She likes to look me in the eye as she urinates. Her eyes and the fur on her face are both black so her expression when she does this is unreadable. When she’s almost finished she lowers her head and gives a couple of vigorous hip thrusts then strides on, head high.
She’s a small dog: a maltese shih tzu cross about as big as a large cat, although she carries herself with the self-confidence of a large wolf. I walk her at least once a day. If the weather is bad, we loop around the park near our house, but on sunny days we continue on up the trails above it. We live in a commuter suburb in a valley high in the hills, surrounded by even higher hills. It can feel claustrophobic, but when you reach the hilltops and walk along the ridgelines you get expansive views of the world beyond the suburb: empty farmland giving on to steep, unfarmable crags with the sea beyond them, and beyond that, the indigo and white peaks of the Southern Alps.
My favourite trail takes us through pine trees and regenerating natives and, for a section of it, the noise of the traffic and lawnmowers dies away. You can hear only the wind and the waves from Cook Strait converging into a white noise that feels like total silence. If we time the walk for when the sun is low and directly ahead of us, it beams horizontally through the trees; the world falls away and we’re like underwater swimmers drifting through silence and light.
But for my dog these walks are mostly an opportunity to urinate and to smell the urine of other dogs. I try to indulge this – it obviously means a lot to her – but we have only a narrow window of time to get to my trail when the sun is in the right position, and after that we need to get down off the hill before it fully sets and it becomes too dark to navigate.
So I’m always dragging her away from patches of discoloured grass where she’s buried her snout. Sometimes, she’ll tug me backwards or snatch the leash from my hand – even though she’s about 1/20th my size – and dash back for a final deep sniff of a cluster of weeds at the base of a tree.
She has a sensory faculty that I do not. Her vomeronasal organ – abbreviated in zoology literature as the VNO – is located between her nose and mouth. Dogs have a more acute sense of smell than humans, of course, but it’s the same sense as ours, just stronger. The VNO is a completely different way of interacting with the world. It detects pheromones: signalling molecules that seem to function as a proto-language for many nonhuman species. Humans start to develop VNOs in utero but the organ regresses when we’re born. Sometime in our evolutionary history, we lost access to this way of engaging with the world.
What is my dog thinking when she smells the signalling molecules of other dogs? What does she think she’s saying when she squats down to reply to them? My daughter refers to this as pee-mail, and she has a comic routine about the messages our dog sends. “Greetings, subjects. It is I, your alpha master and pack leader, owner of these hunting grounds on which I allow you to roam. I have graciously decided not to kill you all, even though you have again disobeyed my previous commands …” and so on, and all the other dogs are saying the same thing.
I feel like the VNO’s input must be something like taste but also similar to reading: decoding long strings of content-rich sequential information, and also something like hearing gossiPp about all the other dogs. After she’s deciphered all messages, she adds to them with urine mixed with pheromone-rich fluid from her anal glands. She also has a separate array of sweat glands in her paws, and sometimes when she’s finished peeing, she’ll make some emphatic dog point by scuffing up the ground, spreading the paw pheromones everywhere. This is quite a performance: grass and dirt fly out in a wide circle. She looks pleased with herself when she’s done.
Bat crazy
There’s a famous essay in philosophy of mind: Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to be a bat? It argues that it must be like something to be an animal that sleeps upside down and navigates via echolocation, just as it is like something to be a human in pain (or a dog deciphering pheromones). But we have no access to this form of experience: we can’t imagine what it’s like to experience the world via a sensory system we don’t possess. It is a form of knowledge about the universe that is simply unavailable to us.
What is it like to be my dog? Sometimes I think I know. The bedrooms in our house are at the end of a long hall and this is divided by a baby gate so that our cat has a sanctuary away from the dog. The cat’s water bowl is at the end of this hall, and every now and then someone leaves the gate open for a few seconds. The dog seizes her chance, races down the hall ignoring any commands for her to stop. She runs to the cat’s water bowl and greedily slurps from it, her eyes rolling and wild with ecstasy at the taste of the special forbidden end-of-hall cat water, until she’s seized and carried, panting and compliant, back to her side of the house, which contains her own untouched water bowl filled from the same tap as the cat’s.
