Hacker News Reader

Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

One time I was trimming a huge set of overgrown bamboo/weeds in my yard, and this bird yapping slowly drifted into my consciousness like, pay attention, alert! I looked up and this tiny bird was darting around the power line and other branches above me, directly facing at me and chirp chirp chirping in a distressed seeming way.

I looked on for maybe 20-30 seconds a bit confused then went back to the trimming, but barely a moment later I saw what I realized was a nest filled with eggs wedged in among the top branches I was just about to cut down. I gave up on the trimming and went inside to ponder bird intelligence & cross-species communication.

View on HN

I felt my brain lighten significantly.

I'm not surprised that animals can communicate "simple" signals like danger, fear, etc. But how would I love for them to be able to exchange finer and longer messages. That would be so fun to imagine we were deaf for thousands of years and also that would make lots of new things to experience. ps: cats and dogs

I still swear that my old cat had a special meow that sounded like "hello".

Paul Watzlawick in his "Pragmatics of Human Communications" explains that (at least so far) animals seem unable to meta-communicate (in the sense of communicating about communication).

If I remember correctly (it has been decades) he mentions as an example that cats are perfectly capable to communicate "I want food", using a combination of vocal and "gestures".

What they cannot do is communicate something like "Listen, I have used the meow for gimme food 9 times already, what are you? deaf? stupid? or just trying to punish me for when I threw up on the carpet?"

Quite possible, maybe that kind of meta level requires more gray matter.. That said the sentiment of exasperation (which triggers our "listen I did this and no result occured") is probably accessible to many life forms, except it's probably expressed as "body language" .. or a more violent behavior.

I suppose (but I am just a layman) that animals do not really have any sense of time.

They can express "I am hungry" or "I am extremely hungry" but they cannot express "I have told you I am hungry for the last 20 minutes" because they have no conceptual model for "things as they were 20 minutes ago".

This does not mean that they have no ability to learn (including learning to recognize humans) but for them I suppose it is just a bunch of "state" which classify me as "nice guy who feeds me" or even just "I know I can trust him not to be a menace" but they have no way to reminisce about when we met for the first time, etc.

("Future state" is probably even more inscrutable to them - they have strategies to cope with the present, some ingrained as instinct, some learned "by experience" but I sincerely doubt that they can contemplate something like "tomorrow I will try doing this").

Makes me wonder about the link between alleged prediction plane in humans, self perception, perception of others and communication

"Fern says the animals talk to each other. Dr Dorian, do you believe animals talk?"

I never heard one say anything," he replied. "But that proves nothing. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn't catch the remark because I wasn't paying attention. Children pay better attention than grown-ups... Perhaps if people talked less, animals would talk more."

- Charlotte's Web

Reminds me of another story in the What The Robin Knows about a group of elephants charging across the savanna, in the direction of some small trees (that would just get bowled over by elephants), and a bird getting the elephants to change direction by doing what you describe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com