
A parrot has a question for humans - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/75/story/the-great-silence
======
DonHopkins
From Richard Stallman's Rider:

[https://github.com/ddol/rre-
rms/blob/master/rider.txt](https://github.com/ddol/rre-
rms/blob/master/rider.txt)

>If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very
glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that
will be nice too.

>DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire
a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know
how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many
decades feeling frightened and unhappy. If you buy a captured wild parrot, you
will promote a cruel and devastating practice, and the parrot will be
emotionally scarred before you get it. Meeting that sad animal is not an
agreeable surprise.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159210)

[https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...](https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-
public/2011-October/007647.html)

~~~
tapland
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.

~~~
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
kortilla
This might be ignorant, but in this case would it be more humane to own two so
they can entertain each other?

~~~
logfromblammo
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.

~~~
lrem
Yup, that happened to my family. Probably for the better... Except one of them
flew off the window when cleaning the cage. Then the other inexplicably flew
off a couple days later. I imagine I should thank my parents for sparing us
understanding depression at such a young age.

------
brownbat
Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who
could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA.

The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?"

The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food.

Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating
and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact
people are hoping for. The precise expectations we have for such an exchange
may say something about the Fermi paradox. Very similar intelligences can
still be so different as to render communication, a real exchange of ideas,
impossible.

~~~
542458
On Koko... Koko's not all she's cracked up to be. Although there is a lot of
non-scientific media that talks about her language abilities, there actually
aren't very many scientific/peer reviewed articles on her, something that is
the source of some contention.

With Koko/many other talking apes the handler does a LOT of interpretation for
the sign language, to the point that it starts to feel a bit like reading tea
leaves. With Koko, I often feel that the handler goes way too far in this. For
example:

    
    
        Interviewer: Koko, do you feel love from the humans who have raised you and cared for you? Ely35150 asked that. We'll see what she says!
    
        Dr. Patterson: She's reading a birthday card.
    
        Koko: lips, apple give me
    
        Dr. Patterson: People give her her favorite foods.
    
        Koko: love, browse drink nipple
    
        Dr. Patterson: Browse is like... the little foods/snacks we give them.
    
        Koko: koko loves that nipple drink, go
    
        Dr. Patterson: She's kissing her alligator.
    
        Koko: lights off good
    
    

At one point Koko signs "nipple", which her handler interprets as "people"
since they rhyme. Seeing as how Koko can't speak english, the idea that she
understands english rhymes feels like more than a bit of a stretch to me.

Many other scientists have approached the ape speaking thing through a bit
more of a skeptical lens, and produced (IMHO) much better work. The work on
Nim Chimpsky in particular is interesting - they found that while Nim could
associate words with concepts (forming phrases like "give food me eat"),
anything resembling syntax, creating new phrases, or a sustained conversation
was simply out of his reach.

~~~
12elephant
I don't think the researcher means to imply Koko understands rhymes. Rather
her hearing is not fine-tuned enough to hear the subtle difference between the
sounds "nipple" and "people". So she uses them interchangeably.

------
jatsign
The author, Ted Chiang, recently released his book of short stories,
Exhalation. This story is included in the book.

It's good, but not as good as his first book, imo, "Story of Your Life and
Others". Story of Your Life was the inspiration for the movie "Arrival". That
book was amazing.

~~~
kaliatech
The first story though, in Exhalation, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's
Gate", is one of my favorites. It's also available standalone.

~~~
jatsign
That _is_ a really good story. I think I kind of downgraded "Exhalation" a bit
because I'd read that story before so it wasn't new to me.

~~~
r3bl
In any case, thanks for mentioning it. Thoroughly enjoyed Story of Your Life
and Others and had no idea he released a second short story collection a few
months ago.

It's going straight to the top of my to-read list.

------
ggambetta
> If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they
> will know someone is trying to get their attention.

Pretty much the plot of Contact (or at least its inciting incident). Both the
book (by Carl Sagan) and the movie (with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey)
are really good.

~~~
Razengan
We often miss all the ways animals right here on Earth try to get our or each
other's attention.

A truly alien species might communicate in ways we cannot even detect, or
think of detecting, like say magnetic fields or some other medium that almost
nothing on Earth uses.

Furthermore, even if they used the same "channels" and frequencies as us,
their minds may just be too different. Even fundamental concepts like time and
numbers or the notion of self may be perceived too differently by them for
their languages to have any convenient analogues to ours.

~~~
ggambetta
Dolphins seem particularly promising!

~~~
cetalingua
Yet, after nearly 5 decades of research we are still unable to crack their
code. We do know however that some sequences they make do not seem to be
random.Our problem is to penetrate the communication system that is not
visually based,and is purely acoustical.

Shameless self-plug: we are working on it, combining citizen science and AI.
Our plarform goes live in a few weeks.

~~~
arwineap
I'll pull the plug; any suggestions for further reading?

> 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

~~~
cetalingua
>any suggestions for further reading?

