The Inside World of Cats
Seeking connections with alien minds across vast oceans of understanding
I think a fair bit about the inside lives of my cats.
The two girls, Andromeda and Athena, are twins, though not identical. They were in the beginning indistinguishable but for the colour of their eyes, but over time Athena got a lot fluffier. They were raised by us, together, from when they were tiny kittens. Indoor cats, for their safety and that of the local wildlife, they’ve never been outside except to go to the vet. There has been no difference between them whatsoever in their upbringing.
Yet they have very different personalities. So much so that it would be immediately noticeable and concerning if they switched behaviour. Andromeda never really grew out of being a kitten. She’s loud, insistent, and adventurous. She tears around the house in frequent bouts of “zoomies” and will absolutely not permit any closed doors—she’ll complain about being on either side of it until you grant her freedom of movement, which she will immediately lose interest in. Andromeda doesn’t like being picked up but she loves to cuddle, and if I lie down she’ll try to crawl into my armpit. She’s terrified of thunder and even uneasy about just a little rain.
Athena is much more mature but I dare say a little less intelligent. She’s much quieter, more placid, more laid back, but also has a hot temper. While Andromeda is more adventurous, Athena is braver. She stands guard, watching from the window or the door for signs of possums, bats, or worst of all the neighbourhood interloper we call Enemy Cat. Athena is fine with being picked up and held. She prefers to be up, anyway.
Of the two of us, Athena seems to prefer me, while Andromeda prefers my wife. Again, neither of us treat either of them particularly differently, they just chose this on their own.
What’s curious to me is that they both also exhibit all of the cat behaviours. You know, they lick themselves a lot, claw at anything with a clawable texture, go into stalking mode when there’s a bug. They do that butt wiggle thing when they’re getting ready to pounce. They bunt and rub their faces on everything. All things it would be weird if they didn’t do.
So it seems there are two classes of behaviour parallel to each other. I’m sure that the people who study this notice it and have some terms for it. There’s one set of traits that are common to all cats, and then there’s a distinct and unique personality that sits atop of it—a driver in the machine. If they make decisions and indicate preferences, then they have an inside world.
Most pet owners would think it’s absurd to question this. But the debate about whether animals have individual lives goes back all the way back. Descartes in the 17th century tried to reconcile the mind-body duality of animals and humans by figuring that animals were essentially just automatons. Robots made of flesh and blood.
Descartes wasn’t a cat person. There is an anecdote, probably apocryphal, that he threw a cat out of a window as an experiment to show that its reactions were purely automatic. If he was a fur parent he would have understood.
But I do find myself fairly often, when I’m interacting with the cats, trying to imagine what they think. How they think. How they see us. Do they have any concept that my wife and I are something different to what they are? Does Athena have some understanding that Andromeda is a thing like her, in a way that I am fundamentally not? What about Enemy Cat, skulking about outside? Or do they think that we’re just a couple of really big, weird looking cats?
Our inside world is what philosophers call qualia, and you will only ever know your own. Nobody will ever know yours. It is the most personal thing you have, more you than even the parts of your body. You can write your soul out word for word, but nobody will ever sit behind your eyes. It is the ghost in the machine, your pilot, the very precise thing you mean when you say “me” or “I.”
You can think of yourself as kind of a yacht on a vast ocean. The yacht is only big enough for you. It has windows that you can see out of but nobody can see in from the outside. There are other yachts that you can see, you can talk over the radio, you can cruise together, but nobody will ever actually be on that yacht with you.
You will never know what someone else’s yacht looks like on the inside. The best you can do is describe it to each other. Some people are better at describing it than others. A poet would do a better job. There’s a cliché that psychologists spend their entire career trying to describe your own yacht to you in order to figure out why their own looks the way it does.
And philosophy has always made a big deal of the fact that you can never really know for sure if there’s anyone else on those little boats. We take it for granted that they’re not just empty vessels floating on the tide, playing some pre-recorded voice or procedurally generated mimicry like a cruel ChatGPT.
I choose to believe that other people exist, of course, that those yachts are occupied also and that the inside of them looks quite a bit like mine. It might be messier in there than it is in mine, or more ordered, or it might have a brighter décor, but I can be fairly confident that all the furniture is in sort of the same place, roughly.
But then another type of watercraft appears. It’s not a yacht. Let’s say it’s a dinghy. Or a pontoon. You really have no idea what it looks like on board that thing. It seems to move of its own accord on the waves, so you suspect it’s inhabited, but it doesn’t have a radio. It does have a whistle that it blows on occasion—enough that you can tell it wants your attention, but it only has like three unique sounds and you can’t figure out what they mean or if indeed they mean anything. Maybe it’s just tooting.
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that if a lion was able to speak our language then we still wouldn’t understand it. He was making a point about how language is intertwined with our mental world and the context of our lived experience. Imagine sitting among a group of people at a party who are all experts in a highly technical field that is completely outside of your knowledge set. How much of their conversation are you going to understand even though they’re speaking the same language as you?
Their inside worlds, the furnishings in their yachts, are still going to resemble yours much more closely than anything a cat experiences. At least, that’s what we assume, even though their emotions and their personality traits can often seem very human. For instance, I would often swear that Athena is expressing pride, that she knows how beautiful she is with her long, well preened and healthy fur. She’ll walk back and forth and pivot like a runway model.
But that’s my projection of my own mind onto hers in an effort to connect and interface with her like two alien computers. She has no way of knowing what a runway model is. Whatever she’s actually trying to do is known only to her. Can only be known to her.
I’ve always been fascinated by the way a cat will often be in the middle of doing some cattish thing, walking from one side of the room or stalking a foam ball, but then suddenly and urgently drop down and lick her hind leg, tail, butt, or somewhat awkwardly, her own neck. What kind of sensation is she feeling in that moment that she needs to lick? That she spontaneously knows exactly what, and where, needs such attention? Is it anything like when I feel a sudden powerful itch, or a cramp, or is it not even close to either of these sensations, is it something utterly alien to the human experience, that only a cat’s brain is wired to know?
Some behaviours are definitely shared between us. The cats will yawn and stretch when they wake up after a long and satisfying nap. Others, much less familiar. They will feel compelled to scratch, and thankfully they seem to be more inclined to do this on the cardboard tubes we bought for this purpose rather than the furniture. Most of the time. I can tell this feels very good to them. If I scratch my own nails on the same objects I feel no sensation besides mild discomfort.
What feels very satisfying in my exploration of all this is my near certainty that these creatures experience a form of love, or something very like it. To be sure, when Andromeda starts walking over the top of us at four in the morning or headbutting me in the leg at four in the afternoon, both of them daily rituals at breakfast and dinner respectively, it’s easy enough to write off her actions as the simplest of cause and effect machine learning. Her tummy tells her what she needs and the walnut sized computer in her head tells her how, according to experience, to get it.
But when I catch them at a time of no pressing urgency, when they express affection even when their little Maslow pyramid is satisfied, that’s the closest I feel that we get to stretching our alien consciousnesses across the chasm, touching one another, and finding something in common. When I turn my chair and I see Athena just staring intently at me from the other side of the room, almost as though she’s just as curious about my inside world as I am about hers.
Sometimes I think humanity feels desperately alone on this rock as we scan the vast, vast ocean of universe for signs of life and meet nothing but silence. But then I wonder why we’re searching so far abroad when there are so many affectionate and delightfully incomprehensible aliens afloat right here beside us, sharing our journey.
Cats are a pure good.
I read that as Meowslow's Pyramid 😹 The end brought a tear to my eye - little aliens are here with us now ❤️