Hello. Let us start by assuming that 'I'm A Celebrity, Please Get Me Out Of The Jungle As I've Already Been Paid And It's Really Shit Here' is, to all intents and purposes, a torture show. Yes it is. I've seen enough clips on Gogglebox to come to that conclusion, without ever putting ITV on to form a wider view. It's okay, I'm not going to accuse anyone who watches it of enjoying people being tortured, you know, being fed horrible things, cut off from friends and loved ones, undergoing physical discomfort... no, definitely not.
You're safe from the moral dilemma of watching people suffer for your entertainment because of the distance between you and them. For a start I bet hardly anyone reading this is in Australia, which we are led to believe is where the show is made (and NOT the Eden Project place or Kew Gardens or a disused TEXAS Homecare just off the A13 near the Ripple Road roundabout). No, there is a distance between you and the infliction of discomfort on others, which is why, presumably, you can still sleep soundly at night after watching it.
And they're getting paid right? If they win they get £ALot apparently, so they've asked for anything that's thrown at them, or placed through them, or on them. And it's this bit I want to focus on. In 1961 a psychologist called Stanley Milgram ran an experiment in the U.S. to try to get to grips with one of the biggest questions of the 20th century: why do people do harm to others? At the Nuremburg trials after World War II, Adolf Eichmann claimed that he carried out atrocities against the Jews because he was simply 'following orders'. Milgram wanted to try to set up an experiment to test if ordinary folks might be capable of such acts if told to do so.
The experiment involved three people. An ad was placed in a local paper, it asked for volunteers to take part in a psychological test for a pre-paid fee of $4. Two volunteers would then draw lots to be either the 'teacher' or the 'learner'. Thing is, this bit was fixed: one of the 'volunteers' was a stooge, and they always became the 'learner'. The third person was an authority figure, a man in a white coat who oversaw proceedings. The 'teacher' and 'learner' were separated by a wall (here's your distance), and the 'teacher' then gave the 'learner' a series of memory tests which got progressively harder to repeat.
If the 'learners' got a test wrong, he (and they were ALL men) were given an electric shock.
The 'teacher' was given a very mild shock before the experiment began, enough to be uncomfortable but not to actually hurt. So, the 'teacher' knew what the 'learner' was going through. The big deal with this experiment is that the amount of shock administered was variable. As the stooge deliberately started making more and more mistakes, the man in the white coat and the clipboard advised the 'teacher' to increase the charge. Pre-recorded cries of anguish, turning to pleads to be released, were played as the charge increased.
Put yourself in the 'teacher' position. When would you stop the experiment? Will they take my $4 away if I bail straight away? Once you know there's an electric shock involved you'll get cold feet and politely call it a day right? Once the poor guy in the other room starts "ow"ing, that's the cut-off point, surely? In the actual experiment, almost all of the 40 'teachers' went beyond 330 volts! Despite recorded screams and even a faked physical episode, most went on to deliver potentially fatal shocks.
It can't have been the money. Even accounting for inflation, $4 isn't enough to risk someone's life for. No, the experiment shows that when people are told to do things by someone in (even bogus) authority, they tend to do as they are told.
Milgram's experiment was heavily criticised because of the stress it placed the 'teachers' under. Later versions had two authority figures, one saying 'stop' as well as the one saying 'you must carry on'. You'll be pleased to know that this made a difference. Although the original experiment was, for want of a better phrase, a nasty piece of work, it was the most instructive.
I think if anyone tried a similar experiment today, there would be a strong chance that the guinea pigs would know something fishy was going on. We've all seen Dom Joly's 'Trigger Happy TV', where he picked on old people or unsuspecting members of the public who don't use English as a first language, to play 'hilarious' (but also humiliating) pranks on. The distance between him and the victims was, oh hang on, there wasn't any distance! He was taking the piss out of these people and filming it and is proud to have done so. What a dick. Then there was 'Game For A Laugh', 'Fonejacker', 'Brass Eye'... all happy to humiliate in the name of entertainment. Admittedly no-one got hurt on those shows (I remember Dennis Norden commenting on 'You've Been Framed': 'It's funny, as long as they get up afterwards'). But no-one was really hurt in Stanley Milgram's experiment either, and no-one on 'Trigger Happy TV' was asked to be humiliated, or were offered a fee beforehand for the opportunity to be humiliated...
