emotional+thinkin

//"Thought is the thought of thought"// -James Joyce//, Ulysses// //"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so."// -William Shakespeare//, Hamlet// //David Medine// I was looking at a spider in my bathroom the other day and while contemplating its insectoid nervous system it occurred to me that Mr. Spider, with his eight legs and compound eyes, has much more sophisticated input/output physical mechanics than I do. Mr. Spider can walk upside down and time his attacks on little insects with a precision and speed that I could never achieve. He's got some seriously heavy duty Mindware. But what higher mammals have and insects don't is a matrix of emotional input/output devices, and this, in my opinion, is what gives us consciousness which is the streaming consideration complicated consequences of both symbolic (imagined) and actual (real) sensations. It also gives us empathy which is really the best evolutionary tool we have, because empathy is what enables us to outwit things. We know what it feels like to be hungry, angry etc. and since we can recognize these feelings in other animals, it gives us the ability, to understand and predict the behavior of other animals. I would also go so far as to suggest that empathy is the mother of curiosity and therefor the precursor to scientific understanding. Through mythologizing and personifying inanimate things and imagining the way they interact with the world, we create an avenue towards complete understanding and control. Why are human beings the only animals that can manipulate fire? This is an age old question. Well, I suppose we humans used to be afraid of fire (and still are as recent events have shown) but fear is only one step away, emotionally speaking from worship. Worship is like fear combined with respect and fascination. From worship comes the yearning for contact (more acute fascination) and this is how science originated. Obviously there are other mammals, like dogs, that can empathize. In fact the relationship between dogs and humans is one of nature's great tales of symbiosis. It is entirely possible that humans learned how to hunt in groups from dogs. It is clear to any one that dogs feel complicated emotional states of mind and anyone that has ever been to a dysfunctional zoo has seen any number of higher mammals suffering from depression, but I am curious to know about the emotional lives of highly intelligent sea life. One doesn't think of an octopus as an emotionally active creature, but they are certainly very clever. The clinical IQ tests done on octopae are famous, but I'll share a story that a friend of mine who used to be in the tropical fish business told me. He heard it from a store owner at an industry convention. This store owner had a special shipment of some very rare and very expensive fish that he was selling in his store. He kept them on the top shelf not to far a tank with a very rare and expensive octopus in it. The fish started disappearing without a trace and he suspected that one of his employees was stealing them. So he sets up a surveillance camera and when he reviews the tapes he sees what has been happening. The octopus did it. Once the store is closed the octopus, who feeds on this particular species of rare and expensive fish in his native habitat, opens the lid on his tank, crawls along the top over to the yummy expensive fishes' tank, opens their tank's lid, eats a fish, crawls back out, closes the lid behind him and crawls back into his tank closing that lid too. What is amazing is not that the octopus could open and close the tanks, after all it had seen that done by the store owner and his employees numerous times before, or that it could recognize the fish as its favorite dinner, octopae have incredible vision, but how he understood that in order to have continued access to the yummy expensive fish he had make himself look innocent of the crime. The octopus effectively empathized with the store owner who promptly moved the octopus to a tank that was too far away from the fish for the kleptomaniacal creature to crawl over there. This raises the question: do arthropods dream of electric sheep?