African grey parrots spontaneously 'lend a wing'
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cub.2019.11.030/attachmen...
I once had an African grey who would help our other pets, often. She'd sit in her perch area, with a good view of the drive, and call out to the dog when she saw me arrive home.
She would often drop treats to the dog as well, and once we caught her trying to take dogs collar off - she almost had it.
Of course, this is anecdotal and not a scientific observation, but our grey was as much of a family member in our house as any other pets, and she was a curious and intelligent being.
(The experience swore me off pet ownership for good, however. Not fun losing such loved ones, nor realising the life they led in captivity was not their own..)
A great name for a restaurant "The Chew Goose".
Surprise!, dinosaur DNA and ready to tear off your hand ;-)
We collect her efforts, which then are nicely deposited in the garden compost, where they create a rather fat and moist soil condition for later parts of the garden.
She is a talker. We call to her to come play and she'll often respond with a solid "Tuk!" if she's not interested, and we should hush, or a "clirp!" if she's not interested, but wants to talk about something else, or a "<favourite imitation of some befuddling device>" if she's actually on her way and just coming around the doorway for a bit of fuss and fun on the floor ..
But! You should never have a grey unless you are prepared to spend a lot of time with it. Anything less than regularly, daily interaction, is going to result in a kind of neurosis the finely tuned attenuators of the human mind may not be readily prepared to endure. Be aware, greys can be Craa-AA-zy! ..
The subject was given things of no value and we don't know if it expected a reward.
How do they know the animal wasn't just making the only move it had out of boredom, or that it expected reciprocity but didn't get it?
The parrots only exchanged tokens when it would actually help the other parrot, meaning the subject understood the other parrot's test and wasn't acting randomly.
> or that it expected reciprocity but didn't get it?
Ultimately, all generosity is predicated on an expectation of reciprocity ("Do unto others..."). The difference is how long the subject is willing to wait for it. The subject was in a situation where immediate reciprocity wasn't possible.
Not really, a billionaire donating his fortune doesn't expect to have that given back to him. The richest in the world would never have a hope of reciprocity
Also there is the self satisfaction that will always prevent any deed from being truly selfless.
Exactly. Don't look to billionaires to inform yourself about how generosity works; they live in a completely different world.
My argument was about RECIPROCITY, which in the billionaire example is not possible regardless of their motives. Even if some are just buying things, there's absolutely no way that every single large donation was given to buy something like a name on a building. There are countless examples of anonymous donors.
Because the idea that all generosity has expected reciprocity is silly and completely unprovable. You would have to change the definition of reciprocity to include any feeling or personal satisfaction, which is completely unknowable. You could never actually prove what that donors intentions were or how they felt after, even if you think you know. And even if you could that would be a huge stretch of an argument for " expected reciprocity" and not what I was implying by the billionaire example.
No, we can't.
So let's ingore the whole "we don't live long enough to make the trip". Because we don't.
So if we're going to go, it's a generation ship. Which is currently magic. Our MVP experiments trying to do this on earth have failed, not in space with all the crazy complications that incurs.
So there's no reason to think our meatbags can go at any price. So....
We've never built a machine that can work for a 1000 years. That's a fraction of what you need to go to another star.
So the fact that there is nothing magic about crossing these distances is exactly the reason we can't do it right now. And probably never can.
We are in the similar situation now, we know what needs to be developed, it’s just very expensive and we can’t (and should not) mobilize entire earth population to pay for it. If we do, we can colonize nearest star systems in few thousand years and Milky Way in couple million.
It's fantasy.
Expansionist species capture resources and eliminate threats. As such we are lucky to be at the edge of the galaxy and not discovered.