Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [98]
More than once Pumpernickel got herself in dire straits (once, trapped on a catwalk heading off a building edge; another time, her leash stuck in the elevator doors as the car began to move). I was amazed at how unfazed she appeared—especially as contrasted with my own alarm. It was never she who got herself out of the fix. I believe that I was more worried about her well-being than she was about mine. Still, much of my well-being hinged on her—not on her knowing how to fix dilemmas, great or small, in my life, but rather on her unremitting cheer and constant companionship.
II
WHAT IT IS LIKE
In our attempt to get inside of a dog, we gather small facts about their sensory capacities and build large inferences upon them. One inference is to the experience of the dog: what it actually feels like to be a dog; what his experience of the world is. This assumes, of course, that the world is like anything to a dog. Perhaps surprisingly, in philosophical and scientific circles there is a bit of debate about this.
Thirty-five years ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel began a long-running conversation in science and philosophy about the subjective experience of animals when he asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" He chose for his thought experiment an animal whose almost unimaginable way of seeing had only recently been discovered: echolocation, the process of emitting high-frequency shouts and then listening for the sound being reflected back. How long the sound takes to bounce back, and how it is changed, gives the bat a map of where all the objects are in the local environment. To get a rough sense of what this might be like, imagine lying in a dark room at night and wondering if someone is standing at your doorway. Sure, you could resolve the question by turning on the light. Or, bat-like, you could hurdle a tennis ball at the doorway and see if (a) the ball comes back toward you or flies out of the room, and (b) if a grunt is heard at about the time the ball arrives at the threshold. If you're very good, you might also use (c) how far the ball bounces back, to determine if the person is very tubby (in which case the ball loses most of its speed in his belly) or has washboard abs (which will reflect the ball nicely). Bats use (a) and (c), and in lieu of tennis balls they use sound. And they do it constantly and rapidly, as quickly as we open our eyes and take in the visual scene in front of us.
This, appropriately, boggled Nagel's mind. He thought that the bat's vision, and thus the bat's life, are so wildly odd, so imponderable, that it is impossible to know what it is like to be that bat. He assumed that the bat experiences the world, but he believed that that experience is fundamentally subjective: whatever "it is like," it is that way only to that bat.
The trouble with his conclusion has to do with the imaginative leap that we do make every day. Nagel treated an interspecies difference as something wholly unlike an intra species difference. But we are perfectly happy to talk about "what it is like" to be another human being. I do not know the particulars of another person's experience, but I know enough about the feeling of being human myself that I can draw an analogy from my own experience to someone else's. I can imagine what the world is like to him by extrapolating from my own perception and transplanting it with him at its center. The more information I have about that person—physically, his life history, his behavior—the better my drawn analogy will be.
So can we do this with dogs. The more information we have, the better the drawing will be. To this point, we have physical information (about their nervous systems, their sensory systems), historical knowledge (their evolutionary heritage, their developmental path from birth to adults), and a growing corpus of work about their behavior. In sum, we have a sketch of the dog umwelt. The parcel of scientific facts we have collected allows