I am not a scientist – I design and write software. Anyone who works in the field that this post deals with will be able to take it apart in no time, but I stand by my qualitative comments on the significance of Alex for our concept of intelligence.

As the entire world knows by now, Alex the Parrot died a few days ago. He was 31.
Alex was made famous for his considerable communication skills. He was the leading subject of an experiment running over three decades by Dr. Irene Pepperberg – a US academic (comparative psychologist).

Alex

I saw a documentary on Alex and his cohorts a few years ago and there is no denying that their skills and innocent charm were/are magical. Do yourself a favour, read an example of a conversation with Alex here. I grew up with an African Grey parrot[1] and while he/she[2] had an extensive vocabulary of calls and words/phrases I have no doubt that they were learned by rote. Lonka(the parrot) did learn to use phrases correctly, such as calling out to my dad as he left for work in the mornings, but those were limited to very simple, routine situations.
Alex’s abilities were in an entirely different league. Able to combine several attributes of one or more items (color, material, count, size) to answer questions that require comparisons, algebra etc he was reported by some to have had an intelligence comparable to a 5-year-old human.

Another fascinating aspect to Alex’s life is the training technique Dr. Pepperberg used to teach Alex. She would train[3] Alex together with a human colleague. These sessions would basically involve Alex competing against the human for rewards. Alex would observe what the human trainer did to receive the reward (e.g. identify the colour of a wooden block) and then learn to do the same. This would result in a natural competition[4] in which Alex’s learning is speeded up by competing with the human for that delicious treat.

What I’m interested in is the ongoing debate about animal intelligence. Alex was used as a case in point by both sides of the argument. Supporters of the idea that Alex showed a very simple form of human-type intelligence point to his ability to combine various attributes of several items into relatively complex comparisons[2] as an indicator of a flexible form of intelligence that goes beyond simple recognition and repetition. Detractors claim that his behaviour, while complex, is rote – simple repetition and recognition.
Another supporter point is that Alex was able to independently express his desires[6]. However, all animals express desire, the dog whining at the door means ‘I wanna pee’.

What I’m interested in is the detractors’ description of their objections, Dr. Herbert Terrace, arguing against classifying Alex’s intelligence as human-like, describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’. Ouch.
But wait! He describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’ – complex. Not to want to make trivialising assumptions about Dr. Terrace’s wider argument or his work I am excited about this statement. Sure, he does characterise Alex’s behaviour as a performance (i.e. trained for repetition), but he does concede ‘complex’.
One of my favourite books of all time is Steven Pinker‘s How the Mind Works. It describes, amongst other things, the Computational Theory of Mind which holds that the brain is a computational device(a machine) which produces intelligent behaviour and cognition through a highly, highly parallalised, ridiculously complex form of information processing.
In short, that human intelligence is a simple product of the brain’s ability to process thousands of events in parallel using its roughly 100 billion neurons and their roughly 3 quadrillion interconnection points(synapses). The secret to this ability lies not in some mystic breath of life, but simply on the brain’s complexity. One of the intelligent behaviours that the brain produces is language and something that is important to note is that Dr. Pepperberg does not characterise Alex’s sentences as language, they are responses – either to questions or to his own desires. I agree with this; a voice assisted satellite navigation system does not use language, it produces responses in the form of human words. But this is not a fundamental difference in the mechanism that produces the intelligence – complex information processing.
If you really understand computer programming it should be clear that a very similar mechanism produces computer intelligence[7]. A computer’s information processing capability is a direct result of the stacking on top of one another of thousands of layers of trivial logical operations. A computer can, after all perform only boolean logic[8] – but stacking those on top of one another in layer upon layer of interconnected pieces produces a spell checker[9].
I believe that the same applies to the brain. There is no magic point at which the brain all of a sudden becomes ‘intelligent’, going from being able to perform basic functions like breathing and recognising poisonous foods through to ‘!bang! I see it all now! I understand’. Fuck that. Intelligence is simply a function of the complexity of the device(machine/organ) that processes the information(reported by our senses) received by the system(the body). And in that sense I feel strongly that Alex was intelligent, not ‘intelligent’ or ‘exhibiting signs of intelligence’; intelligent in the same way that a human is intelligent, the same way that a forest of trees is intelligent and that an evolutionary microchip is intelligent.
And no, I’m not into that whole Gaia, we are all one and interconnected bullshit. Yes, we are all interconnected, yes there is information processing that occurs between individual organisms. But without having to resort to some flaky notion of an overmind, individual organisms/devices like that microchip, Alex and I are intelligent in exactly the same way – the mechanism is the same.

Alex’s intelligence was massively less complex than a human’s, as it was massively more complex than the microchip’s, but it’s the same. Yes, there are still mysteries that complex information processing begin to answer today(such as consciousness – neither Alex nor the microchip was/is conscious as far as we know) – but intelligence isn’t one of them.
It is arrogant and ignorant of the biological reality of the human brain to claim that our intelligence is somehow special or different from that of any other animal or neural life form.

And so, to Alex – I hope you had fun, you were cool. I’m sure that as the last electrical pulses jumped chemically from neuron to neuron in your brain you saw those delicious moments in your life, those wonderful cork nuts that you ate as you spoke.

Cork Nut

[1] By all accounts still alive, but having flown the coop about 5 years ago. Some months later my parents were walking around their town when they heard Lonka’s distinctive calls coming from a nearby house.
[2] Determining the sex of parrots is a notoriously difficult and error prone business
[3] Here we have one of the crucial points of this post, was she training Alex or teaching him, and is there a difference?
[4] The absolute fundamental environment[i] in which all animal(including human) development takes place – competition.
[i] not to be confused with the process that produces that development; being natural selection
[5] She asks ‘How many?’, he says ‘Two’, she asks ‘What’s different?’, he says ‘Color’.
[6] He says ‘Wanna go back’
[7] No, I’m not going to call it ‘intelligence’, it is intelligence.
[8] is it less? is is more? is it equal? That’s all you need.
[9] And here we can speculate about whether the internet(the most complex machine ever built) has already or is still waiting to become measurably intelligent itself.