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Notes -
I don't think about Alex the parrot at all. To my knowledge, no parrot has ever used their language to organize a rebellion against their human owners, something human slaves have done repeatedly. By language, I am not referring to words, but rather to the ability of humans to communicate their internal state to others, to build communicable models of the world that coordinate large-scale cooperative action. Neither parrots nor other animals do that.
I'm not sure what your excerpt about genetic defects is supposed to communicate.
Whether it is "magic" is an interesting question. I'll agree that it alone is not a good yardstick for humanity; large language models are not human and I don't care much about them. I care about language because it interpenetrates and mutually amplifies the rest of the items on that list. Language, in the sense I am using it, is one of the reasons tyranny is not sustainable: people can formulate moral arguments, and those moral arguments retain weight. They can make blood-guilt immortal beyond the imagining of any individual human, and are part of why justice is, in every practical sense, inescapable.
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