Parrot consciousness? (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 01, 2016, 18:33 (3217 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A very long article about using parrots to help rehabilitate PTSD veterans also indicates a degree of real consciousness in parrots:-http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/what-does-a-parrot-know-about-ptsd.html?emc=...-A lovely piece! Many thanks.-QUOTE: "There is abundant evidence now that parrots possess cognitive capacities and sensibilities remarkably similar to our own.”-There seem to be increasing numbers of scientists who say exactly the same about other organisms, right down to the level of the individual cell. The fact that some organisms are actually able to communicate with humans and vice versa is simply a bonus. -QUOTE: “Nature, in other words, in a stunning example of parallel or convergent evolution, found an entirely other and far earlier path to complex cognition: an alien intelligence that not only links directly back to minds we've long believed to be forever lost to us, like the dinosaurs', but that can also be wounded, under duress, in the same ways our minds can."-If you believe in evolution, and bearing in mind that we have followed other organisms onto this planet, it all makes perfect sense: our own complex cognition, sensitivity and intelligence are inherited from our earthly ancestors, no matter how much more complex our faculties have become. If they had not had these attributes, they would not have survived.-DAVID: From this article I can easily believe that parrots have a form of consciousness very parallel to ours, similar but different in kind.-As we have said before, all species (broad sense) are different in kind. A parrot/ant/elephant will think like a parrot/ant/elephant.