My roommate believes he understands how the world works

Arthur believes the vacuum to be dangerous because it's loud. He barks at strangers when it's dark out or they have an item in hand that makes them look slightly different. Sophie hates hot air balloons. They make no sense at all. They just hang there in the sky.

I observe these behaviours and chuckle at the silliness of dogs because I can see their reasoning and know it to be faulty. In a sense, I can see further or clearer. But these behaviours make total sense to the dog. We think of them as having a very simple understanding of the world, one that misses some key stuff, but they see themselves as understanding the world just fine.

The same is true of babies. We see them as starting with virtually no understanding of the world and gradually gaining one. Like a cup filling with water. But they don't see themselves that way at all. At almost every point, a baby will believe itself to understand the world perfectly well. Over time, they do grow to have a deeper understanding, but they don't start from a dark room.

Rather than a cup filling with water, my understanding of cognition is that we make models of how the world works. When presented with a new piece of information, our instinct is to fit it into the existing model, not build a new one based on this new data. Sophie doesn't question her understanding of gravity because she sees a hot air balloon. She gets scared because there is something that doesn't fit her model.

Even my understanding of this phenomena is a mental model of how the world works, but that model is itself limiting. I describe people as being able to 'mentally see’ further than dogs, like we're both standing on a hill and I can detect things further out. But there are times when Arthur will stop at the dog park and bark at something, and all I see are trees and bushes. I think he's just spooked about something, but occasionally some small creature will scurry past. He could 'see' with his superior sense of smell something I could not. So the vision metaphor is only helpful to a degree, and a hindrance in other respects.

I've been thinking about this a lot. If dogs and babies believe they know how the world works, what does that say about us? Ask an adult why something happens, and you'll almost certainly get an answer. We can see the outlines of a dog’s or a baby’s model of the world, but rarely our own. That is, we don’t always realize that we view the world as a model, not the world itself. And everyone, dogs and babies included, believes their model is complete.

#Arthur #Philosophy