The Cat as Master Statistician

A theory on how cats thrive on uncertainty.

I feel I must start with a quick disclaimer: I am not in any way a cat psychologist or behaviorist. I am just a guy who loves philosophy and loves to observe my cat. Over my many years of cat-watching, I have noticed certain things. But like I said, none of this is actual scientific work on animal intelligence or behavior. These are just theories that I have come up with to try to explain the behavior of my cat, from my basic observations.

What I want to talk about in this piece is true of other species, or at least I believe it to be true. Let me explain through simple examples of my cat’s behavior.

I. Uncertainty for Intelligent Animals: Good or Bad?

The first thing my cat did when we moved recently was a well-known and well-documented cat behavior: He “surveyed” or inspected, investigated every corner of the new place, sniffing everything, eventually rubbing himself a little here and there, etc. He explored the space.

Here’s what I noticed, though, over time. I say that the cat is a master statistician, a veritable statistical machine. I believe that he is constantly “computing” all of the statistical patterns in his environment, watching out for objects or features “of interest”.

Cats are pretty intelligent. The fact that they can get bored easily is proof, I think. I often say that my cat knows me better than I do, because he knows all my “patterns of life”. He knows when I wake up in the morning, what I do after I wake up. He has done a complete statistical analysis. If anything changes, he notices right away, and he doesn’t like change.

But there’s another thing. He himself is constantly changing his behaviors. Other than the fact that my cat certainly does certain categories of things, like sleep and eat and so forth, there is absolutely no regular pattern to his behavior (not that I could find). My theory is that cats do this on purpose, by instinct. I think that being “unpredictable” is a very effective way for certain animals to resist being “stalked” by other creatures.

For instance, when we were in a much bigger apartment, every now and then the cat would disappear. I would try to find him and I swear to God, every single time, I would search absolutely EVERYWHERE in the apartment and I would never find him until I checked the last place I thought he could be.

This happened so often that I figured he knew where I was going to look for him, because he must keep track of where he hides, and when he doesn’t want to be found, he not only knows where he hides, but keeps track of places where I find him. Whatever it is, I am convinced that the cat does this, again on instinct, because I was never able to guess correctly where he was on any of my first dozen attempts, over the course of several years.

In other words, it seems that there is a form of randomization process that he uses so that no detectable, regular patterns can be found in things like his hiding places. There will be regularity at the “small” scale, local regularities, like lately he’s been sleeping on the bed. But there’s no way of saying how long that will last. It might last 3 days, a week, and then at some point I won’t be able to find him any more.

That’s the game he plays, at least in my theory. In any case, if so, then his “statistical” intelligence, if you will, is much more powerful than mine. He gets me every time. I am not as “sensitive” as he is to small changes, and he is much better than I am at “predicting” things.

II. Who Gets The Last Laugh?

I often find myself arguing with people about some statement or other that I made about humans being very “predictable” creatures. Whether or not one believes that to be true, compared to my cat, I am so many times more predictable; there are many orders of magnitude of difference.

Humans tend to be creatures of habit and routine. We have a finite list of things that we do, across a finite set of different categories, and we do them at relative frequencies/intervals, ranging from things that recur often to things that recur less often, to a few things that only happen once or a few times, and then things that are genuinely “new”, that haven’t been tried out before.

The thing is, if you look at humans within a given culture, you will see certain patterns, regularities. If we call the things that we do “priorities”, then human life in a sense is a priority-based queuing process. We have a collection of things on a to-do list and we go over the list. Some items are recurring, some are more or less so, some are new, etc.

You add new items to the list, you cross off items on the list, you are basically a To-do-List-Observing Machine. Should someone observe you long enough, once they know what the various categories of things are that you do, and the relative frequencies and so forth, then one can relatively quickly come up with a more or less formal “pattern of life analysis” and actually be able to predict with surprisingly high accuracy, where you will be at some future time and what you will be doing.

A cat, on the other hand, only has a handful of things that they do, but the order in which they do them, to me at least, seems to approximate pure randomness, or “noise”, a noisy “process”, i.e. a stochastic process.

In any case, I will leave it at this for now and come back to this later. My question for you is the following: Is it easier to be unpredictable when one has only a handful of things one does or when someone has many, many different things that one habitually does? The question is, who is more predictable, my cat who only sleeps and eats and licks himself and so forth, or me, where I have dozens if not hundreds of different activities I engage in relatively often?

Another way to put it is, does the size of the “alphabet” make a difference, when you’re trying to put “symbols” in a sequence that appears random to observers? It’s a trick question and it’s not about the size of the alphabet, really. If you look at the sequence of letters in any piece of English text, you will find that there is a great deal of regularity. The difference, you could say, is that there is a “system” to the English language, i.e. grammar, syntax, and so forth. My hypothesis is that the cat does it on purpose NOT to be “systematic”, except in his or her ability to fool observers.

So while there doesn’t seem to be a precise or discrete “action syntax” or “grammar” to how my cat organizes his daily activities, I argue that there is still such a thing as “cat dynamics” in the sense that we might speak of “human dynamics”, which in the case of the housecat has to do with an entirely different set of strategies for decision-making, compared to humans.

Finis opera.

A.G. (c) 2016.