The dog seems to have a taste for forbidden pleasure, which seems like a sophisticated, decadent human sensation, but perhaps it’s common to many species? It’s also possible she’s feeling something profoundly unlike pleasure or any human emotion, and that her different senses and neural architecture give her access to some completely alien emotional state. Like many dogs, she twitches and grunts in her sleep. We assume she’s dreaming and that her dreams are like human dreams – “Maybe she dreams she’s chasing rabbits!” – but I wonder if she dreams about terrifying sequences of pheromones.
Nagel’s essay isn’t really about bats. It’s about the limits of knowledge. We have direct access to our own subjective experiences and we use speech and art to communicate the nature of those experiences to other members of our species.
But our civilisation primarily understands the world via the philosophical framework Nagel refers to as scientific materialism. This assumes that reality is purely physical – it’s made of stuff (our brains, for example, are organs, cells, proteins, molecules, atoms, electrons, protons composed of quarks) – and that we can acquire true knowledge about the nature of this objective world. Some phenomena might seem complex – brains, dogs – but everything can be understood by reducing it down to the observable interactions of particles and forces. All of biology is explained by chemistry, which is explained by physics, modelled by mathematics.
The problem, Nagel points out, is that scientific materialism cannot access subjective experience, nor can it account for its existence. It cannot explain how quarks, electrons, proteins, cells, etc, generate and moderate consciousness. We can know everything about a bat’s brain but it can’t tell us what the bat experiences, or even – at present – how its brain creates those experiences. (Physicists can land spacecraft on other planets, the neuroscientist Patrick House complains, but biologists do not know what sadness is). For Nagel this is the “explanatory gap” between the objective and subjective worlds, and the gap’s existence tells us that we’ve failed to understand something profound about the nature of reality.
Bags of bother
Some people let their dogs shit on the side of the ridge trails and then leave it there. I disapprove of this but I understand: it’s a long way to carry a bag full of dog shit back to the bins in the park. But some people carefully collect the shit in a plastic bag and then leave the bag by the side of the trail. What are they thinking? Instead of breaking down in the sun and rain, it just sits there inside the plastic.
A few weeks ago, my dog found one of these bags. We were almost back at the park so she seized it and dashed away from me, ignoring my yells, racing down the trail to the sunny expanse of the lawn where she tore the bag open and proceeded to eat and roll around in the liquidised contents, picking the bag up again and running away whenever I came too close. I always carry treats with me when we walk, for situations exactly such as these, which arise distressingly often. But whenever I held them out she met my gaze with a bold stare, unblinking. “There’s nothing – NOTHING – you could offer me”, it seemed to say, “that’s better than eating this bag full of another dog’s shit.”
In the end, I had to chase her. Just as a Maasai warrior of the Great Rift Valley can outrun a cheetah over long distances, I can eventually outrun my tiny, shit-covered dog as she flees across a suburban park while children and other dog-owners laugh at me. When she tired and slowed, I tripped her hind legs and she rolled, sending the bag flying, spraying its remaining contents in wide looping arcs as it tumbled through the sunlit air. I clipped the lead on her, trying to get as little filth on my hands as possible, then dragged her home to the bath.
Dogs do not seem to experience disgust. The sensation is believed to be an evolutionary strategy for disease avoidance, especially acute in humans because we’re so social, and this hypersociality creates a large population pool for pathogens to circulate in. If humans even breathe in proximity to one another we can transfer disease, whereas my dog can eat another dog’s excrement with little chance of infection. Apparently, their digestive systems are inefficient so there are often nutrients to be found in the shit. And pheromones, of course. No one knows for sure why they roll in it but the theory is that they’re masking their own scent, an ancient hunting instinct.
Evolution reversal
Four decades after What is it like to be a bat? Nagel published Mind and Cosmos, a book asserting that the theory of evolution via natural selection was wrong, or at best woefully incomplete. This was not well received (“the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker” – Steven Pinker; “the most despised science book of 2012″ – the Guardian). Evolution is a very successful theory – possibly the most persuasive theory science has ever produced. It explains many things about the natural world that are otherwise inexplicable. How could it be “wrong”?
Nagel’s argument goes like this: If humans experience disgust and other species do not, then for evolution to be true, the difference must be attributable to genetic difference. But – as per his bat essay – no one has the slightest idea how the entities described by scientific materialism – genes, proteins, neurons, etc – generate subjective experiences. What is disgust? Or sadness? Why are these states available to the nervous systems of complex organisms? How do our brains generate or interact with them?
