Persistence Theory and Interspecies Communication

Interspecies communication remains one of the most profound and elusive frontiers in cognitive science. Despite decades of research into animal cognition and symbolic learning, true two-way communication between humans and non-human intelligences — particularly dolphins, octopuses, and elephants — has yet to transcend its anthropocentric scaffolding. We propose that Persistence Theory, a thermodynamically grounded model of information preservation under entropy, may offer a new lens for bridging this gap. By focusing not on symbolic equivalence but on the mutual preservation of structured, reversible patterns, we suggest that shared communication can emerge from the stability of interaction, rather than the alignment of vocabulary. This perspective reimagines interspecies dialogue as a thermodynamic negotiation — a process of discovering what can persist between fundamentally different minds.