So 2 things 1. pet appreciation and 2. the gods
1. We ask: what makes us really appreciate pets, or animals in general? Like why do I ultimately appreciate a pet dog more than a pet fish? There are many ways to articulate it, and one way is ability to perceive me as a holistic, autonomous agent. If I have a dog and I pet him, throw a frisbee for him, put out food for him, he realizes all of those things are me/being done by me, the same larger animal. This gives me a special recognition that could be integral to human-animal relationships in general.
However, if I have a fish in a fishbowl, it merely perceives all of my actions as randomly happening in its environment. Fish food falls from the sky, a blurry face appears and moves around, all of the water disappears and then more comes in. With my hamster, I can poke him from one end, with one finger, and he will turn around and stare at it and sniff it. It's unclear whether he even relates this finger as belonging to me, or associates it with my face, or can even make out my face as a face, etc. He probably just thinks of it as "flying thing that pokes me with that specific scent." And then while he's staring at it, I can bring my OTHER finger to poke him from the other side, and he'll turn around, and now think there are 2 "flying things that poke me with that scent," but might totally think of them as separate agents. It seems like there are two factors which determine this inability to perceive me as a holistic being. 1. Size: because I am so much larger than he is, so I can make my fingers come in from opposite ends and he can't even see that they are connected to the same being, and 2) he doesn't have enough sensory + logical processing capabilities to recognize my face as a face and connect that all the things I'm doing are related to me/my face etc. (The self is synonymous to the face in that the eyes are the window to the soul)
2. And this segues into the next idea: the gods. The same way that a smaller, lower-level creature can't perceive my actions as mine, and sees them as a bunch of random, disconnected events, perhaps I can't perceive a higher, extrasensory being's actions as theirs, and just see them as a bunch of random disconnected events in my life. This might relate to certain feelings we have on things like synchronicities, collective consciousness, Murakami novels (where seemingly disconnected events are connected in a greater way), etc. Perhaps God was originally posited by the same analogy, while someone was observing an animal. Maybe a supernova in a distant galaxy and a comet coming for earth, or two oddly similar events at very different times in your life, are connected in origin: some super huge higher-dimensional dude trying to pet you.
1. We ask: what makes us really appreciate pets, or animals in general? Like why do I ultimately appreciate a pet dog more than a pet fish? There are many ways to articulate it, and one way is ability to perceive me as a holistic, autonomous agent. If I have a dog and I pet him, throw a frisbee for him, put out food for him, he realizes all of those things are me/being done by me, the same larger animal. This gives me a special recognition that could be integral to human-animal relationships in general.
However, if I have a fish in a fishbowl, it merely perceives all of my actions as randomly happening in its environment. Fish food falls from the sky, a blurry face appears and moves around, all of the water disappears and then more comes in. With my hamster, I can poke him from one end, with one finger, and he will turn around and stare at it and sniff it. It's unclear whether he even relates this finger as belonging to me, or associates it with my face, or can even make out my face as a face, etc. He probably just thinks of it as "flying thing that pokes me with that specific scent." And then while he's staring at it, I can bring my OTHER finger to poke him from the other side, and he'll turn around, and now think there are 2 "flying things that poke me with that scent," but might totally think of them as separate agents. It seems like there are two factors which determine this inability to perceive me as a holistic being. 1. Size: because I am so much larger than he is, so I can make my fingers come in from opposite ends and he can't even see that they are connected to the same being, and 2) he doesn't have enough sensory + logical processing capabilities to recognize my face as a face and connect that all the things I'm doing are related to me/my face etc. (The self is synonymous to the face in that the eyes are the window to the soul)
2. And this segues into the next idea: the gods. The same way that a smaller, lower-level creature can't perceive my actions as mine, and sees them as a bunch of random, disconnected events, perhaps I can't perceive a higher, extrasensory being's actions as theirs, and just see them as a bunch of random disconnected events in my life. This might relate to certain feelings we have on things like synchronicities, collective consciousness, Murakami novels (where seemingly disconnected events are connected in a greater way), etc. Perhaps God was originally posited by the same analogy, while someone was observing an animal. Maybe a supernova in a distant galaxy and a comet coming for earth, or two oddly similar events at very different times in your life, are connected in origin: some super huge higher-dimensional dude trying to pet you.
