So here's an interesting thing. I was browsing the web in bed this morning (fuck you, it's my birthday) when, as per usual, my bedroom door opened and the cat came in and jumped onto my bed to show me love and piss me off (or just piss, maybe). Usually, the cat either does that thing that cats do when they keep walking into you and rumbling, or blunders around the room breaking all of my good shit. This morning, however, the cat just sat on my shoulder and watched me browsing the net. It was unusual, and I couldn't help but wonder what the cat was thinking about: was it wondering what I was doing, or why I was doing what I was doing? Continuing this line of thought, I started to wonder if the cat was thinking about how I was doing what I was doing. Does my cat recognise that I am a member of a more technologically advanced species than her? Do cats and dogs look at things like cars and TVs and doors and wonder how that works? Or do they just wonder what is happening to them? I suspect, completely without reason to, that the case is the latter.
What about more intelligent animals? Dolphins, chimpanzees, orangutans, elephants? Really quite a lot of animals are actually very clever, and exhibit behaviour that suggests self-awareness. So, when we let a chimpanzee (genetically the closest animals to us, and a known user of tools) play about with a computer, does the chimpanzee question how the computer works, and does the chimpanzee associate the computer with us - and hence recognise it as a product of our intelligence? What about less complex mechanisms like doors and wheels? If these animals do make this association, what part of their psyche is it that enables them to make this connection? Is it their self-awareness? Their ability to think about things in relation to their own existence? Do we actually recognise that we are more intelligent than other animals, or do we simply assume it? Perhaps all animals think that they are the most intelligent ("so long, and thanks for all the fish!").
What if, continuing this chain of thought, the Earth was visited by and we made contact with a species that is - objectively - vastly more intelligent than ourselves? Would we (be able to) acknowledge that this species was more intelligent than our own? Plenty of Hollywood movies suggest that we would make this association, but it is important to understand that any alien that we can imagine, no matter how outlandish or unexpected, is still a product of our imagination (and as such is limited and dictated by the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding). As a result, we cannot help but be able to consider and judge ourselves in relation to them, being a product of a human imagination. If an alien culture arrived that was completely beyond the human capacity to imagine, expect or comprehend, would we actually be able to consider ourselves in relation to it and judge it to be a more intelligent and advanced race than ourselves? Or would we be like my cat staring at my laptop, and just wonder what the hell was going on?
Perhaps the answer to these questions is already known and a quick search would clarify this for me, but this is one of those cases where I find the question as interesting as any answer could be, and am happy to remain ignorant. With regards to the questions themselves, I suppose this is a very similar thought experiment to "Paley's Watch". If you don't know it, google that bitch yo, it'll melt your shit.
My cat is actually called Hairy Potter. It has never forgiven me.
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