Cats and Mystics

• Human Judgements of Animal Actions by John Fentress, 10/10/97
  • The Fallacy of Immaculate Perception by Lee Dean, 10/14/97
    • Maybe They are Just Being There (Here) by John Fentress, 10/18/97
      
      

Can we know what an animal thinks? In some respects, we may fair better in understanding an animal’s thoughts than we do in understanding human thoughts. I may ask someone what he’s thinking and the answer I receive might be a lie. Or, the response given may be rendered in all "honesty," but the reply may also be steeped in self-deceit. With the human capacity for self-deception, from moment to moment or situation to situation, I cannot know for sure if my own thoughts are rational or irrational. Since an intentional lie is an abstraction, a concrete-thinking animal is, at least, more honest. Not by moral choice, of course, but by the limitations of its brain.

Since few animals reason in the abstract to any testable degree, a process of elimination can be used. A concrete-thinking animal is limited by what it can associate through its senses and its experience. My cat, basking belly up in the sun, has no association to the china vase he knocked off the mantelpiece yesterday. I know he isn’t reflecting on yesterday’s clumsy misstep. Nor is he making plans to pay an insurance premium in the event his territory should burn down tomorrow. He isn’t thinking about the fact that he is growing older and will someday die. He has no knowledge of death for he has never experienced death and is unable to perceive his own death through his senses.

As he lies there, I wonder if this cat is thinking at all. His worldly awareness seems to extend no further than the pure bliss of his sun-warmed belly. Perhaps he is having an introverted pure consciousness experience so sought after by mystics around the world. The abstracting human brain, however, usually requires rigorous mental discipline to achieve this state while my concrete-thinking cat, perhaps, slips into it with apparent ease. In addition, this particular mental state is always referred to as being ineffable—it cannot be described but only experienced. The human mystic can verbalize this mental state no better than my cat can.

Mystics always claim that this experience results in a "higher" state of mental awareness. Watching my basking, concrete-thinking cat, however, I wonder if these mystics may have gotten their "directions" confused.

Lee

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