“What if I was (like) them, including all the relevant psychological and emotional factors?”
At that point I’m just back to thinking about them as cats.
Perhaps my terminology in the post was wrong, since I do in fact empathize with cats, and I can empathize with humans the same way I empathize with cats without inducing disgust/disappointment. That’s part of the suspension of disbelief; I empathize with them in a way which does not involve thinking of them as creatures very similar to me.
Can you expand on how you interact with cats? Do you spend much thought hypothesizing about what a cat is thinking? I do, and find it to make a significant difference in (kitty petting frequency) outcomes even though the information rate is so low and I always have many hypotheses; if that isn’t what you mean then I’d like to understand in detail what kind of modeling you’re doing when you interact with a cat “as a cat”.
Yeah, I track (my guesses of) what the cat is thinking/feeling, and one part of that is putting myself in their place and experiencing (what I believe to be) some of their feelings.
At that point I’m just back to thinking about them as cats.
Perhaps my terminology in the post was wrong, since I do in fact empathize with cats, and I can empathize with humans the same way I empathize with cats without inducing disgust/disappointment. That’s part of the suspension of disbelief; I empathize with them in a way which does not involve thinking of them as creatures very similar to me.
Can you expand on how you interact with cats? Do you spend much thought hypothesizing about what a cat is thinking? I do, and find it to make a significant difference in (kitty petting frequency) outcomes even though the information rate is so low and I always have many hypotheses; if that isn’t what you mean then I’d like to understand in detail what kind of modeling you’re doing when you interact with a cat “as a cat”.
Yeah, I track (my guesses of) what the cat is thinking/feeling, and one part of that is putting myself in their place and experiencing (what I believe to be) some of their feelings.