consciousness – Pain In The Bud

A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.

Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.

More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.

Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.

In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.

It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.

No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.

“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”

Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.

Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.

This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.

Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.

Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.

Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.

“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon

An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.

In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.

The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”

The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)

We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”

If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.

Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.

If you’ve spent time around physics types, listened to media appearances by science educators like Michio Kaku and Brian Greene, or even watched episodes of The Big Bang Theory, you’ve almost certainly heard of Schrödinger’s cat.

But what is it, why is it important, and what does it really have to do with cats? Most importantly, if you’re a cat lover, does it involve harming cats?

I promise you, if you stick with me and have a little patience, you’ll not only understand Schrödinger’s cat, but a hugely important element of physics will be demystified for you.

Let’s take a step back. First, we all learned in school that Isaac Newton was the “father of physics,” and Albert Einstein came along about two centuries later, revolutionizing physics by adding to Newton’s work and coming up with his own, more accurate model.

To this day, Newton and Einstein are in a class by themselves among physicists because they single-handedly changed everything we know about the natural world.

We all remember the famous story about Newton watching an apple fall from a tree, wondering why the apple fell down instead of up, and eventually developing his theory of gravity. Newton went on to develop his theories, which describe everything we see in the natural world, from that apple falling to the complexities of orbital mechanics.

Everything seemed to work perfectly, until a physicist named Max Planck came along in 1905 and published a paper introducing quantum physics.

What is quantum physics?

Now the word “quantum” has been incorporated into practically everything these days and has been so utterly abused as a marketing buzzword, a way to add a veneer of science to things that are otherwise nonsense, that it’s essentially a meaningless word to most people. Practically everything is described as quantum, from deodorants to claims of psychic telepathy.

But the gist of it is this: While Newtonian physics does indeed describe everything we see with our own eyes accurately, it does not accurately describe things at the subatomic level.

In other words, there are two sets of rules in our universe. Everything larger than an atom behaves according to one set of rules in our universe, and everything the size of an atom or smaller — which includes subatomic particles — behaves according to a different set of rules.

Not only that, but at the quantum scale, things get really, really weird.

They behave in ways that are completely at odds with everything we intuitively understand about reality, so much so that even Einstein himself was disturbed by what he found. Einstein famously described quantum entanglement — the ability of two different objects to be linked and share properties, regardless of how far apart they are — as “spooky action at a distance.”

So what the hell does this have to do with cats?

Ready to get even weirder?

Thanks to Planck, Einstein, John Stewart Bell and innumerable physicists — who are still studying these concepts, and still winning Nobel prizes for them in 2022 — we know that two particles can be “entangled” and will remain that way no matter how far apart they are.

You could take one particle, transport it 10,000 light years away, and it would still be entangled with the other particle.

But it gets even stranger than that.

Our entangled particles have certain properties, such as their spin, which are unknowable until we measure them. In fact, they exist simultaneously in all possible states until the moment when we observe them, at which time the wave function “collapses.” It’s called quantum superposition.

Not only that, but when we measure one particle in an entangled pair, the second particle’s wave also “collapses” (settles on a certain state) and we know its spin instantaneously, regardless of how far apart the particles are.

If I measure an entangled particle here on Earth and find its spin is up, I know the corresponding particle that’s been moved to, say, Epsilon Eridani, 10.47 light years away, is spin down.

You can see why this would be profoundly disturbing to scientists. It violates the speed of light, and it’s completely counterintuitive. How can the mere act of observation change something in the physical world, and how can it change something else potentially thousands or millions of light years away? Everything we know, every gut instinct we have, screams that this should not be true.

But it is true.

These aren’t just ideas kicked around by scientists smoking the sticky stuff, by the way. They’ve been proven experimentally many times over. No matter how much we might dislike the idea, no matter how weird or spooky it may seem, it’s true.

Enter Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist. He devised a thought experiment that goes like this:

Imagine you have a sealed box with a cat inside. Inside the box are two buttons: One button feeds the cat a yummy treat, the other button kills the cat. There is an equal (50/50) chance of the cat pressing either button. (Other versions use a more complex system involving radioactive material, or poison, that could kill the cat, again with a 50/50 chance.)

We don’t know if the cat is alive or dead until the moment we open the box. So in this thought experiment, we can think of the cat as both alive and dead until we “measure” or “observe” by opening the box.

That’s what’s happening in the above example of quantum entanglement and the idea that a particle is neither in one position or another until we measure it.

Why is measurement the key here? No one knows. Scientists are still arguing about that. Some believe that there’s some special quality of consciousness that interacts with the universe, so the mere act of observing something can change physical reality.

Others scoff at that idea and insist we’re missing something, that it’s not the act of observation that determines the final state of a particle at all.

Regardless, the important thing here for cat lovers is that Schrödinger’s cat is just a thought experiment.

Schrödinger never had a cat, as far as anyone has been able to ascertain, and no one has used an actual cat in an attempt to reconstruct the thought experiment because 1) You wouldn’t learn anything, since cats are not subatomic particles, and 2) Anyone intelligent enough to be a physicist is presumably intelligent enough to understand how absurd, pointless and cruel it would be to use a living being in an experiment that can’t give you any answers.

For those of us who aren’t geniuses, here’s Sheldon explaining the thought experiment as a child (in Young Sheldon) and as an adult (in The Big Bang Theory):