Today Hili is in her role as editor in chief, or perhaps she is falling into apotheosis. Either way, any Sunday that includes a four-footed friend to cuddle is a good Sunday.
A: Do you think you are making my work any easier?
Hili: Yes, in a sense, I make it possible for you to ponder things.
In Polish:
Ja: Czy ty sądzisz, że mi ułatwiasz pracę?
Hili: W pewnym sensie tak, pozwalam ci na spokojne zastanowienie się.
Awwww, look at that lovely face! She is such a pretty girl.
She does make the pondering more pleasant I would think.
Whenever I need to think something through, my first instinct is always to find a cat to help me. Pretty much always works.
b&
Awww so snuggly!
meow
Cats, like owls, have facial and behavioral traits which make them look to us like they are thinking very deeply and calmly about serious matters. That’s one reason we like them, I think. We tend to subconsciously or consciously mimic our companions and become more relaxed or contemplative. I know I do.
Being a rational skeptic, however, I try to remind myself that that cat thoughts would probably best translate into something like “hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.”
I dunno…seems to me that human exceptionalism likely isn’t the wisest default position, especially considering how closely related we are to all the other mammals.
Not that I expect Baihu to be the one to unify Quantum and Relativistic Mechanics…but there’s certainly a lot more going on in his brain than just “hummmmm.”
b&
I often wonder what animals are thinking when they look off to the distance. I also wonder what it’s like to think without language.
It’s that “thinking without language” that I don’t think I’ll ever manage. It’s just such an alien concept to me that I’ve no clue what it could possibly be like.
Yet, clearly, at least some type of thought is possible without language. And pretty sophisticated, too…see the gorillas taught sign language as adults who recount traumatic experiences from their childhoods.
b&
I wonder how the so-called “feral-children” recall their early lives. By most accounts they will have grown up with very little if any language.
And sadly they never develop language to tell us. Our brains need certain inputs, it appears, to develop language and if we miss the opportunity, it is forever lost.
I remember a professor trying to tell us we couldn’t think without language. I wanted to call bullshit but didn’t feel like getting in a fight in class. Thankfully, it was a language professor and not a linguist or science prof!
Yes, fascinating but immensely sad.
Seems to me that a lot of my dreams are non-verbal, yet I still have a “vision” of a narrative…
I sometimes find myself doing something without having made a conscious decision to do it, and I suspect that’s what living without language is like. You’d do things without thinking at length about whether you should, or how you should do them. I think living without language would be a rather vague, floaty sort of way to live. That’s my guess anyway.
I think you probably think in pictures. Most of my childhood memories are visual from before 5.
When you do something unconsciously, that’s just your brain not sharing.It does this with most thing even filtering information out before it hits the optical nerve. Sneaky.
There’s certainly more going on when catching mice or chasing a laser, granted. And I suspect there’s a mental cat analog for the concept “hungryhungryhungryhungry.”
But my guess is the phrase “sometimes I sits and thinks … and sometimes I just sits” probably applies to cats more often than not, with an emphasis on that last one.
They’re not just sitting…they’re meditating!
b&