A parrot has a question for humans

> Our problem is to penetrate the communication system that is not visually based,and is purely acoustical.

Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this

EDIT (Thanks @yeellow): Pilot Pirx => Ijon Tichy (how could I mix them up? Well, it's been two decades or so since I last read them)

- ~~Pilot Pirx~~ Ijon Tichy series: I remember a short story from the "Ijon Tichy" series of stories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries): It started with a microphone being lowered to onto the surface of an extremely hot planet (hotter than Venus) and a conversation was recorded, I think it was a student and a teacher, or it was between scholars of that alien race. Of course, already it is clear that this wasn't about any reality-based-fiction, the whole setup was just to show human thought in a mirror by letting the conversation come from aliens. In the conversation the rogue (student? scientist? I don't remember) proposes that there could be life on planets that are much colder than their own. This obviously preposterous idea (haha) is shot down by the other party in the conversation and exposed as silly nonsense contradicting science (of that hot world).

By the way, unrelated to the current subject but possibly one of the best stories ever written, is the Ijon Tichy story where he is alone in his space shit and a tiny meteor destroys the controls. It takes two people to repair the damage though, one inside, one outside the space ship - simultaneously. He knows about some time altering vortexes and manages to fiddle with the engines to fly through them. Each time he flies through one of those vortexes there are multiple versions of himself on the space ship, for example his Wednesday and his Saturday version. The story is about his difficulty recruiting himself for the repairs. It's hilarious! It starts with him waking in the middle of deep sleep because somebody who looks like him is shaking him. In his sleepy state he forgot all about the time vortexes and he thinks he's dreaming. So he refuses to move because "damage repaired during a dream is not really repaired, so I may as well just keep sleeping". The next day he has the exact opposite problem: He finds himself sleeping and tries to convince his previous-day version to do the repairs together, without success of course. That's just the start though, more and more versions of himself appear and disappear...

EDIT:

Found the time vortex story (in full): https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-star-diaries/154-the...

"Deep Thinkers" is a good recent book, you can check it out (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27...)

>Given our depth in knowledge in acoustics, I'm hoping you can expand a little on this

Our challenge is that we are visual species who are trying to understand “acoustic” species. (see ”What it is like to be a bat? https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/hum...) Yes, we can describe their vocalizations in terms of peak frequencies, RMS, center frequencies, duration, intensity, inter-click-intervals for burst pulses or sperm whale codas, but what does it all mean? The biggest struggle is not even that, but how to conceptualize their communication system. Naturally, being humans, we want it to have semantics, grammar, pragmatics and phonetics, and if it does not, they must be dumb (i.e. Chomsky’s argument). So we search for the smallest unit (a phoneme) and naturally we cannot find it.

Additionally, we know that dolphins have at least 2 sound generators (and possibly up to 4) that could work simultaneously and independently, potentially producing very complex utterances. On top of that, we have an animal that “sees” the world through sound, it must have at least some contribution to how the communication system is set up. The conventional belief as of now is that echolocation is separate from communication, although Dr. John Lilly was convinced that dolphins could use echolocation to describe things in their environment (to be clear, we have no scientific support for this hypothesis).

That is why describing dolphin whistles and other sounds terms of duration, peak frequencies, infliction points, etc., does not help at all, as it does not help us to understand how the communication system is set up and what this whistle actually means (and why is it used). The only positive thing in all that is that there must be some sort of communication system. If you ever encounter a pod (especially the offshore species) you would be amazed at their constant chat. So much energy is spent on all these utterances they must be important and must have at least some meaning.