Mike
I used to enjoy a cigar from time to time, something I did in the privacy of my back yard when weather permitted. While self-indulging, I noticed my cat Mike doing something interesting. Mike caught sight of a mouse by an old milk can we have tucked in the corner by the back door. He pursued the mouse, and it very reasonably ran into the corner behind the milk can. Here is the interesting part: Without hesitation, Mike went to the other side of the can to catch the mouse as it emerged. It didn’t emerge of course, the mouse chose hiding over running. I rescued the mouse by removing Mike.
I find this interesting.because Mike behaved as if he believed in the persistence of hidden objects, assuming of course he couldn’t hear any heartbeats or breathing. More than that though, he behaved as if he believed in, or at the very least operated within the context of presumed Newtonian space. It seemed obvious to Mike that the mouse continued on the same trajectory under the constraint of the bricked corner, which amounts to the x, y, and z axes of Newtonian space. I’ll admit this might be pushing things a bit, but to push even further, my cat might be functioning within the same forms of perception as me, the Kantian ones of space, time and causality.
To expand on that idea, space, time, and causality are a priori (logically prior) to any perceptual knowledge I might have. They mediate my understanding, and I find my perceptual experience taking place in that context. I’m not sure I can imagine a discrete object such as an apple that is not located somewhere in space and time. I only see two options to explain this to myself: Either I experience the world precisely the way it actually is (naive realism), or my experience and its context are a package deal and I have no idea what the world behind my experience is actually like. I lean towards the second option. It would be awfully difficult for me to do otherwise, although it might be possible to do so in some kind of peak experience.
Returning to Mike the cat, I’m not claiming that cats believe things, although they might, who am I to say? I’m suggesting that regardless of the sophistication of a living thing, it is successfully existing and reproducing because it behaves as if it knows, or at least believes, something about its world. This is backing off somewhat from A. J. Ayers’ definition of knowledge as a true belief with sufficient reason to a more humble definition of knowledge as a behaviour that looks as if it were the result of a belief confirmed by results. After all, cats do catch mice and eat them.
If I wanted to say something true about the world of putative things, Kant’s noumenal world, I would have to assume that noumenal world has discrete, separate objects and events just as the perceptual/phenomenal world apparently has. And I would also have to assume that these actual (noumenal) objects are interrelated by causality. These claims assume a lot. It’s an unjustified extrapolation from personal experience that assumes a fundamental materialism of some sort and contradicts the hypothesis of the quantum field in quantum mechanics as well as claims made by mystics throughout history. Enough said about that, except to mention that Bertrand Russell said perceptual experience is more convincing than anything else.
From Mike’s point of view, things that run, skitter, and hide, or perhaps make scratching and squeaking noises from a concealed place are potentially food. This brings me to an amusing cat behaviour that can be seen as an attempt to not be seen by others as potential food. Cats are very good at fast walking instead of running from danger. They behave as if they had a theory of other minds that for safety’s sake, supposes a mind similar to their own, “If I run, the dog will chase me.” That’s not unreasonable, I would tend to suppose the same thing.
There’s something important to sort out here. Are cats self-conscious, and do they have a theory of other minds? These kinds of thoughts are usually dismissed as anthropomorphic, projecting human qualities onto other entities. The next question is whether I, myself, have self-consciousness and a theory of other minds. If I do have such a quality, that would be the thing I could project onto cat behaviour and thus be guilty of anthropomorphizing. Another possibility presents itself: It’s not that cats have no self-consciousness, while humans do; it’s not cats and humans both have self-consciousness; it’s also not cats have it and humans do not. It could well be that cats and humans both do not have self-consciousness and a theory of other minds. In other words, nobody has a separate mind, nobody has a point of view, nobody is a self. I want to explore this strange idea further.
When I engage in activities such as driving a car, riding a bicycle, or simply walking, I have noticed that these activities occur without attention, or abstract and theoretical thought. They can just happen. My only role is to be present to see it all happening. It doesn’t need me, it will happen just fine without me there. And eventually I’ll realize this extends to everything I do, feel, and experience, all my relationships, goals, hopes, dreams, pleasures and sufferings. I realize there is nothing here that qualifies as me, and all that is here is merely my window into this reality. Initially this mostly seems like an interesting and unprovable proposition but the practice of self observation makes it become experientially obvious. We are awareness, we are here noticing things. Living things are like keyholes through which the universe catches a glimpse of itself.
I think physical things and awareness of them lie on the same continuum. They’re made of the same stuff, whatever that stuff might be. This was also Carl Jung’s take on things. He described the action of archetypes in the context of his theory of synchronicity as being “psychoid”, in other words, neither entirely psychical nor physical. The putative objects of our experience are not entirely physical but they behave as if they were. Here’s an interesting quote from the theoretical physicist David Bohm, who seems to agree:
“If the thing and the thought about it have their ground in the one undefinable and unknown totality of flux, then the attempt to explain their relationship by supposing that the thought is in reflective correspondence with the thing has no meaning, for both thought and thing are forms abstracted from the total process. The reason why these forms are related could only be in the ground from which they arise, but there can be no way of discussing reflective correspondence in this ground, because reflective correspondence implies knowledge, while the ground is beyond what can be assimilated in the content of knowledge.
Does this mean that there can be no further insight into the relationship of thing and thought? We suggest that such further insight is in fact possible but that it requires looking at the question in a different way. To show the orientation involved in this way, we may consider as an analogy the well-known dance of the bees, in which one bee is able to indicate the location of honey-bearing flowers to other bees. This dance is probably not to be understood as producing in the ‘mind’ of the bees a form of knowledge in reflective correspondence with the flowers. Rather, it is an activity which, when properly carried out, acts as a pointer or indicator, disposing the bees to an order of action that will generally lead them to the honey. This activity is not separate from the rest of what is involved in collecting the honey. It flows and merges into the next step in an unbroken process. So one may propose for consideration the notion that thought is a sort of ‘dance of the mind’ which functions indicatively, and which, when properly carried out, flows and merges into an harmonious and orderly sort of overall process in life as a whole.”1
Why do I like cats? “Its all good”, as they apparently think, “And if things change, I’ll deal with it then”. I like them because we each have our perceptions, priorities, and understandings, but we also have these windows of soothing friendship that we can reach through. They care, and so do I - everything cares as best it can.
David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 55.