What’s It Like to Be a Dolphin? (I Don’t Know and Neither Do You)

This is a reply to Gary J. Whittenberger’s response to my article entitled “The Hard Problem of Consciousness Is an Insoluble One.”

In August of 2026 I stayed at the Hilton Waikaloa Village on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii and participated in the hotel’s Dolphin Quest experience of swimming with dolphins. These are highly trained, well-tended cetaceans swimming about a large, sand-bottomed saltwater lagoon that is constantly monitored and separate from the open ocean, and although we all had to sign pages of a waiver obviously drafted by a team of lawyers, we never once worried for our safety. Thus, we could relax and enjoy the experience of touching, stroking, holding, and grabbing on to the dorsal fin of a dolphin to let it take us for a ride. In my case, I also imagined what it would be like to be one of those dolphins.

Instead of being a bipedal primate, I fantasized about having a fusiform body that enables these ~500-pound swimming machines to propel through the dense medium of salt water, a blowhole that allows them to breathe out of the top of their head, a dorsal fin on the back for stability, pectoral fins (flippers) on the sides for steering and stopping, and two huge flukes (lobes) on the tail that move up and down to drive the dolphin through the water. Instead of my human skin, as I stroked our dolphin, Malu, I thought about what it would be like to have a smooth, rubbery, and hairless covering that is 15–20 times thicker than my skin, with an underlying blubber layer for thermoregulation and energy storage (and we were instructed not to touch around the dolphin’s eyes and face because the skin is extra sensitive). Finally, although I enjoy sushi, I tried to picture what it would be like to eat raw fish over and over and over all day. It was a challenging task, to say the least. Here is how I described it in my chapter on consciousness in my book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, Why It Still Matters:

But the only way to have the full-on qualitative experience of dolphin-ness is to actually be a dolphin with all that entails anatomically, physiologically, neurologically, and cognitively. In that case, then, I would no longer be a human wondering what it’s like to be a dolphin. I’d just be a dolphin, and very likely not asking what it’s like to be a human. This is what is called the hard problem of consciousness.

This chapter, in fact, falls in Part III of the book, “Known Unknowables,” for a reason. I contend that the hard problem of consciousness may very well be an insoluble one, that is, we not only know that consciousness is presently an unknown problem, the way that it is configured very likely makes it unknowable. What’s it like to be a dolphin (or a bat or you)? How should I know?

I can imagine what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin or you, but that final step of transporting into the inner sanctum of another being’s private and subjective experience is not possible.

We do not know—and cannot know—what it is like to be something other than what we are. That is, our internal states (consciousness) are private and subjective … by definition. I can imagine what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin or you, but that final step of transporting into the inner sanctum of another being’s private and subjective experience is not possible. Thus, although there are nearly two dozen officially registered theories to explain the hard problem of consciousness, and many variations on each of these theories, I suspect that the problem is presented in a way that cannot, ultimately, be resolved. 

Of course, I could be wrong. This is why I chose for the epigraph of Part III of my book a quote from Robert Ingersoll:

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men.

I do not know what it’s like to be another being’s subjective self, but perhaps one day this will be possible through something like Gary Whittenberger’s proposed brainscope; who knows, maybe Elon Musk’s Neuralink company (or the technology from Synchron, Paradromics, Blackrock Neurotech, or Merge Labs) will enable my metaphorical homunculus to transport from my skull into that of another sentient being and actually experience what it is like to be in that skull. 

Maybe. 

But if so, I’m not even sure I would want to know what other beings are actually thinking. And if that does happen, ethical privacy concerns will have to be sorted out by lawyers and regulatory agencies. In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy my private consciousness even while enjoying the fantasy of imagining what it’s like to be something (or someone) else.