But it’s not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it’s naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
Which means that they will best remember things that they can immediately put to use, yes. Such as how to breed fish for desired characteristics, maybe? Or how to create some basic tools.
But what those tools may be, besides the tools real dolphins already invented? And breeding fish requires some sort of enclosure, ability to manipulate individual fish, etc. It’s not even clear there’s anything to gain from breeding fish if you don’t do some underwater agriculture for fish food (and thus need fish very different from available species to make full use of that).
Perhaps the reasons dolphin’s large brains are not particularly optimized (comparing to ours) in terms of neural density, despite ample time at their brain volume, is that they already do pretty much everything that a greater intellect would do.
On the ground and with the hands, when our intelligence was the same as of dolphins, we had a lot of complex and useful things we could have been doing if we were a little smarter, and that’s how we evolved our intelligence (and conversely, how they didn’t evolve much further).
Which means that they will best remember things that they can immediately put to use, yes. Such as how to breed fish for desired characteristics, maybe? Or how to create some basic tools.
But what those tools may be, besides the tools real dolphins already invented? And breeding fish requires some sort of enclosure, ability to manipulate individual fish, etc. It’s not even clear there’s anything to gain from breeding fish if you don’t do some underwater agriculture for fish food (and thus need fish very different from available species to make full use of that).
Perhaps the reasons dolphin’s large brains are not particularly optimized (comparing to ours) in terms of neural density, despite ample time at their brain volume, is that they already do pretty much everything that a greater intellect would do.
On the ground and with the hands, when our intelligence was the same as of dolphins, we had a lot of complex and useful things we could have been doing if we were a little smarter, and that’s how we evolved our intelligence (and conversely, how they didn’t evolve much further).