During recent Zoom meetings and Skype calls, I often excuse myself for my canary chirping away in the background, causing all kinds of feedback. But how could I blame him? It’s only in his nature they say, so I take full responsibility and try to suss him. To know why he does what he does is merely a guess. You could look at it through the lens of evolutionary biology, that he sings the song he sings to seduce his female counterpart. But I find that hard to believe.
After being locked down with the creature for about a year I recognize its song all too well: mostly the same pattern with little variations and reflections of sounds in its environment. Sadly, there isn’t any female counterpart for him to be found in this room. At times I like to picture him as a celibate preacher. A desiring entity pounding out repetitive machine-like sequences.
On the other hand, I like to imagine he varies his song to find out which one is most attractive or beautiful. But what am I but a silly human projecting silly human behaviour? No chick comes flying his way, but he keeps generating variations and mimicking sounds from his environment, brute-forcing away; hoping his context will affirm him someday in his tireless chanting.
Darwin taught us (leaving some nuance behind) that we are but far cousins of birds. And I must admit, in a silly way, we humans have some bird-like tendencies. We, bipedal species, seem obsessed with showing off information sequences. I am humbly jealous of my bird in one big way though: he doesn’t have any obliged zoom-meetings on lauded apparatuses.
Some say we became human when we started chirping around a campfire: hallucinating meaning in self-referential fractal echoes, chasing dragons and ghosts, … Call it what you want, it fails to please me. A more satisfying thought to me is that we became what we are through analogical reasoning. To be more specific: the silly act of recognizing ourselves in external phenomena, be it animal or machine; and carefully nudging those phenomena to be more synchronous or dissonant with ourselves. How small a thought it takes… This is an attempt at being silly in this sense: modulated nudges towards synchronicity subject to feedback mechanisms.