The Unbearable Parrotness of Being

V's sister Silvia has (or had) a small collection of parrots living in her garden. (She split with her husband earlier this year and we're not sure who got custody of the feathered family members.) The least domesticated but somehow most human of these goes by the name of Gringo (a red-headed Amazon). Gringo is a no-prisoners sort of parrot. Only V's 18-year-old niece Clara Lucia is trusted implicitly, as they have grown up together. Everyone else keeps their fingers out of his cage. That he alone of all the household parrots spends most of his day behind bars is partly a consequence of this unpredictable sociability, but also apparently a matter of his own preference.

Gringo isn't afraid of people, whatever their size or gestural state, but if there is one thing that makes him take a few steps backward on his perch...it's a shoe.

Somewhere in his birdy amygdala there's something footwear-shaped that triggers this response, an amalgam of fright, flight and fight. Gringo greets a backpacker's sandal the way an Inca might have greeted a total eclipse of the sun (or a certain acquaintance of mine might greet his daughter's new boyfriend, if the latter turned out to be the bearer of some non-European ancestry).

There's clearly something involuntary in the way he assumes the posture - which begs the question: is it just an empty reflex? How much of this behaviour is a signal to the outside world and how much is it an expression of an inner state? Perhaps the crucial question about animal emotion is not so much "do they have them?", because they clearly do from a behavioural point of view, but "how do they feel their emotions, subjectively?" How, for example, does it feel to be a parrot contemplating a shoe? How does my father's Jack Russell feel when it watches me eating a mince pie?

The question is also relevant to people that believe that everyone else is a zombie.

We can already make machines that can display and even recognise human emotions, yet we haven't the foggiest idea how to make one that feels them, and even if we did, we wouldn't be able to tell if it had anything like the sort of subjective consciousness we have. (Us non-zombies that is.)

In his book The Feeling Of What Happens cognitive pyschologist Antonio Damasio proposed that consciousness originates in our sentimental apparatus as "a state of feeling". As opposed to states of knowing, states of feeling emerge from the more antiquated parts of the vertebrate brain, suggesting perhaps that sentience is a spectrum of different sensations - not something that absolutely distinguishes every human from every other being in Nature.

Meanwhile, I'm not ashamed to anthropomorphise my green friend Gringo. When the skies open above Antigua in the late summer afternoons he sits and soaks up the downpour in his rusty old cage, and sings. He warbles together phrases from tunes he must have overheard, interspersed with his own notes, plaintively improvised. It's a performance that's touching like nothing else I've ever heard; and I can't believe that only one of us is feeling it.