He really was a dick, wasn't he?
You would have to find people who haven't watched a lot of television, perhaps because they are always on the television. Because of inflation, you would have to increase the fee for such research. Ordinary people won't get out of bed for less than $4 today; if you want to experiment on celebrities in a controlled environment and film the results for posterity, you'll need to pay £Thousands, even £Hundreds of thousands. Perhaps it could take place in a jungle, with the public voting on who has to go through certain 'challenges'...
The proper historical bits from this are contained in:
'Investigating Psychology' edited by Nicola Brace and Jovan Byford
'Investigating Methods' edited by Jean McAvoy and Nicola Brace
Both are part of the Open University module 'Introducing Psychology'.
By day a mild-mannered janitor, by night an off-duty mild-mannered janitor.
................by day a mild-mannered janitor, by night an off-duty mild-mannered janitor...............
Tuesday, 24 November 2015
Monday, 19 October 2015
Witnesses
I've just read an interesting article on psychologist Alfred Binet, the man responsible for the first IQ tests. He wanted to use them to find ways to help those with learning difficulties, and not to highlight those difficulties as weaknesses. He thought it was as important how you asked a question as the question itself. A technique which highlights how the results of questioning can be warped by the questioner is 'interrogative suggestibility'. Just for fun (don't phone in), here's an example:
Case 1:
Kevin spots the actor Terrence Stamp in Oxford Street and says 'hi'
Kevin spots the actor Terrence Stamp passing in a 73 bus the day after.
When Kevin tells Rachel, she says that Terrence Stamp was being interviewed on Radio 2 at the same time as either of these sightings, what is Kevin's defense?
This isn't a court-of-law situation, so I'm not going to pretend to know the correct procedure for analysing the evidence, but just for fun...
I believe the first sighting to be true because Kevin spoke to the actor. Celebrities are used to being recognised (some positively crave it, especially Nick Grimshaw, the idiot), so to say hello to a complete stranger is unusual in London. It is possible that the person looks like Terrence Stamp and is used to being mistaken for him, or is the sort of person who says hello to strangers on the streets of London. A weirdo.
If we believe the first sighting I think it is logical that the second also occurred. If you've seen Terrence Stamp in the street AND spoken to him, why would you make up a story about seeing him on a bus? It is possible it's the same weirdo again, but the odds are mounting against it.
If Kevin saw Terrence Stamp on one, maybe two occasions, the Radio 2 interview could have been pre-recorded (and Steve Wright, the bastard, pretended that it was happening live). The second sighting is easier to dismiss as wishful thinking, or 'having Terrence Bloody Stamp on your mind too much'. Watch the road for heaven's sake, it's dangerous out there.
One way the prosecution could try to unseat Kevin would be to use interrogative suggestibility and ask the following question:
'What colour scarf was Terence Stamp wearing?'
When Kevin thinks long and hard (or long and woolly eh? Eh? Oh never mind) and answers: 'Brown, I think.' And the prosecution shouts: 'HA! We know for a fact that Terrence Stamp has never worn a scarf, brown or otherwise!' You know that they have used interrogative suggestibility in its evilest form.
It could be enough to convince the jury that Kevin was making it up, which is perhaps better than being found guilty of stalking Terrence Stamp.
Dismissed.
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
The Not So Big Questions
"Will watching 'The Great British Bake-Off' make me put on weight?"
Clive
"If a mobile phone has loads of apps on it, is it heavier?"
Wendy
"How heavy is a memory?"
