I think I read in Daniel Gilbert’s Book “Stumbling on Happiness” a very good approximation to what I always thought an animal “thinks” like:
Imagine you’re reading a long text and your mind starts wandering and gets lost in shallow feelings like the warm weather or the sounds of the birds, while your eyes keep reading the letters. Suddenly you’re at the end of the paragraph and you realize that you can’t remember anything you just read… or did you actually read it at all? You look over it again and the words sure look familiar, but you simply can’t say for sure if you actually read the text. You were in fact reading it, but you weren’t consciously aware of the fact that you were reading it.
Being a dog is probably like letting your mind wander and never snapping out of that state, everything you do is as if it’s on autopilot without having to first pass the “semi-control” of a conscious observer/inhibitor/decision-maker who has a concept of a future that goes on beyond a few moments.
Not sure if that is really a fair caricature of an animal mind, but it’s my current model of how an animal mind functions.
I think I read in Daniel Gilbert’s Book “Stumbling on Happiness” a very good approximation to what I always thought an animal “thinks” like:
Imagine you’re reading a long text and your mind starts wandering and gets lost in shallow feelings like the warm weather or the sounds of the birds, while your eyes keep reading the letters. Suddenly you’re at the end of the paragraph and you realize that you can’t remember anything you just read… or did you actually read it at all? You look over it again and the words sure look familiar, but you simply can’t say for sure if you actually read the text. You were in fact reading it, but you weren’t consciously aware of the fact that you were reading it.
Being a dog is probably like letting your mind wander and never snapping out of that state, everything you do is as if it’s on autopilot without having to first pass the “semi-control” of a conscious observer/inhibitor/decision-maker who has a concept of a future that goes on beyond a few moments.
Not sure if that is really a fair caricature of an animal mind, but it’s my current model of how an animal mind functions.