What do you think cats think about when they are not sleep?
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Answer:
The first thing I’d consider is that cats, for the most part, don’t get bored. This suggests that they have a great capacity for going into a receptive state, registering events in the environment in a calm, open way. It’s the sort of state that relaxation exercises try to get you into, and I suspect it’s the goal of meditation, though I’ve never been good enough at meditation to know first hand. You can see why this would be evolutionarily advantageous for a predator—don’t chase the rodent, let the rodent come to you. The cat-person meme that crystallises this observation is: “My cat had a staring competition with a porcelain ornament. My cat won.”
I have observed cats moving from this relaxed state to get up and do something—maybe go for a walk in the garden. It seems as though the idea comes into their head, and sometimes they’ll go out and sniff a few things, investigate parts of the garden, maybe eat a little grass. Our present cat likes to lap water off vegetable leaves, if there’s been a heavy dew or rain; she’s semi-feral, and we think she prefers wild water to stuff in a dish. It looks very much like the cat is enjoying a bit of time in the garden, as you and I might, though sometimes there’s clearly an investigation of areas that have been scent marked by other cats: sniff, sniff, then countermark. There doesn’t seem to be any agitation about this response, so it might just be keeping up with activity in the neighbourhood, and asserting their own presence. It’s perhaps a very low-key version of dog behaviour: for dogs, trees and fire-hydrants are obviously social media, which they scan before posting their own content.
Finally, cats that live with humans do seem to make some effort to understand these strange large animals. Cats have noises that they only use to humans, and sometimes cats look at humans speaking as though they are trying to understand. We have had just one cat that actually acted concerned towards us, getting unhappy if we were disagreeing, and trying to get us to bed early. She was the only cat I’ve known who seemed to have a sense of anything like morality, and she was really good. Again, it makes sense for cats to try to understand their commensals, who have so much more power and control over the environment than cats do. Some cats seem to understand the notion of being medicated or taken to the vets: they’ll resist, at first, but then co-operate once they realise that resistance is futile. They can also get us to give them food, open doors, and so on, and our present cat lets me know when she wants me to go for a walk in the garden with her. Our present cat differentiates her cries: making basically the same sound, she is very strident when she wants me to come away from the computer and go for a walk with her, but quite subdued when she’s asking for food, like “Umm, I thought you’d like to know my food bowl is empty” (although really it’s “I can see the bottom of my food bowl.”)
What is beyond my comprehension is quite how this all works without language. We humans are so used to having language with which to externalise and examine our mental content that it’s difficult to understand how non-linguistic thinking might go, though it’s probable that quite a lot of our mental processes are pre-linguistic. But I guess there’s a lot of research data on this sort of thing, some of which might be illuminating, so I’ll stop here, remembering the question is about what I think cats are thinking about. BTW, when they’re asleep, they clearly dream.