Samsonite®
Three questions, or possibly the same question. Let's take them one at a time.
Clive is being rhetorical when asking if merely watching 'The Great British Bake-Off' is going to result in him gaining weight. The implication is that watching Mary Berry and Doc Hollywood presiding over endless sugary dessert foods will induce Clive to either take up baking, or go to Marks & Spencer and purchase four chocolate eclairs and eat them all at once with a cup of tea. You could argue that if he takes up baking but shows a will of steel, he could ration himself to a tiny portion of cake, or give ALL his cakes away to the poor or greedy. If he takes the M&S option, all is lost.
Logically, we must answer "no". The evidence linking Clive's gain of two stones after the first show of the last series of 'The Great British Bake-Off' is purely circumstantial. The eclairs were on 'special' that week anyway.
Now, to mobiles. Your 'phone weighs 132 grammes, you add an app, ('Facebook', for argument's sake) which is 48.9 MB of whatever-that-is, does this make your iPhone (other devices are available) heavier? I tried it, and the kitchen scales were not sensitive enough to give a change of reading.
Logically, I think the answer can't be "no, it gets lighter."Adding things to things never makes them smaller, unless it's a wolf to a flock of sheep. There is, however, a way in which the answer could be: "it stays the same." I'm no scientist (so take that back!), but the 'phone could have a weight, or more appropriately mass, that is capable of holding a certain amount of apps. When the 'phone's capacity is full it simply refuses any new apps, photos etc. After all, there is no physical feed to the device when adding apps, and no wires are needed. I'm going to guess that the "cloud" is a weightless one.
And finally to Samsonite®. Their new ad starts with the line: "How heavy is a memory?" Like Clive, the (M)admen are being rhetorical, in this case to falsely suggest that the most important part of any holiday is your suitcase. In the same way, the new UPS ad tries to take credit for all the thrusting new businesses in the world forging ahead and changing the world. Yeah right, it's all down to the post guy. The new Samsonite® suitcases are quite light, apparently; but they've been making the buggers for ages. So, big deal. A memory weighs the same as an app; it's the dirty pants and stolen towels that make a return journey more exhausting.
Clive
"If a mobile phone has loads of apps on it, is it heavier?"
Wendy
"How heavy is a memory?"
Samsonite®
Three questions, or possibly the same question. Let's take them one at a time.
Clive is being rhetorical when asking if merely watching 'The Great British Bake-Off' is going to result in him gaining weight. The implication is that watching Mary Berry and Doc Hollywood presiding over endless sugary dessert foods will induce Clive to either take up baking, or go to Marks & Spencer and purchase four chocolate eclairs and eat them all at once with a cup of tea. You could argue that if he takes up baking but shows a will of steel, he could ration himself to a tiny portion of cake, or give ALL his cakes away to the poor or greedy. If he takes the M&S option, all is lost.
Logically, we must answer "no". The evidence linking Clive's gain of two stones after the first show of the last series of 'The Great British Bake-Off' is purely circumstantial. The eclairs were on 'special' that week anyway.
Now, to mobiles. Your 'phone weighs 132 grammes, you add an app, ('Facebook', for argument's sake) which is 48.9 MB of whatever-that-is, does this make your iPhone (other devices are available) heavier? I tried it, and the kitchen scales were not sensitive enough to give a change of reading.
Logically, I think the answer can't be "no, it gets lighter."Adding things to things never makes them smaller, unless it's a wolf to a flock of sheep. There is, however, a way in which the answer could be: "it stays the same." I'm no scientist (so take that back!), but the 'phone could have a weight, or more appropriately mass, that is capable of holding a certain amount of apps. When the 'phone's capacity is full it simply refuses any new apps, photos etc. After all, there is no physical feed to the device when adding apps, and no wires are needed. I'm going to guess that the "cloud" is a weightless one.
