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If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

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Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

#31

Post by Archelaos »

traject_ wrote: post #24
nico wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's no reason to believe that LLMs are necessarily similar to humans. Just think of flight; both birds and planes can fly despite being very different. It's understandable that because humans are our main reference for intelligence that we see LLMs speaking language as a proof of similarity but there's no concrete reason to assume that.

Here is a cognitive experiment were chimpanzees perform better than humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKvX9PPmI-Q

Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

#32

Post by [deleted] »

pcrh wrote: post #20

It's interesting to compare this "sound-talk" that parrots can easily accomplish with the obviously greater intelligence of apes, who can't reproduce human sounds, with the debate over whether chatGPT is intelligent or not. Note that Koko was obviously a greater communicator than any parrot ever was. Is mimicking human behaviour a necessary, or even sufficient, criteria for demonstrating cognition and intelligence?

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Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

#33

Post by behringer »

traject_ wrote: post #24
nico wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's no reason to believe that LLMs are necessarily similar to humans. Just think of flight; both birds and planes can fly despite being very different. It's understandable that because humans are our main reference for intelligence that we see LLMs speaking language as a proof of similarity but there's no concrete reason to assume that.

Planes and birds do operate on the same principles though, but instead of power through propellers birds are powered via wings.

There's no reason to think an LLM would not work for a monkey. Even if it is a different structure than how things work in humans a parallel structure could offer more or less the same benefits.

Anyway I buy the whole LLM thing, consider a baby, they can't talk at all and only become coherent when you talk to eachother just about non stop for 2 or 3 years.

Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

#34

Post by catchnear4321 »

rmellow wrote: post #29

> There was also a communications problem. Though they had an equivalent IQ of sixty, and could understand several hundred words of English, they were unable to talk. It had proved impossible to give useful vocal chords either to apes or monkeys, and they therefore had to express themselves in sign language - Rendezvous with Rama (1973) Guess it's more fiction than science fiction now.

It would be impossible to give them useful vocal cords. Just not because of the vocal cords.

There should be a category specifically for invalidated science fiction. Things found to be unpossible in any timeline, assuming consistent laws of nature.

Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

#37

Post by nico »

nico wrote: post #18
osamagirl69 wrote: post #9

A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones! >Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms. >This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded tha…

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Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?

#38

Post by bhawks »

withinboredom wrote: post #11
earleybird wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parrots parrot parrots?

Parrots parroting parrots parodying parrots.

Obviously we are the smart ones with our wonderfully clear, expressive, and concise language. /s --kind of.

We really need to be aware of our own biases and biological limitations if we actually want to study and understand the ability of other animals to have complex communications. Birds experience reality differently than we do - they see more of visible spectrum, they can make multiple sounds at once, etc. I wouldn't be surprised that what they can hear and how they perceive things like time is very different then us. Anyone observing parrots, crows, and other highly social avians can see they have complex relationships.

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