Cats in the Mirror

I'm half way through this book, “Artificial Minds, by Stan Franklin”. It's a very interesting survey on AI theories. It really makes me thinking a lot. I'm very impressed with author's idea of expressing the mind and intelligence as a matter of degree. I basically agree. But to extend this view to an extreme, even a bacteria can have a very little mind of its own. No, this extreme case is hard for me to accept.

How about cats?

Can cats have their own mind? Are they conscious? Are cats self aware? The author mentioned in his book that evidence of self-recognition in a mirror can be taken as sufficient to conclude self-awareness. Some great apes have passed this test, while baboons, gibbons and some monkeys can't be shown to be self aware in this way.

This is an interesting test, although I think it is flawed and not fair to most animals. My cats showed no interests at all to their own images in the mirror. They looked at me in the mirror, they tried to catch the bright laser dot in the mirror, but they have no interests in themselves in the mirror! I was really confused by this. Can I conclude that they don't have self awareness? No, I think they are quite aware of their own existences. They wash their faces and clean their furs a lot! Do they know the images in the mirror are the reflections of themselves? Yes. Why? Because cats usually behave very hostile towards other new cats. If they think the cats in the mirror are not themselves, they would start to hiss. And imagine the cats in the mirror hissing back... Or what if vision is only secondary to cats? What if cats mainly smell the existences of its enemies? Suppose cats do recognize themselves in the mirror, so what? Do they care? What should we expect them to behave? Does a pretty face mean anything to a cat?