And finally to Samsonite®. Their new ad starts with the line: "How heavy is a memory?" Like Clive, the (M)admen are being rhetorical, in this case to falsely suggest that the most important part of any holiday is your suitcase. In the same way, the new UPS ad tries to take credit for all the thrusting new businesses in the world forging ahead and changing the world. Yeah right, it's all down to the post guy. The new Samsonite® suitcases are quite light, apparently; but they've been making the buggers for ages. So, big deal. A memory weighs the same as an app; it's the dirty pants and stolen towels that make a return journey more exhausting.
Sunday, 19 April 2015
The First Cut
You are on Twitter and someone is annoying you. Not trolling, or being deliberately offensive to anyone in particular, just annoying. You know the ones, they pick a subject and won't let it lie, they choose to relay a 140 character missive over eight tweets
like
this
and you see the one that says "this" first, and have to check their feed to find out what "this" refers to and it turns out it's only "or that". That. It doesn't matter how they annoy you, they annoy you, so they have to go from your timeline or you'll have to read that book you got for Christmas or tidy up instead of going on Twitter. There are ways to do this.
1. Muting. This is a relatively new thing on Twitter (I'm always late to this stuff, you're putting quoted tweets in little boxes now, so each tweet has a subsection attached which has to be read before/after the one you're doing and it means the 140 character limit which makes Twitter such fun to deal with is blown out the window stop it now!), where was I? Oh yes, muting.
Muting is the stupidest, lamest, lilly-livered way of removing arseholes from your timeline.
"I can't stand what that guy's saying and he holds no interest for me whatsoever, but instead of walking away from him I'll carry on standing next to him, but I'll cover my ears up."
No-one, ever.
Then there's 2. Blocking. I've read some very sensible pieces on blocking as The Way Forward®, and it is a very logical solution. With one swipe the dick is erased from your Twitter experience. Okay, you might see him (and let us not be coy here, it is nearly always a him) and his @ mentioned in one of those group conversations, the subject of which you have no idea because some of the people involved are in locked accounts and others have blocked you... where was I? Blocking is the scientific, clean, fair way to get rid of him. He will just see his follower/followee numbers reduced by one and think another spam bot has been reported. You never interacted with him, nor he with you. No problem, move on.
But wait. You want him to know that you've blocked him, don't you? If you block you've let him off scot-free for moaning all day about lame celebrities and then bragging about his article in the paper that's really, really lame AND FULL OF TYPOS TOO. He might, at some point in the future, click on your @ thinking: "Didn't that guy follow me once?", only to discover the terrible truth. This would be sweet: he'd sit back in his armchair, reach for the brandy and realise someone out there doesn't think he's the absolute arbiter of taste he thinks he is. Sweet indeed, but there is no way of guaranteeing this will happen, and sitting in your armchair waiting for it to possibly happen will be a much more stressful and unrewarding experience than the one he might have to go through.
Then there's 3. Soft-blocking. For those at the back, this is where you block then immediately unblock, a sort of "my mistake for following in the first place, sorry". There is no place for soft-blocking in this particular story.
And finally there's 4. Unfollowing. Aha, didn't see that one coming did you? I now believe that good old-fashioned unfollowing is the deepest cut of all. Why? Because I guarantee that the stain in question checks who is unfollowing him on a weekly, daily, perhaps minutely basis. Of course he is, imagine the embarrassment of him exchanging dull pleasantries with a minor celebrity who has a few more followers than him, only to find that they ditched him months ago. He can't take that risk. So unfollow, and soon enough he'll be doing that armchair/brandy thing and mwahahahah etc.
But don't delay, best if it were done quickly, lest you find he gets in first and does you.
like
this
and you see the one that says "this" first, and have to check their feed to find out what "this" refers to and it turns out it's only "or that". That. It doesn't matter how they annoy you, they annoy you, so they have to go from your timeline or you'll have to read that book you got for Christmas or tidy up instead of going on Twitter. There are ways to do this.
