Do animals share our sense of beauty? What about causality?
There is a book making the rounds, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. But what if the opposite of the subtitle is true and animals share the same world as us? If we could talk to animals, would we find out that they also like lounging by the pool, listening to music, and drinking beer? From my notebook:
Animals likely share our perception of physics. They must see the Earth as “ground” that exists below their bodies. When they plant their paws down, they must feel solid and sturdy.
Time must flow the same for them. When they are comfortably chewing grass in an open field, the seconds must fly the same as they would for us on a leisurely stroll. Likewise, when that calm is interrupted by an opportunity for sex or the threat of a predator, minutes should become milliseconds, whipping them into a frenzy, with their breaths shortening and their pulses quickening, just as it is for us.
Animals probably share our sense of cause and effect. When a branch snaps, animals stop and inspect, thinking in animals thoughts, “What was that? Oh, just a squirrel?” After which, they put their heads back down and return to grazing.
The closer an animal is to us in the evolutionary tree, the more likely they share our mapping of colors to second-order sensations. Large swaths of blue should be soothing, just as punctuations of red are arousing. They should feel the brush of wind, and they should hear birds sing. They might even know that those songs are coming from birds, and because songbirds are not harmful, the sound is somewhere between non-threatening and beautiful.
