The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.
I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
All humans are human.
Babies can feel pain.
Plants feel.
Animals think.
Just …
So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.
I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.
Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":
A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"
I think this is a huge error which collapses the most urgently important distinction at the heart of the entire issue. Plants do complex, interesting things, and we borrow from an already existing vocabulary to make analogies. So people will say plants "feel" or "communicate" or "see".
But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.
>Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.
But seriously, the articles you posted are inappropriately repurposing words normally associated with conscious experience, in order to get attention.
There is lots of evidence plants react to stimuli. There is no evidence they feel.
fortunately, there is a lot of evidence behind plant's feeling and thinking; enough so that if you were to expose yourself to it, and if you were willing to update your beliefs based on strong scientific evidence, I believe you'd change your view.
There's evidence for stunningly intricate, marvelously impressive biological function, but there's no evidence whatsoever for internal mental states.
What's happening is we borrow from a pre-existing vocabulary with connotations to conscious activity and we use it to describe automatic biological reflexes, and then some people lose track of whether it was an analogy or whether it was literal and start claiming plants can "feel."
11 distinct calls is something a rote automaton could easily cope with. So I don't think this study proves much of anything about birds' cognitive abilities.
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.