David Hellman

This post falls outside the usual categories this blog has covered (video games and Braid stuff). I have my reservations about the personal or even mundane disclosures that comprise so much of the web; my twitter updates have been strictly blog update announcements so far. I am even hesitant to comment on other people’s tweets because at this early stage, a single comment would heavily shift the ratio of professional tweets to chattery public conversation tweets. Though my recalcitrance is probably somewhat un-dude in the twittering world, it’s hard to feel casual on the open stage of the internet. Even the sillier posts in this blog have been video game-related, granting them at least a nominal professional justification.

On the other hand, you never know what might come from sharing miscellanea of one’s life! That tediously ambivalent disclaimer aside, here is a video:

I shot it Monday afternoon in a dead-end staircase surrounded by gardens very near my apartment building. These are the same famous parrots from the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

Their sounds are frequently the first things I hear in the morning.

I’m obsessed with birds right now. It started with pigeons, and their hilarious mating dance. Then I started looking more closely at the gulls, crows and other birds around here. It’s so easy to ignore animals as irrelevant cruft on the city. But many of them thrive here. When I’m looking at a crow, and then it looks at me, and I can tell I’m not just a patch in its view, but the object of its attention, some kind of equalization occurs. That crow is apprehending me; I am apprehending it. Mutually aware, we will now go about our business with more or less consideration for the other. Whether the crow continues to preen in my vicinity with apparent indifference, or from an abundance of caution flies away, I know I exist in its world. The relationship may develop no further, but already my routine obliviousness is interrupted.

That moment of mutual recognition scrambles my sentience-projection module. When I see people, I make broad assumptions about their minds, their perceptions and the worlds they inhabit by projecting my own experience onto them. Despite the variation among people, and despite my assumptions’ assuredly frequent wrongness, the comparison feels sensible. Human, human. (Probably one of the most common errors we make is incorrectly assessing how much other people’s minds resemble ours.)

When I look at an ant, my ability to identify with it is so slight, that the sentience-projection module defaults to OFF. This may be wrong or unenlightened, but ants just seem like little scurrying machines. (In the case of mosquitos, I hate them so much, and “dehumanize” them so fervently, that I want to ascribe negative-sentience, although I’m not sure what that means.)

A bird is right in the middle. Their faces are not as articulate as a human’s, or a dog’s. But you can tell when one is looking at you. And you can tell a lot more, if you start to watch. When I look at a bird, my sentience-projection module, which I use to populate my sensory world with psychology, goes a bit haywire. The switch can’t default to OFF/ANT or ON/HUMAN. It’s somewhere in-between. And, in the way of things that defy compartmentalization, it becomes fascinating.

To learn about the span of amazing avian adaptation, I recommend The Life of Birds, a 10-episode BBC series by David Attenborough. The footage Attenborough’s team compiles is frequently astonishing.