Animals' knowledge of their bodies

HowToBe

The Living Force
It is perhaps quite minor, but I would like contest a statement by Ouspensky I just read in the excerpt from Tertium Organum at the beginning of chapter 6 of The Wave.

P. D. Ouspensky said:
Among the animals known to us, even among domestic animals, psychological differences are so great as to put them on totally different levels. We do not notice this and put them all under one head — ‘animals’.

A goose has put its foot on a piece of watermelon rind, pulls at it with its beak but cannot pull it out, and it never occurs to it to lift its foot off the rind. This means that its mental processes are so vague that it has a very imperfect knowledge of its own body and does not properly distinguish it from other objects. This could not happen either with a dog or a cat. They know their bodies perfectly well. But in their relations to outside objects a dog and a cat are very different.

I'm not confident that this statement is necessarily true. My evidence is the way dogs and cats tend to act towards their tails. I have more personal experience with cats, and they seem to me to regard their tails as an external object. If they see it flicking back and forth in the corner of their vision, some will try to catch it just as they would a string. Also, if you touch their tail, their tail might flick, but they don't appear to realize they are being touched; they tend to react directly if you touch their body, legs, or face, though. They can obviously feel pain from their tails, but otherwise for the most part they seem to ignore them, unless they are chasing them. How many have played the game where you wave the cat's tail in front of its face? :)

For what it's worth.
 
Well, modal logics is a class of cognitive functions that Ouspensky might have been trying to use at a time when he didn't have the faculty for understanding them (in systems terms). After all, G did tell O that if O had understood what he wrote in his own book, then G, himself, would have come to O and asked to be O's student.

The part in ISOTM where O reports this is quite funny to me - especially the line where O says "...he made something altogether unintelligible out of the words Tertium Organum."


HowToBe said:
I'm not confident that this statement is necessarily true.

Well, the flip side to what you're saying is that you're not confident in the idea that it is not possible for the statement not to be true, and to that, I agree.

However, I think we are also assuming we know perfectly well what he is really trying to say, but I see enough maneuvering room in that last paragraph that I'm not entirely in agreement or disagreement myself. Need more input. :D
 
HowToBe said:
It is perhaps quite minor, but I would like contest a statement by Ouspensky I just read in the excerpt from Tertium Organum at the beginning of chapter 6 of The Wave.

P. D. Ouspensky said:
Among the animals known to us, even among domestic animals, psychological differences are so great as to put them on totally different levels. We do not notice this and put them all under one head — ‘animals’.

For me, the above statement from Ouspensky is important. The example he sites may not have been correct (or not - I do not know enough to comment).
Different species of animals do appear to be vastly different in terms of their habits and behavior - take birds and reptiles for example. Thinking about this had helped me understand polarities as they exist in nature (2D), then find analogies in the world of humans (3D) and then extrapolate into and higher realities (4D) when reading the Wave.

This is somewhat off-topic given that you wanted to discuss how animals understand their bodies - so please excuse the digression.
 
As far as I know cats are playing with their tails for a training them selfs.
Other thing is Cats are seeing things in black and white and if something
interesting happens or passing on the front of then than they are seeing in
color and more sharp than human Eye.
Cats and dogs do not have strong vision. They rely on scent and sound primarily as their sensory detection. Cats in particular have weak vision. They are color blind, and cats more so than dogs. Dogs can sometimes tell the difference between yellow and blue, for example. Most cats can only detect a little color, and are best at focusing on one object narrowly (for hunting). But they do have better night vision than humans. Both dogs and cats have better perspective and depth perception, due to the placement of their eyes, than human beings do.
from http://webecoist.com/2009/01/14/animal-vision-color-detection-and-color-blindness/
 
I'm not confident that this statement is necessarily true. My evidence is the way dogs and cats tend to act towards their tails. I have more personal experience with cats, and they seem to me to regard their tails as an external object. If they see it flicking back and forth in the corner of their vision, some will try to catch it just as they would a string.

tails are the one part of its body cats and dogs have no control over TAILS DON'T LIE that is what started the cruel mutilation of ''cropping'' say dobermans tails and ears so you cant tell if the dog is happy to see you or scared of you
and the tail chase game is just that a game they know its their own tail they pretend ''to be a goose'' so to speak
my cat stopped playing the tail game when we got a kitten...he now behaves like an distinguished elderly gentleman above childish games like that but he brings home small still alive " training rats" for kitty
 
tonosama said:
As far as I know cats are playing with their tails for a training them selfs.
Other thing is Cats are seeing things in black and white and if something
interesting happens or passing on the front of then than they are [not] seeing in
color [but are seeing] more sharp than human Eye.
Is this what you meant to say? Yes, I understand that it is training for them, but that doesn't tell us whether they see their tail as a part of them or not. It is an instinct, and thus requires no rational understanding to perform.


rrraven said:
tails are the one part of its body cats and dogs have no control over TAILS DON'T LIE
Actually, this is part of why I think they consider their tails more-or-less an external object. Because they cannot control it, I think it appears to them like an external object that follows them around, or an external object that is attached to them which does it's own thing as if alive. I read further and Ouspenski say something that supports this idea:

Ouspenski said:
But, distinguishing between two kinds of phenomena — two kinds of motion — an animal is bound to explain one of them by some inner inexplicable property of objects, i.e. it will probably regard that kind of motion as the result of the animation of objects, and will regard moving objects as alive.

