Are Dolphins And Orcas Sentient

What would happen if elephants suddenly became sentient?

Elephant are sentient.  All creatures in the animal kingdom are sentient.  All that means is that they can sense things. Add to this that Elephants are one of the creatures we've identified as having self awareness.  A trait that all great apes, including humans, have.  That bottle nosed dolphins and orcas have.  Finally there is one none mammal that has shown to be self aware, European magpies.  There are others that show indication of self awareness like giant cuttlefish but more study needs to occur there. Elephants have, like all other self aware creatures we've identified have also demonstrated sapience which many people think sentient means.  Cuttlefish and other cephalopods also demonstrate sapience but not yet shown to be self aware.

Are dolphins smarter than humans?

It is entirely possible but we have no way to test that as there are different forms of intelligence that we don't posses or understand such as the whistles they make. We know it is language, and it seems complex, but we don't know what they are actually talking about.There is one way dolphins are smarter than us. They are far more adapted to their environment that we are. They don't need clothes, houses, farms, etc. Everything they need is free in the ocean for the taking, or at least was, before humans started sailing the seas and polluting them.One definition of intelligence is the ability to successfully live and reproduce. There is no doubt dolphins have all the abilities and skills needed to live and reproduce without outside help unlike humans.I think the best answer, to your question, is that we are both intelligent animals but with different knowledge bases, skills, and abilities. Trying to compare us would be like comparing apples to oranges. We are both mammals but dolphins live in the ocean and humans live on land.There are a couple of ways where dolphins are definitely smarter than humans. They live with their environment in a non-harmful way while we are polluting ourselves into extinction. Which of us would you say is the smarter animal in the long run?

Is it possible that dolphins are extremely sentient or in possibly early stages of sapience?

A similar question was asked previously so I will refer you the answers here Should we consider dolphins as sapient beings?You can also read what the WDC has to say in Whales and Dolphins as sentient and sapient species Sentient and sapient whales and dolphins.

Are dolphins sentient?

Yes, dolphins are sentient; they mourn their dead, mothers mourn their dead babies, they can feel emotion. They are amazing in so many ways.Source: Do Dolphins Have Feelings?, Dolphins: The animals that love and grieve just like us

What would a sentient underwater humanoid race actually be like?

The first thing to ask is why are they humanoid? A humanoid body is not optimized for living underwater. You would expect a creature that lives underwater to gradually lose the legs or convert them into fins. Being humanoid implies that they are recently descended from a land-dwelling ancestor, and still retain the humanoid body as a relic of their land-dwelling past. They probably still have to return to land to reproduce.We would therefore expect them to be air-breathing, as it is difficult to impossible to develop water-breathing again once you’ve been adapted to living on land. They might be able to hold their breath for quite a while, having similar adaptions to whales to be able to retain extra oxygen and shut down some internal organs while submerged to save oxygen for the muscles and brain.They will probably have a thick layer of blubber for warmth. Switching from land-dwelling to aquatic means they would have to quickly adapt to conserving heat while submerged. Growing thick blubber is one way to do that. Hair will be useless, and a drag, so they’ll likely have little if any body hair left.Human arms and shoulders are adapted for throwing rocks and spears. Thrown weapons are almost entirely useless underwater. Their arms might develop more for strength, like a chimpanzee’s, possibly with thick nails for prying shellfish off of rocks.Vision is less useful underwater, but it’s not going to be easy for a humanoid form to develop sonar. They might just develop larger eyes adapted for low-light vision instead. They will probably not have external ears, and genitals and other organs will also be kept internal as in marine mammals.Also expect them to have advanced kidneys capable of concentrating the salt levels in their urine to being higher than the surrounding seawater, similar to those of some marine mammals, so that they will not need fresh water to live.

What earthly animal comes closest to human levels of sentience?

I’ll start my answer by providing the disclaimer that we don’t understand enough about our own human consciousness yet to make generalizable claims about the conscious experience or lack thereof in other species. However, there is a lot of ongoing research in this space, not only with respect to human consciousness but that of other animals as well (the insect / plant consciousness space is less studied).I think the most interesting case has been recently made for the dolphin. Not only has the dolphin limbic system (which controls many of the reward and motivational neural systems) been observed to be larger than humans, there was a recent discovery (Dec 2015) that suggested dolphins have a ‘collective consciousness’, which is ultimately based on how dolphin group dynamics and communication work. So what does that mean?These scientists discovered that dolphins employ a sono-pictoral form of language that facilitates the creation of cliques and groups (use language to make friends, relate ideas, execute tasks, coordinate activities, etc). Dolphins scan the environment around them, blasting high-frequency sound waves, and receive the reflection of these waves which their brains process visually. They see sound. And not only can they see sound, they can send the footprint of these sono-pictoral perceptions to other dolphins, which process the images in the context of the situation, e.g. an sono-pictoral representation of a shark will be understood by the group of dolphins collectively, and they will take action in a coherent way.I welcome an expert opinion on this, but as a non-expert, this supposes a different layer of experience and social dynamic that is related but ultimately separate from what we understand as human beings, which may explain the altered brain morphology in dolphins with respect to humans (specifically in the paralimbic region). In the end, although dolphins haven’t been capable of erecting buildings or bridges and curing disease, etc. there is evidence emerging to suggest that we are not alone in the ‘conscious’ experience of our world, and that a variety of conscious streams may exist on planes fundamentally different from our own (potentially orthogonal).Ironically, some of us seem to be so concentrated on finding conscious life elsewhere in the cosmos that we may be missing it right under our feet or in our oceans.SpeakDolphin

If humans evolved on the soil, why wouldn't sea creatures also evolve into sentient life forms over the same time period?

Other life forms do have sentience.Probably the best example is killer whales, or or as, which not only solve problems, but communicate in distinct languages, form cultural groups, and distinguish us as having equal or better intelligence (and thus avoid eating us despite the ability to). In fact orcas are a fascinating study of parallel evolution of intelligence as we share very similar intellectual thought, yet are not closely related.But that aside, sentience is not necessarily a good thing. The ability to distinguish our own intelligence and think beyond ourselves does not always help our species. In fact, animals which have more limited intelligence are often more successful, such as ants.Take the dog, for example. This is a species that has very similar hunting and social behaviour to humans (hence its compatibility with us), yet is definitely. Not near our intellectual capability. This is because it simply does not need to be. Dogs are capable of this (in fact a dog is more closely related to the orca than humans), yet definitely does not develop such intelligence.To summerise: intelligence is not essential to being successful. Humans are more of an abnormality… like orcas.