Parrots can't talk
Parrots parrot parrots?
Parrots parroting parrots parodying parrots.
If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
11–20 of 221 posts
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#12"If parrots can speak, why can't monkeys?" would be a more accurate headline.
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#13Parrots can't talk
yes i can
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#14[flagged]
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#15[deleted]
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#16Infrasound aside, it seems that it's neural after all. Apes scream and grunt, so vocalisation follows gross mood. (I don't know if anyone has tested apes for ultra low frequency communications)
I don't follow why screams and grunts can only encode gross mood. Presuming I can differentiate them enough to have some amount of vocabulary, why can't I make a well reasoned and abstract grunt?
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#17Parrots can't talk
Guess it depends on what you mean exactly with "talk". They can articulate phrases, isn't that enough?
It's not language. It's basically mimicking humans.
Noam Chomsky on Nim Chimpsky and the Emergence of Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a39vcatTCVU
Chomsky has a few other interviews where he addresses this.
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#18A 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?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess it depends on what you mean exactly with "talk". They can articulate phrases, isn't that enough?
It's not language. It's basically mimicking humans. Noam Chomsky on Nim Chimpsky and the Emergence of Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a39vcatTCVU Chomsky has a few other interviews where he addresses this.
You don’t need a language to communicate (ask my cat — or any cat/dog). You also don’t need words, but colloquially, “talking” means using words, not using language. Someone talking to you with random noises you can reproduce would still be called “talking” whether or not it was a language.
In other words a baby saying “milk” because it wants milk doesn’t mean you should ignore it because it isn’t using a “language.”
Re: If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
#20It'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?