For Nagel, it’s no good replying that mammalian brains are complicated, that we may not understand subjective experience now but science marches on: neuroscientists are doing very impressive work on the neural correlates of consciousness; it will all make sense one day. But, he would reply, just as our eyes and nerves evolved from simpler precursors, there must have been a moment when some aggregation of organic molecules first flickered into awareness.
Perhaps some creature in the warm seas of the Cambrian era felt something like pain or fear or pleasure or saw something in its mind’s eye: a shadow, a flash of light. This process must have been simple enough to emerge from random mutations in gene sequences resulting in physical changes to the molecules they code for – but no current theory of biology, chemistry or physics can even theorise how that came about. Consciousness is, ultimately, the only thing we know about the world and our inability to explain how it emerged is a deep problem for a theory that’s presented to us as comprehensive.
In a tangle
I lost my temper with the dog a few weeks ago. It was at the end of a long day, and it was cold and raining. I put the lead on her then put my shoes on, and by the time I’d done this she’d tangled her leash up in the wooden legs of our dining room table and chairs. So I got down on my knees underneath the table and untangled her but in the brief time it took to stand up and pick up my phone and keys she’d tied herself up again.
I yanked on the leash and she yelped in fear and pain. As I untangled her she cringed as far from me as she could, and she did this for the rest of the walk: a muddy, wretched march around the empty park in the failing light. When I tried to walk her the next day she hid behind an armchair and trembled with fear. I told her I was sorry – whispering so that no one else in the house would hear me apologising to a dog – and when this failed I ordered her out in my voice of stern command. This never works. Eventually, I bribed her out with food.
The dog does not understand the leash and she doesn’t understand that she doesn’t understand it. If we’re walking down the street and I’m distracted for a second, the dog will instantly wrap herself around a bin, or a streetlight or a tree, and then choke herself as she repeatedly lunges forwards to escape.
There’s this debate in philosophy of mind about whether humans have the same limited understanding of the world as other animals. It’s a question that dates back to Darwin, who worried about the implications of natural selection: “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Do humans have the ability to accurately perceive reality, either because we have access to capacities like science or reason (whatever they are) or because we possess some mystical connection to the true world, like a soul (whatever that is). Darwin worried that we didn’t: that we’re just a smarter version of monkeys and dogs: we might see more than them but we’re still bound by our cognitive limitations. If his horrid doubt is correct then our experience of reality is just an interface optimised for survival and reproduction rather than comprehension. The world we see is like the desktop display in a computer: simple icons and symbols representing a complex and unfathomable reality. When I’m reading on the couch and the dog jumps onto my lap and starts growling because she wants me to play with her, I can never see or hear or feel the real dog, only the icon of a dog generated by my nervous system. And that would explain our inability to understand subjective experience. It’s an aspect of reality beyond the interface; something we have no access to. As with my dog and the leash, we know that there’s something we can’t see, can’t understand – but all we can do is strain against it, uncomprehending.
Playing chase
Owning a dog can be pleasantly social. We often run into her friends at the park, and over time the owners of these dogs have become my friends, although conversation tends to revolve around dog grooming, vet bills and lists of expensive items the animals have destroyed since we last talked. Sometimes we take the dogs up the hill but in winter it’s too muddy and dark.
If it’s late and the park is otherwise deserted, we let them off the lead and stand in a cone of lamplight by the club rooms while they chase each other around, running between our feet and then out into the twilight in wide, looping arcs. Eventually, they come and sit in the middle of the group, panting and looking from face to face.
Then the dog and I walk home, usually taking an unlit path beside a stream. My phone has a torch but she can see at night so I let her tug me through the gloom. The section beneath the trees is black and before we enter it she pauses and looks back at me and the crystalline cells behind her retina catch and reflect the light from the park so that her black eyes seem to glow.
What does she see when she sees me? Is it similar to what I see in the mirror? Or am I some incomprehensible dog perception, shaped by smell and pheromones and other nonhuman thoughts? I like to think it’s the latter, because I also like to think that even though her brain is small she somehow perceives something I can’t: something that explains Nagel’s explanatory gap. It would be a human equivalent of the leash; some simple but unseeable thing tethering me to the physical world, which I could never understand, but which deciphers everything. It’s comforting to pretend that at least one of us sees what we are and where we’re going, as she leads me away from the light of the path and the static noise of the stream and into the silence and darkness, stopping to pee on the way.