1. Muting. This is a relatively new thing on Twitter (I'm always late to this stuff, you're putting quoted tweets in little boxes now, so each tweet has a subsection attached which has to be read before/after the one you're doing and it means the 140 character limit which makes Twitter such fun to deal with is blown out the window stop it now!), where was I? Oh yes, muting.
Muting is the stupidest, lamest, lilly-livered way of removing arseholes from your timeline.
"I can't stand what that guy's saying and he holds no interest for me whatsoever, but instead of walking away from him I'll carry on standing next to him, but I'll cover my ears up."
No-one, ever.
Then there's 2. Blocking. I've read some very sensible pieces on blocking as The Way Forward®, and it is a very logical solution. With one swipe the dick is erased from your Twitter experience. Okay, you might see him (and let us not be coy here, it is nearly always a him) and his @ mentioned in one of those group conversations, the subject of which you have no idea because some of the people involved are in locked accounts and others have blocked you... where was I? Blocking is the scientific, clean, fair way to get rid of him. He will just see his follower/followee numbers reduced by one and think another spam bot has been reported. You never interacted with him, nor he with you. No problem, move on.
But wait. You want him to know that you've blocked him, don't you? If you block you've let him off scot-free for moaning all day about lame celebrities and then bragging about his article in the paper that's really, really lame AND FULL OF TYPOS TOO. He might, at some point in the future, click on your @ thinking: "Didn't that guy follow me once?", only to discover the terrible truth. This would be sweet: he'd sit back in his armchair, reach for the brandy and realise someone out there doesn't think he's the absolute arbiter of taste he thinks he is. Sweet indeed, but there is no way of guaranteeing this will happen, and sitting in your armchair waiting for it to possibly happen will be a much more stressful and unrewarding experience than the one he might have to go through.
Then there's 3. Soft-blocking. For those at the back, this is where you block then immediately unblock, a sort of "my mistake for following in the first place, sorry". There is no place for soft-blocking in this particular story.
And finally there's 4. Unfollowing. Aha, didn't see that one coming did you? I now believe that good old-fashioned unfollowing is the deepest cut of all. Why? Because I guarantee that the stain in question checks who is unfollowing him on a weekly, daily, perhaps minutely basis. Of course he is, imagine the embarrassment of him exchanging dull pleasantries with a minor celebrity who has a few more followers than him, only to find that they ditched him months ago. He can't take that risk. So unfollow, and soon enough he'll be doing that armchair/brandy thing and mwahahahah etc.
But don't delay, best if it were done quickly, lest you find he gets in first and does you.
Saturday, 28 March 2015
Mike Yarwood
Some of you will be old enough to remember the Mike Yarwood show. He did impressions. At the end of the show, he'd sign off with: "And this is me." My dad would then shout: "We know!" The implication being that all of Mike Yarwood's impressions sounded like him, putting on a bit of a voice. His Eddie Waring was good, we'll give him that, but everyone could do Eddie Waring.
What did he mean by "and this is me"? We have two options:
a) I have been an absolute genius for the last half hour, and only this sign that I am returning to my own personality can convince you that I'm not doing an impression of a third party, also called Mike Yarwood.
b) This is an impression of me; none of you know what I sound like in real life, and only my genius can portray it.
Whichever it was, Mike Yarwood's voice, or 'Mike Yarwood's' voice, was the dullest in the show.
If we take him at his word, and assume that he was simply talking as Mike Yarwood, using an unaffected *Mike Yarwood voice*, it begs the question: is it possible to do an impression of yourself? Perhaps you had a cassette machine as a kid; do you remember the fist time you heard your own voice? To most I think it came as a shock, for some reason your ears, which were as close to that voice as anything else (and built to hear things, goddammit), didn't give you the real thing. Because your voice sounded normal, apart from not being what you quite expected, you may not be tempted to do an impression of it. It would be futile too, you're not that silly.