A kitten plays with a ball or with its own tail because the ball or the tail runs away from it.

Also, this:
Ouspenski said:
An animal may remember all the ‘phenomena’ it has observed, i.e. all the properties of three-dimensional bodies it has come into contact with, but it cannot know that that which for it is a recurring phenomenon is in reality a permanent property of a three-dimensional body — an angle, or curvature, or convexity.

This is the psychology of the perception of the world by a two-dimensional being.

For it a new sun will rise every day. Yesterday’s sun has gone and will never recur again. Tomorrow’s sun does not yet exist.

The cat or dog does not see their tail at all times, nor do they appear to have complete sensation in them - I've seen a cat knock it's tail against the edge of a desk (while jumping off my lap) hard enough that it made a *knock* noise which sounded painful, but the cat did not seem to be affected. In my observation, such a knock to any other part of the body would prompt the cat to immediately start licking that spot to relieve the pain. So, if this is true, lacking constant feedback about their tail, it may seem to them as if "a new tail appears every day. The old tail is gone and will never appear again. Tomorrow's tail does not yet exist."

rrraven said:
and the tail chase game is just that a game they know its their own tail they pretend ''to be a goose'' so to speak
Pretending requires concepts, which according to Ouspensky animals lack. To "pretend" that their tail is not their tail requires that they have a concept of "my tail" in the first place. In addition, they must have the ability to imagine their tail not being what it is; they must be able to think for a moment "A is not A". But, if animals could really create and comprehend concepts such as these, then it seems we should be able to establish a language with them that would allow them to communicate this to us. If language and concepts go hand in hand as Ouspenski says (a concept is a word, at least in our minds), and animals lack language, then they must lack concepts, generally speaking. Here are the relevant quotes:

Ouspenski said:
Thus, all the actions of animals, at times very complex, expedient and seemingly rational, can be explained without assuming the existence in them of concepts, reasoning and mental conclusions.

On the contrary, we must admit that animals have no concepts. The proof of this is that they have no speech. If we take two men of different nationalities, different races, each ignorant of the language of the other, and settle them to live together, they will immediately find means of communicating with each other. One would draw with his finger a circle; the other would draw another circle alongside the first. This is enough to establish that they can understand one another. If a thick stone wall were to separate people, again it would not deter them. One would knock three times; the other would also knock three times in reply — communication is established. The idea of communication with the inhabitants of another planet is based precisely on the system of light signals. On the earth it is proposed to make an enormous luminous circle or square. It should be noticed on Mars or somewhere over there and should be answered by a similar signal.

With animals we live side by side, yet we are unable to establish such communication with them. Evidently, the distance between us is greater, the difference deeper than between people separated by ignorance of language, stone walls and enormous distances.

Ouspenski said:
Thus, out of the various sensations experienced at different times (in groups), there arises in a child the representation of a tree (this tree), and later, out of the images of representations of different trees is formed the concept of a tree, i.e. not of this particular tree but of a tree in general. The formation of concepts leads to the formation of words and the appearance of speech.

Speech consists of words; every word expresses a concept. A concept and a word are really the same thing, only the one (the concept) stands, as it were, for the inner aspect, while the other (the word) stands for the outer aspect. The word is the algebraic sign of a thing.

So, the cat looks one moment, and sees "this tail", and when she looks again she sees "that tail", but because her sensation of the tail is not constant or complete, she cannot imagine it as "her tail". Remember, we are using words to describe this, but words are concepts, so while I say "this tail", the cat does not see it and think "tail"; probably the cat simply sees its shape and to it the grouping of sensations are simply "this", and when she sees the tail again later, to her it is simply "that", a different representation. The cat cannot have a real concept of "myself" or "tail", so she cannot think of "my tail". To her, "I see it therefore it is."

Having read a little further, I found a quote that seems to support my assessment:
Ouspenski said:
But, distinguishing between two kinds of phenomena — two kinds of motion — an animal is bound to explain one of them by some inner inexplicable property of objects, i.e. it will probably regard that kind of motion as the result of the animation of objects, and will regard moving objects as alive.

A kitten plays with a ball or with its own tail because the ball or the tail runs away from it.
A key thing to note is that it is the sensation created by the movement of the tail or ball that triggers the cat's instinct; this requires no concepts or reasoning. We must avoid projecting the image our own nature onto animals if we are to really understand what the world is like for them with some degree of accuracy, and thus understand their behavior, just as we must do the same if we are to understand organic portals and psychopaths.

Or so I conceptualize... :)

Does this make sense?

[EDIT: adding a quote I forgot to include and making spelling corrections]
 
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