Monthly Archive for June, 2008

I’ve been read­ing a lit­tle about ani­mal cog­ni­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion (Shh­hhh, its research!). The mys­tery of “what goes on inside” an elephant’s head is not really what inter­ests me; it’s what ani­mals reveal about the rela­tion­ship of per­cep­tion, lan­guage and knowl­edge. If lan­guage is what we use to seg­ment and inform the con­tin­uum of our per­cep­tions, then lan­guage is knowl­edge (and knowl­edge is lan­guage) and the knowl­edge of ani­mals must be very, very for­eign. Learn­ing about non-human life forms con­tin­u­ally con­firms my sus­pi­cions: (1) We aren’t shaped by lan­guage, we are lan­guage (what­ever lan­guage that may be), and (2) Many of us have aliens liv­ing in our own homes.

Wittgen­stein gave us this famous ver­dict on ani­mal lan­guage and con­scious­ness: “If a lion could talk, we would not under­stand him.” Some peo­ple think he was say­ing that ani­mals can’t have lan­guage as advanced as our own. I think he was say­ing that lions have dif­fer­ent per­cep­tual appa­ra­tus, and a dif­fer­ent sym­bol­ogy, so even if a lion could com­mu­ni­cate in Eng­lish, or sign lan­guage, the words and metaphors it would draw upon would fol­low a com­pletely dif­fer­ent logic. This is exactly why I have always been freaked out by the idea of pets. We’re so casual about hav­ing ani­mals live with us, and strangely con­fi­dent that all our one-sided con­ver­sa­tions are pen­e­trat­ing them just as they would a baby, or a mute uncle. Yet ani­mals, so long as we don’t speak their lan­guage, should silence us like con­tem­pla­tion of the galaxies.

Think of all the pic­tures of cats on the web. No mat­ter how much we learn about their bod­ies and brains, no mat­ter how much we live and inter­act with them, they remain icons, or sym­bols, or some­thing. We gaze at them like stars and pred­i­cate their mean­ing and iden­tity with our own image.

The ques­tions that haunt us are: Do they under­stand me? Do they appre­ci­ate beauty? Do they have mem­o­ries? Do they make mean­ing? Do they have any­thing at all like story and nar­ra­tive? Do they dif­fer­en­ti­ate right and wrong? As this line of ques­tion­ing con­tin­ues, it becomes more and more obvi­ous that the answer is no. Well, at least not like that, right? The prob­lem is we have no idea how to phrase the ques­tions so they even make sense in the con­text of a dolphin’s expe­ri­ence (or an ant’s, or a rabbit’s, or a dinosaur’s, or a blue jay’s).

We know that ani­mals can see, hear, smell, taste, touch and feel; we imag­ine that they think, rea­son, and abstract from their own his­to­ries of sen­sory infor­ma­tion. We try and put our­selves inside a dog’s col­or­blind, scent-swamped, ear-pricked expe­ri­ence, mar­veling at how dif­fer­ently they see the world. But it’s not as though we could sim­ply heighten and dampen cer­tain senses and brain capac­i­ties and arrive at a dog’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the world. It’s not as if the world is a fixed text, or dataset, seen from var­i­ous angles, or inter­preted through dif­fer­ent lenses, which we can com­pare and con­trast. It is dynamic, exist­ing in rela­tion­ship and process.

Remem­ber tri­ads? All of our infor­ma­tion comes to us via “a coop­er­a­tion of three sub­jects”: sign, object, and inter­pre­tant. Accord­ing to Charles Pierce, as quoted in this essay, “this tri-relative influ­ence” is not “in any way resolv­able into actions between pairs.” It’s not just the world and it’s inter­preters, there are these lit­tle guys called signs–the words and sym­bols we use to com­mu­ni­cate our perceptions–aiding and inter­fer­ing. The “tri-relative world” exists in the inter­face. Ani­mal signs and sign-functions are not like our own. And with this bril­liant ker­nel of evi­dence *wink*, I sug­gest that ani­mals do not live on Earth, as we know it: they are aliens on plan­ets that may as well be light years away.

Thomas Sebeok, the semi­oti­cian who applied sign study to the study of evo­lu­tion of life sys­tems, and pop­u­lar­ized Biosemi­otics, believed that “semi­o­sis [or sign behav­ior] must be rec­og­nized as a per­va­sive fact of nature as well as of cul­ture.” “The sig­nif­i­cance cir­cuit,” as Sebeok calls it in his essay, “The Sign Sci­ence and The Life Sci­ence,” is “based on con­struc­tion by the observer-participancy of some carbon-based life.” Ani­mal, veg­etable, mineral–each the locus of its Umvelt. Not ves­sels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, trans­mit­ting infor­ma­tion and receiv­ing knowl­edge, but com­mu­ni­ca­tion itself, con­sti­tut­ing what is seen, known and understood.

Mostly, I just I love the way we talk about our fur­rier friends, attribut­ing cun­ning and emo­tion, and imag­in­ing inner mono­logues.