...here's the Little Cat being fooled by digital images of delicious prey:
I've seen videos of cats doing this, but I haven't before lived with a cat that was enticed by video images. Miss Lily loved to sit at the window and imagine massacring the feeder birds, but video didn't elicit the same response.
What was kind of fascinating is that The Girl played a whole series of these "cat video" clips, and the Little One's reaction to them was very different.
As you can see, the birds and rodents were boffo box office. She sat on the couch and followed the bird movements with her head as they flicked across the screen. But the rodents - a mixture of rats and squirrels - were utterly irresistible. She tried to catch them with her paw, and, finally, climbed up to the screen and tried to get behind it to where the rodents "were".
I'm not sure whether she was entertained by all this digital predation or just frustrated that she couldn't taste the sweet blood of her victims, but either way we all had quite the diverting half hour before we cut the cord, she looked at us with disgust, and jumped down to lick her backside.
Cats, go figure.
But now people?
You'd think that almost two million years of evolution would make us harder to fool with digital simulation.
2 comments:
“But now people?
You'd think that almost two million years of evolution would make us harder to fool with digital simulation.”
Oh, heavens no.
We've never undergone ANY evolutionary selection for that ability. Gathering food and dodging lions on the African savanna sure didn't apply.
That's also why I personally think our species is probably done.
We're building immensely complex societies, and we're not handling that complexity well at all. Just like digital simulations: we've never been selected for that, past what's happened to our genome in the last piddling 5000 years.
We've been getting by since we started practicing agriculture at the village level by (i) creating fictions about our social environment, and then (ii) acting as though those fictions were real.
And every time social complexity increased past a particular critical point (2nd century BC Romans turning city-state into empire, 17th century England getting too gnarly to be managed well by any single man no matter how competent, etc), the prevailing set of social fictions tended to stop working.
When that happens, you'd better find another set that does work for you, and fast, or things are going to get bloody. Often as not, they get bloody anyway; events like the Glorious Revolution don't happen very often.
Now we're at the point where our prevailing social fictions are ramming the societies they enable right up against physical forces that'll bloody well kill the lot of us if we don't deal with them logically, rather than fictively. Forces like global warming.
But we've never been selected for logic either. if we had been, people like Leonhard Euler would be a dime a dozen, and they most certainly are not.
Instead, we've got mobs of literal madmen who are demonstrably willing to tear down their own nation states around their ears, because of the fictions they've been taught, fictions they believe to be real. By organizations like the late 20th century Republican Party, and people like Donald Trump.
Point(s) well taken.
I ran across something similar to this reading Jared Diamond's Upheaval. It's unfortunately facile - Diamond is a anthropologist who specialized in the tribe of New Guinea until he hit it big with his examination of the mechanicultural priors of the Age of Conquest in Guns, Germs, and Steel - but it does outline the fact that factors that Daimond points out - "political polarization, low voter turnout, obstacles to voter registration, inequality, limited socio-economic mobility, and decreasing government investment in public goods." - put the 21st Century U.S. closer to the category of societies that didn't do well with catastrophic environmental/social/political issues like climate change than ones that did.
Sadly, our technological civilization has kind of outrun our sociopolitical ability to NOT think like a bunch of protohominids. What that implies for the global future is kinda ominous.
In this case, though...I was mostly going for cute cat stuff. I may revisit the low bar of human expectations in a future post.
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