Over-Thinking About Thinking

It’s not anthropomorphism to believe that animals think & feel like us. It’s assuming they think & feel the same ways about the same things as we do.

Misreading physical cues like facial expressions or body language leads to totally mistaken interpretations of what an animal has on its mind, what it intends or wants. An ape showing its teeth may be not happily grinning but expressing terror; a cat staring through narrow eyes is not plotting wicked designs, it’s expressing contentment; a wild deer doesn’t come up to you because it likes you, it wants the food in your hand; dolphins aren’t cheerful, they can’t help wearing a grin that is frozen in place. 

For generations, Western thought–always to be distinguished from the thinking and philosophies of the rest of the world–has considered animals to be soulless objects divinely bestowed to humankind for our convenience and use: ‘meat-machines’ put on Earth to supply our needs. The shepherd might have affection for particular sheep, but in the end, it was still about wool and food. We decided we never had to consider let alone care about how they felt about any of it.

We–Western thinkers, that is–have equated our intelligence with our technological capability. But now we know that a bottle-nosed dolphin and even more so, the largest dolphin, the orca, has a brain of proportionally similar size to a human, and that it is many times more convoluted than ours, we have to consider, with all that brain power and no fingers to build things with, what have they been using it for instead?  Consider the world they live in, what stimulates their interest, what needs, what problems have they to solve? What do they care about in their environment with their big brains? It almost certainly will have to do with sound, with communication. Consider that they’ve been evolving to be what they are for millions of years longer than we land-bound apes!

What assumptions have gone unconsidered all this time about what other species care about, what motivates them, what shapes their particular kind of intelligence, their cognition? 

We know that all of us, human and non-human, strive to live, to keep our lives, but how do other animals regard death? We know now that animals mourn the lost, it’s been clearly observed in chimpanzees, in elephants, in swans, in cows, in dogs and cats…  What we see is the experience of loss from the side of the survivors, but what can we know about how animals think of dying? All our assumptions have been based on humankind’s interpretation of death as the worst thing that can happen. 

It isn’t, of course. Pain is worse; suffering is worse; despair beyond all hope is worse. 

I wonder, what does ‘hope’ look like in animals? I can see it when a dog waits endlessly for its person to return, even for years like that dog in Japan, Hachiko, who waited to the end of his life at the train station for his person who had died. 

It’s all cultural, of course, the shape of that dread of death. Some of us dread judgment as did the ancient Egyptians, some of us just hate the thought of not knowing how the stories all will end. Some of us are horrified at the notion of non-existence, the ending of our personal consciousness. There are various cultural visions of some idyllic afterlife, but of all those who have faith in Heaven, how many actually believe that they themselves will deserve it? How many in the world believe in reincarnation, seeing rebirth as a failure, or maybe as the promise of a chance to do it all better?

I wonder if maybe there is simply not caring about what comes next. Could we humans just be overthinking it? Thinking, after all, is what we do with our big brains. I think it was the educator, Edward De Bono who said something to the effect that human beings love to explain more than to find truth: We love to complicate things, to build perfectly pointlessly complex machines to arrive at simple conclusions, mental Rube Goldbergs, every one!