Another article I read said that the whale deliberately surfaced, and that these whales typically get along with humans, so it's possible it was very aware of what was happening and was trying to save his life after it accidentally swallowed him.
So I suspect the conversation was more about "I almost killed a human! Oh noes!"
The esophagus of that kind of whale is too small for human to get through, and it's not a toothed whale so it can't really chew its food to make it fit. It only wants to eat things that it can swallow whole.
They are going to try to spit out anything they swallow that is bigger than their normal food. My guess would be that it surfaced because that means less water resistance when trying to shake the large non-food item out of its mouth.
It may have been aware that it was a human, but I have some doubts. If it saw that a human (or really anything larger than it can eat) was amidst the prey it was about to make an eating pass on I'd expect it to either wait for the large thing and prey to separate or would switch to a different target. It would only try to eat that prey if it didn't see the human.
When those whales start their eating run their eating apparatus expands to take in a lot of prey (they often eat schools of small prey). When it expands the whale can no longer see what is in front of it. Finding a human (or other large thing) in its mouth during/after a food run would come as a complete surprise to it. I doubt that its sense of feeling inside the mouth is sufficiently discerning to tell a human from any other similar sized animal or from an inanimate object.
It may be smart enough to reason that there were humans in the general area and that it didn't see any other large animals and that it was an area that it knew didn't have any large inanimate objects and so infer that the thing it got most likely is a human, but I'd expect at that point it is too busy thinking "THERE'S SOMETHING BIG IN MY MOUTH!" and "HOW THE HECK DO I GET RID OF THIS!!!". Reasoning about what it was would come after it deals with that.
> It may have been aware that it was a human, but I have some doubts. If it saw that a human (or really anything larger than it can eat) was amidst the prey it was about to make an eating pass on I'd expect it to either wait for the large thing and prey to separate or would switch to a different target. It would only try to eat that prey if it didn't see the human.
My understanding is that the whale's mouth balloons open for feeding during a pass, blocking their forward vision. This is a significant cause of them getting stuck in nets.
So I suspect the conversation was more about "I almost killed a human! Oh noes!"