November 4, 2022
Having a dog for 14+ years made me think a lot about animal sentience. Dogs, cats and most other mammals have likes and preferences and will take specific actions to get them. From small things like Ginger pulling down a pillow to lay on and get comfortable, to mice weaning themselves off heroin in order to spend more time with other mice.
And of course many animals can be trained, which requires at least a little bit of cause-and-effect in the thought process.
But they all have their limits. Even the smartest dogs can only learn a few dozen words (which in fairness is more than I know of any other human language) and there are things that are just... beyond them. I remember one time I was driving with the dog up to Ohio for a holiday and I was using one of those leashes that attaches to the seat belt. Ginger tangled herself up in it and looked at me like she was saying "please fix this". So I get the feeling that she knew there were things she couldn't do that I could.
Which makes me wonder what she was capable of knowing. Did she know that the little nubs sticking out of the wall are how I made the lights come on? Did she care? Or was it just some magical thing that humans do?
After she went deaf, if she was sleeping I'd wake her up before I left the house so I could go through the routine of giving her a treat as I got ready to go. So she'd know I was just leaving like normal and wouldn't wake up to me having disappeared. Would it have mattered to her if I didn't do that?
And of course, we have our limits too. Being land-only creatures for most of our evolutionary existence, we're pretty crap at 3-D navigation. So bad that Star Trek: The Next Generation posited that we'd take whales with us on our starships so they could help the hairless monkeys zip around the galaxy.
But we at least know it's there and can figure it out if we put our minds to it. Higher dimensions are just about impossible for us though. I mean, we can get the concept on a technical level (kind of) but we don't get it. Maybe that's holding us back from discovering warp travel, or the Grand Theory of Everything.
It'd be kind of arrogant to assume that all these other simple creatures can only get so far before they not just can't understand things, but become incapable of understanding, and turn around and assume that we don't have that kind of limit.
I wonder what that's like. Not stuff like "I suck at math" but knowing that there may be creatures out there who can answer questions that no human could ever conceive of asking. Would we treat them as gods? Would they want that kind of adulation, or would they try to show us that it's just a list of things we haven't figured out yet? And when they try to explain it all, there's some hurdle that turns into a hard cutoff, no matter how they try to get it all through our thick skulls?
Would they say, fuck it, sure we're gods? Would they keep trying? Treat us like we'd treat a particularly dim herd of cows? Or would they walk away from a species that doesn't get it -- that can't get it -- and hope that if we spend a few hundred thousand years not wiping ourselves out that one day we'll be ready?
