21–30 of 221 posts
Infrasound 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?
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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Earlier 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.
I owned a parrot for a few years. The speech she had was like a tape recorder, she could mostly only play back what she heard in an identical manner. But she was able to play back pieces of appropriate snippets in the right context to express herself to a level that I'd call it talking. It's not normal "speech", but if you gave an otherwise normal human with damaged speech centers in their brain a tape recorder it's very much like that.
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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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
According to birds, we just emit a bunch of low pitched grunts and noise all day.
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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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?
Parrots can't talk
Not sure what your criteria for "talking" are but, by all of my own measures, my parrot sounds pretty much exactly like me in most cases, and like a child in most others. The words are clearly distinguishable, understandable, and in multiple languages (he lives in a multi-language household).
So, yes. Parrots can talk. Can they converse? Sometimes loosely, usually not at all. But they can very much talk.
If you mean that parrots do not understand the words and construction they are speaking, sure. But at that point you're splitting hairs. My parrot says "do you want it?" when he wants a treat. He says "good night" when he wants to go to bed. He says "c'mon!" when he wants me to come to him. He absolutely talks.
Weird hill to die on.
- Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
Guess it's more fiction than science fiction now.
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?
> The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices? We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?