"Deep Thinkers" is a good recent book, you can check it out
([https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27...](https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo27346780.html))

>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...](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf))
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.

~~~
arwineap
Thank you for expanding, I appreciate the time it took and have already found
further reading to be very interesting

------
jhbadger
Parrots get the attention because they are the classic imitators of human
voices, but among birds, corvids (crows and their relatives) are the ones that
have been shown to have mammalian-level intelligence.

~~~
jcims
They aren’t bad speakers either.

[https://youtu.be/AfsnHVaScjg](https://youtu.be/AfsnHVaScjg)

~~~
blarg1
Also this one

[https://youtu.be/BbRS9K4rZ8Y](https://youtu.be/BbRS9K4rZ8Y)

------
erinaceousjones
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.

[https://www.facebook.com/myreadingpets/](https://www.facebook.com/myreadingpets/)

------
KingMob
Back in grad school, I used to TA for Dr. Mischel of Nim Chimpsky fame.

A _lot_ of researchers badly wanted to prove language in chimps back in the
70's, but it all amounted to naught, and other than a few holdouts, the field
moved on.

People got excited about animal _communication_ , but confused that with
_language_. Language has a syntax, such that one can utter a sentence you've
never spoken before and you can understand a sentence you've never heard
before. Language is impossible under conditioning-based learning, but most of
the chimp "utterances" could still be explained by conditioning. E.g., chimp
Washoe infamously signed "water" and "bird" when a swan happened to be nearby,
but that could be explained with operant conditioning: she associated signing
"water" and "bird" in the presence of waters and birds with getting treats.

Eventually, researchers started taking a sober look at the "corpuses"
generated by animals. When cherry-picking individual phrases, things looked
impressive; but when they really started to analyze these statistically as a
whole, the results were unimpressive, closer to random utterings designed to
elicit treats, rather than communication.

------
cetalingua
Speaking 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 species. Dolphins' primary modality is sound, so
if they have any communication system, it will reflect that. Will we be able
to crack their code someday? Hopefully, the answer is yes.

~~~
stuntkite
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 a rosetta stone
for another species. We can translate things like "brown fox north" and such.

[0] [https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-
discov...](https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-
prairiedogese)

~~~
cetalingua
>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.

~~~
stuntkite
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt#Dolphinarium)

~~~
cetalingua
Oh, yes, Dr. Lilly and his NASA funded study. All acid, sex and other things
aside, some of the stuff he did was indeed interesting, if only to get to know
dolphins in a way impossible in the wild. There was one NPR interview with
Margaret some time ago, she mentioned that Peter (the dolphin she worked with)
was absolutely captivated by her knees. He would echolocate on them and
investigate them constantly. If you think about it, dolphins must know each
other's anatomy pretty well due to their echolocation abilities. So a human
knee (having no analog anywhere in a dolphin's body) was the constant focus of
Peter's interest. But wild dolphins do not seem to be captivated by human
knees, so this difference in their motivation is very interesting. In fact,
the question about curiosity and motivation to communicate is a important one,
even if we do a playback and use all correct sequences, if the dolphin is not
motivated to reply in any way, the experiment will fail and we will never know
why.

------
mark_l_watson
Nice, I read the whole thing before noticing that Ted Chiang wrote this. Off
topic, but I have really been his and sci-fi from China.

I have owned a Meyers Parrot for over 15 years. We got him from a local
breeder as a baby and hand fed him. I question the morality of owning such
smart animals as pets, but that aside, he is a great pet. Parrots do require
at least a few hours of interaction time a day from their owners. Right now
mine is next to me beating up on his bell toy. He will only do this when
someone is watching him. Anyway, don’t get a parrot unless you have a lot of
free time.

------
viach
I can't think of an interesting and important question one could ask a non-
human, except (if it's an alien) "how to do cold fusion" or "how to live
forever", ie specific technological stuff.

Really, what do we expect to hear from monkeys and dolphins deciphering their
language? Give them a small talk on the current Bitcoin prices or ask what
they think about the next elections? I suspect in the end it'll lead to
something like "How are you? I'm fine!"

Maybe it's just me though.

~~~
jatsign
You could ask them the same things you ask any human, but get radically
different (and perhaps very interesting) answers.

You could look at their art, listen to their music, learn their philosophy -
assuming they have any of that, and that it's comprehensible to us.

~~~
TJSomething
I would be unsurprised if some other species had oral histories. It seems that
elephants and crows are able to communicate about specific locations and
people while their referents aren't around.

------
carapace
FWIW, 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

------
singingwolfboy
You be good. I love you.

~~~
onychomys
Just to be clear, he said that to whoever was putting him to bed each night. I
worked in the Pepperberg lab as an undergrad back in the day, and he said that
to me a hundred times too.

------
PaulHoule
If 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.

~~~
cogburnd02
> bring back the dinosaurs

There are _several_ movies about why this is a _bad_ idea.

~~~
ben_w
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.

~~~
logfromblammo
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.

~~~
ben_w
Then I suggest most of the Culture battles in Iain M Banks’ works. I believe
one of the passages was along the lines of: “Are we winning?” “We won several
minutes ago. You’ve been watching a slow motion replay since it started.”

