I found some "swearing parrot" videos from Youtube, and thought I would put them here. They're so funny.
First, a parrot repeats some random episodes it has heard from daily scottish life:
And then, another parrot says it wants a biscuit...and some other things:
Many parrots are great at repeating things that they have heard from their owners and from their surroundings. And when they do that, one might think that they're actually intelligent, and understand what they're saying. But most often they're just simply repeating words and sentences, and don't really know the meanings of the words...although there have been some rare exceptions to this rule.
But while I was watching these videos, and wondering the learning abilities of these birds, I started thinking about human learning processes as well: Is our own "learning" process really so different from the bird learning?
Because most things that we learn in schools, and at home, and from our friends, and from the media, are basically just simple "life lessons" and "mantras", like rules, thought forms and beliefs...and after we have learnt these lessons, we will then repeat them to others, just like parrots do, and live our lives "as we were taught" and "as everyone does". And that's how parrots live too: they live like they were taught, and as other parrots around them do. So where's the difference?
We go through our lives basically "repeating words" such as "work", "school", "friends", "facebook", "shopping", "good time", "money", "Jesus", "Allah", and so on. Our lives circle around these things; and this is the "repeating exercise", we repeat these things...but in the end all of these things can be broken down into single words...and after you have done that for all things in your life, you then have in your hands the "parrot's word set", that you're repeating day after day.
And even when we learn something radically new, like a completely different worldview from what we have had up to that point, even then we're not freed from this learn-repeat process...We simply adopt the new values (or words), and start repeating them instead of the old values (words). But eventually we became bored to these new words, and then partially go back into the old words, mixing the two "instruction sets" in our minds, randomly repeating both of them.
