Displacement and Non-Human Senses
For me, this is the saddest one frame comic that I think I've ever seen. It's from Zach Weinersmith's SMBC web comic. For reasons that I don't fully understand, it even makes me tear up a little bit. However, it also gets right to the heart of something about human language and human thinking.
As far as we know, non-human animals communicate about the present, and perhaps the very short term future. Many clearly have some form of memory, but what that form takes, we can't know. Ted Lasso, another fictional character, said: "You know what the happiest animal in the world is? It's a goldfish. It's got a 10 second memory."
On the other hand, the fundamental nature of human language and human thinking is not only to think and communicate about the past and the future, but to create worlds of language and often of pictures that have no existence outside of our thinking and communicating about them. In linguistic terms, we move our language and our thinking not only forward and backwards in time and space, but in and out of reality. For humans, these unreal communicative worlds can be as important, and in some sense, as real as other more tangible worlds. If you had an emotional reaction to the cartoon, you know what I mean, and you did something that seems specifically human.
This discussion has been about language and may seem to compare humans favorably to other species. And, human language does seem to be both qualitatively and quantitatively more sophisticated than non-human communication. However, please keep in mind that evolution gives living things the senses and communication systems that are best adapted to their lifestyles and existences. Human language wouldn't make lemurs better lemurs. They have no need for it.
Even beyond this, we can study non-human senses and communication systems but it is impossible for us to fully comprehend what these mean to the animals themselves. The philosopher Thomas Nagel explores this in a very famous essay called "What Is It Like to be a Bat?" Nagel concludes that a) it must be like something, but that b) since we lack bat brains and since we lack the sensory apparatus used by bats, we can never know what it is like to be them. The world as perceived by an animal is called the animal's umwelt. The bat umwelt remains beyond our understanding.
Consider the octopus for a minute. The drawing shows exactly how octopuses are not. The drawing imagines an octopus as human like but with a lot more legs. But whatever else it is, octopus umwelt is totally different than human umwelt. Their bodies are completely flexible, and more to the point, their nervous systems are structured utterly differently than our own. They do have a central brain but each of their tentacles also has a complex nervous system with something like a brain. The octopus' central brain is capable of sometimes, but not always, controlling its tentacles. Can the octopus be said to know what it is doing? It's not clear what 'know' and 'doing' even mean for an octopus. Further, octopus suckers have nerve receptors for touch and taste. However, the nerves from them stimulate the same brain centers. So, octopuses are unable to differentiate between touch and taste. They don't have a sense of touch and a sense of taste like humans do. They have a sense of touch-taste. We can (and do) know that this fact is true. But, what does it mean in terms of octopus umwelt? It's simply impossible for us to know. Because we live in human bodies we can never even conceptualize what the sensation of touch-taste might be.
A couple years ago, a film called My Octopus Teacher came out. IMHO, it's quite a bad film but it was popular. It's also deceptive. An octopus can't exactly teach you anything. Watching an octopus or interacting with one may cause you to think human things. You might relate octopus behavior to reflect on human behavior and the nature of life. But, that's you projecting on to the octopus. That's you using the octopus for your own human purposes. No human can think octopus thoughts. It's totally human to try to imagine what an octopus might be thinking. It's good. It's fun. However, we can be pretty sure that whatever we think it's thinking, we're wrong. We don't know what thinking means to an octopus. We can't know what the octopus' experience is and the octopus cannot know ours. We live in fundamentally different umwelts and lack the physical body parts to enter into each other's experienced worlds. Of course we can't fully know the experiences of other human beings either. I can't be inside your head, but that's a whole different issue.