reasoning, we can never return to that primal natural bond, like the other animals, but we can do something just as good by using our abstract minds to break the communication codes of other big-brained beings, to build a bridge across the species divide and to begin a dialogue, and hopefully even offer them a gift, like the Torch of Prometheus in TWST. We’ve made great scientific discoveries with meaningful existential implications: We’re star dust, Earth is a speck of dust in the galaxies, our beings depend on water, air, and food, our umbilical connection with mother nature. These are discoveries that should make us humble in the scheme of things, not drive us deeper into the bubble of human exceptionalism, i.e. our personal and species ego trip. In my humble opinion, the antidote to human exceptionalism is a paradigm shift to planetary mindfulness. I coined the term, RUSH = Radical Ultra-Secular Humanism; a paradigm-shift to science, mindfulness. Instead of waiting for the Extra Terrestrial’s to contact us, “Break the communication codes of earth’s other big-brained beings and begin to have a dialogue before they are crushed by the juggernaut of human exceptionalism.” – Howard Steven Pines
Let’s join Howard in launching The Whale Song Translation Project!! If you or someone you know is interested in the research and wants to join the effort, to bridge the gap between human and Humpback whale communications please email Howard directly at [email protected]
WWW.HowardStevenPines.com
Acoustical Society’s website: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/2.0000957
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