One man who may have attempted an impression of himself is Michael Caine. How many times must he have pitched up at an interview, only to be asked once again: "Have you ever said: 'not a lot of people know that'?" I seem to remember him putting on that voice to join in, so as not to sound like a grump. Poor sod. I do however have evidence that the self-impression can, and has, been done.
Working in a University kitchen, there was one of our number (I'll call him 'Kevin' because it isn't his name) who had a particular speech pattern he used when expressing disdain at others, or life in general. If, for instance, Kevin thought the menu particularly dull, he would list the dishes that he would add to pep it up.
The list would start quietly:
"Ham & chips, gammon,..."
But, as the ideas flowed, and the realisation struck that there were so many dishes ignored by the powers that be, the voice would growl, growl some more, and increase in volume with each addition:
"..SHEPHERRRRRDS PIE!!, STEAK AAAAND KIDNEY PIE!!!..."
After a while, most of the others in the kitchen could do a pretty good impression of this, and we'd look for excuses to start a list of our own. Kevin didn't seem to realise that we were doing an impression of him, and eventually the day came when he did an impression of one of us, doing an impression of him. And what did it sound like? The same, only louder. A bit disappointing really.
P.S. If you want to know how to do an impression on Twitter, here's how:
Frank Spencer:
*Frank Spencer face* *Frank Spencer voice* "Ooh, Betty."
You're welcome.
What did he mean by "and this is me"? We have two options:
a) I have been an absolute genius for the last half hour, and only this sign that I am returning to my own personality can convince you that I'm not doing an impression of a third party, also called Mike Yarwood.
b) This is an impression of me; none of you know what I sound like in real life, and only my genius can portray it.
Whichever it was, Mike Yarwood's voice, or 'Mike Yarwood's' voice, was the dullest in the show.
If we take him at his word, and assume that he was simply talking as Mike Yarwood, using an unaffected *Mike Yarwood voice*, it begs the question: is it possible to do an impression of yourself? Perhaps you had a cassette machine as a kid; do you remember the fist time you heard your own voice? To most I think it came as a shock, for some reason your ears, which were as close to that voice as anything else (and built to hear things, goddammit), didn't give you the real thing. Because your voice sounded normal, apart from not being what you quite expected, you may not be tempted to do an impression of it. It would be futile too, you're not that silly.
One man who may have attempted an impression of himself is Michael Caine. How many times must he have pitched up at an interview, only to be asked once again: "Have you ever said: 'not a lot of people know that'?" I seem to remember him putting on that voice to join in, so as not to sound like a grump. Poor sod. I do however have evidence that the self-impression can, and has, been done.
Working in a University kitchen, there was one of our number (I'll call him 'Kevin' because it isn't his name) who had a particular speech pattern he used when expressing disdain at others, or life in general. If, for instance, Kevin thought the menu particularly dull, he would list the dishes that he would add to pep it up.
The list would start quietly:
"Ham & chips, gammon,..."
But, as the ideas flowed, and the realisation struck that there were so many dishes ignored by the powers that be, the voice would growl, growl some more, and increase in volume with each addition:
"..SHEPHERRRRRDS PIE!!, STEAK AAAAND KIDNEY PIE!!!..."
After a while, most of the others in the kitchen could do a pretty good impression of this, and we'd look for excuses to start a list of our own. Kevin didn't seem to realise that we were doing an impression of him, and eventually the day came when he did an impression of one of us, doing an impression of him. And what did it sound like? The same, only louder. A bit disappointing really.
P.S. If you want to know how to do an impression on Twitter, here's how:
Frank Spencer:
*Frank Spencer face* *Frank Spencer voice* "Ooh, Betty."
You're welcome.
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
Being Here
Hello.
I'm studying philosophy, but before we get onto the serious stuff, we are being gently taught the arts past & present. So apart from some sketches on Plato (and Socrates by association), I'm still feeding off scraps and old Monty Python sketches.
BEING. Apparently this is a biggie. We've been taught that Buddhism sees all sentient beings as equal; you live, you die, you come back and do it all over again, unless you become enlightened. But today I saw Martin Heidegger argue against this...
