Relevant - "My Reading Pets" is a facebook page I follow, a doctor of early childhood development (iirc) tried out teaching her bored cockatoo Ellie reading simple words to help occupy Ellie's mind -- fast-forward several years later and she's teaching several parrots to read and in the process convey some pretty complex internal concepts via word-cards. Not vocalization, and using predefined call-and-response (generally the birds are answering questions with a fixed set of answers), but I find the whole thing astounding and fascinating nonetheless.
A parrot has a question for humans
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Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#42FWIW, our estrangement from Nature is easy to overcome if you try.
Here's the beginning of the scientific basis for understanding e.g. what they do at Findhorn:
"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#43Speaking of dolphins (and whales for that matter), there is a reason why it has been so hard to not just "communicate" with them but to even understand the function and the meaning of a number of calls they make.It appears that it is very hard for a human mind to understand a consciousness so different from our own. We are visual species, and even though our language is acoustic, it reflects our nature as visual spec…
We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. The ocean is basically a noisy internet with their calls like alien packets that are mixed with a complex natural langue. Elephants have a similar thing. They make long sub-bass vocalizations that they can feel for miles with their feet. As far as I know, prarie dog [0] is the closest we've come to…
>We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it.
Well, not exactly.In fact, we still know surprisingly little. For the humpback song, one of the most studied topics up to date, there is still a major disagreement if it is a reproductive display or something else.Humpbacks make tons of other sounds as well, those have not been studied as much as their songs. For bottlenose dolphins, the most studied species, we sort of know the function of the signature whistles (again, not everyone agrees), but know very little about the function/meaning of other whistles and other sounds like burst pulses or LFNs.Echolocation has been studied a lot, still, we do not know if it is used in communication in any way.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love birds. Volunteered at a wild bird rescue, wish I had 100 of them, love visiting any place with parrots when travelling. But I would never buy a bird. Offering a better place for one who no longer has anyone to take care of it is great, but promoting breeding and sales of captive intelligent animals feels very wrong.
As a long time parrot owner, sadly I must agree with you. I devote about two hours a day to my parrot, and even at that he wants even more attention. Volunteering at a parrot rescue organization is probably the better alternative to owning a parrot.
This might be ignorant, but in this case would it be more humane to own two so they can entertain each other?
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> bring back the dinosaurs There are several movies about why this is a bad idea.
There are also several movies about faster-than-light spaceships which are crewed by humans even during combat. Movies should not be the basis for an argument.
I very much want to see a sci-fi where combat begins with the captain (aka the token human) saying, "Ship, you are weapons-free. Lethal force is authorized." Then their acceleration pod seals, and fills up with perfluorodecalin. The rest of the action is the ship AI trying to save itself, its crew, and the cargo.
If you have a FTL spaceship, the modal weapon will likely be FTL torpedoes, armed with thermonuclear warheads or better, and guided by kamikaze AI. Engagement distance will not be in visual range. Unguided weapons will miss, unless the targeting system can predict where the target will be when the weapon reaches it.
So at some level, it will be combat computers trying to "Iocaine Powder" each other, by predicting the other's offensive and defensive strategy. The AI that can be more unpredictable, while better predicting what the other AI will do, will win.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a long time parrot owner, sadly I must agree with you. I devote about two hours a day to my parrot, and even at that he wants even more attention. Volunteering at a parrot rescue organization is probably the better alternative to owning a parrot.
This might be ignorant, but in this case would it be more humane to own two so they can entertain each other?
Depending on the bird this is often the recommended practice.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a long time parrot owner, sadly I must agree with you. I devote about two hours a day to my parrot, and even at that he wants even more attention. Volunteering at a parrot rescue organization is probably the better alternative to owning a parrot.
This might be ignorant, but in this case would it be more humane to own two so they can entertain each other?
There is always the risk that they won't like each other.
Or that they will like each other too much, and thereby no longer have any need for the human interaction.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#48If I had billions I would retreat to an island somewhere and try to bring back the dinosaurs by breeding super ostriches or something like that.
My plan would be to teach all the parrots to converse in English, just like Alex [1]. Then people would arrive lost at the island and the parrots could give them directions.
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt many dog owners would agree with you that we have not deciphered the language of dogs. We viscerally understand how they communicate, it’s simply hard to systematically describe it.
> We viscerally understand But that's a very superficial understanding of a language. Maybe we have different concepts of what understanding a language means. Dogs are smart enough to grasp relatively advanced concepts, do you think you would understand the response if you asked "do you want food A, B, C, or D"? And I'm not talking about body language (them pointing at the thing) or training them to react in a specif…
>The meaning of a lot of human languages or alphabets is completely lost even if they were conceived by humans almost identical to us biologically. Hoping to understand alien languages without the aliens helping us is a pipe dream.
There has been limited success with parts of Voynich Manuscript (some plants names?) and some interesting developments with rongorongo, but overall, yes, super hard. Hopeflly, Natural Language Processing might help, some promising results were reported for Linear B. (https://neurohive.io/en/news/researchers-use-machine-learnin...)
Re: A parrot has a question for humans
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. The ocean is basically a noisy internet with their calls like alien packets that are mixed with a complex natural langue. Elephants have a similar thing. They make long sub-bass vocalizations that they can feel for miles with their feet. As far as I know, prarie dog [0] is the closest we've come to…
>We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. Well, not exactly.In fact, we still know surprisingly little. For the humpback song, one of the most studied topics up to date, there is still a major disagreement if it is a reproductive display or something else.Humpbacks make tons of other sounds as well, those have not been studied as much as t…
Sorry, that was a bit unclear. I meant that we have studied a lot but that doesn't scratch the surface of whats there. So much distance, such a wide range of movement, and hidden social activity that while we can listen its hard to see the environmental context to decode it.
They can communicate with us pretty ok. Notorious acid head government contract grifter John Lilly's assistant [0] got a young male dolphin to screech count all the way up to six (i think) in english in exchange for erotic massage.
It's crazy to think about, but to have the sort of view of dolphins that we have of a prairie dog town we are gonna need some way better tools if it's even possible. If I could share a language with one or many dolphins I don't even know what I'd tell them that they'd care about.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt#Dolphinar...