Let’s get one thing straight: I’m a pretty serious dog person. I have a dog-a-day calendar in my office. My parents’ home phone number is listed in my cell as “Chubbs,” our family dog. I sleep on a pillow every night covered with illustrations of dogs.
But I believe dogs are qualitatively and significantly different from people.
Gregory Berns’ New York Times Saturday opinion piece (“Dogs Are People, Too“) would have us reconsider that idea. The basic premise of the article is that after doing MRI scans of dogs who are alert and awake (not sedated and unconscious), researchers have found that dog brains use neurological mechanisms that are remarkably close to those of human brains. Perhaps, as the article cautions, this similarity doesn’t prove that dogs “love” humans in the same way we humans love. But it should cause us to reconsider our assumption that dogs and humans are really that different. We might even consider granting them the rights of personhood.
A recent article in the Boston Review (“On Being an Octopus“) tackled a very similar question. In that article, Peter Godfrey-Smith revisits the thesis of Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, “What is it like to be a bat?” Godfrey-Smith summarizes the thesis of Nagel’s paper:
He asked this in part to challenge materialism, the view that everything that goes on in our universe comprises physical processes and nothing more. A materialist view of the mind, Nagel said, cannot even begin to give an explanation of the subjective side of our mental lives, an account of what it feels like to have thoughts and experiences.
Or in other words, no matter how much information we have about the neurological processes of a bat, that scientific data actually provides no real understanding of the cognitive experience of being a bat. It is, in a way, a restatement of Descartes’ formulation of mind-body dualism. Our physical body (including the physical brain tissues in our heads) is in some way distinct from our mind/consciousness/soul.
Godfrey-Smith’s excellent article probes the question of what experience is like for an octopus, an animal that is evolutionarily-speaking very removed from humans but that still exhibits some degree of problem-solving and other higher cognitive processes. The octopus, he writes,
is curious and a problem-solver. Some octopuses carry pairs of coconut half-shells around to reconstruct as spherical shelters. Octopuses can recognize (and take a disliking to) individual human keepers in aquariums. They learn the layout of their environment and hunt on long loops that take them reliably back to a den. Octopuses have eyes built on a “camera” design like ours, with a lens focusing an image. They also have sensitive chemical sensors in their suckers—they taste the world as they touch it. When watching their eyes, it is natural to think that perhaps octopuses are a bit like us, just with more arms and no bones. Like other animals, they use their senses to track what is going on around them and to guide action.
According to a well-documented Wikipedia page, the octopus also exhibits playful behavior. Heck, one octopus even successfully predicted several outcomes of matches of the 2010 World Cup.
We have a hard time ascribing personhood to the octopus, however, since it is so difficult to see it as a physical equal. It is a boneless blob with a lot of arms. I would argue, then, that Berns’ willingness to ascribe personhood to dogs is not just a matter of their neurological processes and advanced cognitive function but also of their beautiful hair, their expressive faces, and the warmth of their bodies on a cold night.
We share these physical attributes with dogs. It is easy to see ourselves in them.
It is not easy to see ourselves in the octopus, with our rigid bones and dearth of rubbery tentacles. But even if we hesitate to ascribe personhood to the octopus (or the dog), we should still try to understand the experiences of these strange aliens who inhabit Earth with us:
Getting a sense of what it feels like to be another animal—bat, octopus, or next-door neighbor—must involve the use of memory and imagination to produce what we think might be faint analogues of that other animal’s experiences. This project can be guided by knowledge of how the animal is put together and how it lives its life. When the animal is as different from us as an octopus, the task is certainly difficult, but it is one worth undertaking.
(P.S. I feel bad whenever I eat octopus.)