Here is his interview with a Buddhist monk. via @openculture on Twitter
If you don't want to see the interview, the main point I took was this: Only humans have a sense of their own being. He uses the example of a craftsman starting a job; if he has no vision of the job being completed, the job is meaningless so he wouldn't bother. We live, if you like, in the future.
So animals do not have this sense of being, and as a result, a sense of cause and effect. When our German Shepherd, Sophie decided to take out the boredom of being left alone for half an hour on the sofa, she tore it to threads. When we came home she was unrepentant; sitting with a piece of yellow cushion stuffing on her nose, as if to say: "What?" Sam, our other GSD, did look shamefaced; perhaps he was more enlightened.
It's difficult to look into your pet's eyes and not see a little human, but it can be a relief to be reminded they are not. Our Newfoundland Gracie lost the use of her hind legs from the knee down, but the vet explained she would have no fear of the condition worsening. As a result, she merely got on with each day as if the difficulties of the previous one had not happened, not expecting things to get better, but not deteriorating either. She managed to get around quite happily for another four years like this, outliving her twin sister.
The only problem with this thinking is that none of us knows it to be 100 per cent correct. I'm reminded of the film 'The Elephant Man', where Frederick Treves takes solace in the belief that Joseph Merrick is an imbecile, unable to contemplate his deformity, only to hear him reciting poetry in his room. Martin Heidegger is renowned as one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, but was also a member of the Nazi party until it was abolished. (see more here)
So perhaps Harry (our terrier) knows his eyesight is getting worse, mourns his previous owner, and curses the family that gave him up when he was four years old. I know for a fact that he'd still eat fish fingers, even though they make him ill. He might not be enlightened, perhaps he's just not that bright.
I'm studying philosophy, but before we get onto the serious stuff, we are being gently taught the arts past & present. So apart from some sketches on Plato (and Socrates by association), I'm still feeding off scraps and old Monty Python sketches.
BEING. Apparently this is a biggie. We've been taught that Buddhism sees all sentient beings as equal; you live, you die, you come back and do it all over again, unless you become enlightened. But today I saw Martin Heidegger argue against this...
Here is his interview with a Buddhist monk. via @openculture on Twitter
If you don't want to see the interview, the main point I took was this: Only humans have a sense of their own being. He uses the example of a craftsman starting a job; if he has no vision of the job being completed, the job is meaningless so he wouldn't bother. We live, if you like, in the future.
So animals do not have this sense of being, and as a result, a sense of cause and effect. When our German Shepherd, Sophie decided to take out the boredom of being left alone for half an hour on the sofa, she tore it to threads. When we came home she was unrepentant; sitting with a piece of yellow cushion stuffing on her nose, as if to say: "What?" Sam, our other GSD, did look shamefaced; perhaps he was more enlightened.
It's difficult to look into your pet's eyes and not see a little human, but it can be a relief to be reminded they are not. Our Newfoundland Gracie lost the use of her hind legs from the knee down, but the vet explained she would have no fear of the condition worsening. As a result, she merely got on with each day as if the difficulties of the previous one had not happened, not expecting things to get better, but not deteriorating either. She managed to get around quite happily for another four years like this, outliving her twin sister.
The only problem with this thinking is that none of us knows it to be 100 per cent correct. I'm reminded of the film 'The Elephant Man', where Frederick Treves takes solace in the belief that Joseph Merrick is an imbecile, unable to contemplate his deformity, only to hear him reciting poetry in his room. Martin Heidegger is renowned as one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, but was also a member of the Nazi party until it was abolished. (see more here)
So perhaps Harry (our terrier) knows his eyesight is getting worse, mourns his previous owner, and curses the family that gave him up when he was four years old. I know for a fact that he'd still eat fish fingers, even though they make him ill. He might not be enlightened, perhaps he's just not that bright.
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