What is it Like to Be a Dog?

I am a professional dog trainer. Specifically, I train dogs to guide those who are blind. Each month, the organization I work for teaches up to twenty-four blind students (many of whom have had dog guides before) how to work with and care for their new dog guide. Recently, I had the unfortunate opportunity to pick up a dog from one of my organization's graduates who passed away. The dog was a German shepherd, an intensely loyal breed. The dog and his now-deceased master were together for a little over seven years.

Now, most pet owners who have had a dog for seven years know what it's like to lose a beloved pet that has been part of the family for that long. However, a dog guide is more than just a pet: under Federal law, a dog guide can go anywhere its master can go: they go to the supermarket, the local Starbucks, the bank, the post office, the library, and the workplace. They spend much more time with their master than pet dogs do - nearly twenty-four hours a day. Additionally, dog guides - as near as we can tell - develop a unique sense of responsibility for their master, further deepening the bond between human and canine.

Where am I going with this, you might be thinking? Well, when I brought the deceased graduate's dog back to my organization, and into my kennel, the dog seemed to simply pick up where he left off seven years ago: he merged relatively seamlessly back into the pack - not the same pack he was in seven years ago, but a pack just the same. He played, asserted his dominance, sniffed, drank water from the trough - all the things he did seven years ago with a different group of about twenty dogs.

What about his master? What about the person who fed him and loved him for seven years? What about the bond they shared for seven years, guiding his master everywhere - proud when his master praised him effusively for avoiding a car coming out of a driveway, remorseful when he brushed his master's arm against a parking meter when he was distracted by another dog? The dog shows no sign of depression. He's active - playful, even. He's socializing with other dogs. By all accounts he seems normal.

I am intensely interested in - obsessed with, really - human consciousness. It is probably the most bizarre - and intractable - phenomenon in the natural world. The 17th Century philosopher René Descartes sort of kicked things off, in terms of consciousness studies. He's the guy who said he could doubt pretty much everything about the world except himself - his consciousness. He famously said, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. From this, he basically concluded that there are two kinds of stuff: material stuff, and thinking stuff; or, material and immaterial - body and mind. It's called dualism. Since then, modern science - and neuroscience in particular - has disabused most scientists (and nearly all philosophers) of the notion of dualism. In other words, the mind is the brain: consciousness arises from material brain processes. Serbian-born American philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a paper back in 1974 called, "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" Hence the title of my blog post. In this paper, he suggested that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism."

But to step back from the abyss of philosophical inquiry for a moment, consciousness is the thing all of us laypeople are most familiar with (or so we like to think). Each of us has the experience of what it's like to be us; we have a subjective point of view. Additionally, we have thoughts, emotions, and visceral feelings of pain and pleasure. I know what it's like to be me and I assume, based on observations of your actions and the knowledge that you are a human being like me, that you know what it's like to be you. Many times I can guess what you're thinking or feeling based simply on your actions or body language.

But what about a dog? The relationship between humans and dogs goes back, presumably, for thousands of years. That's thousands of years of human beings observing dog behavior. So pet owners - and especially dog trainers - enjoy a level of confidence in determining what a dog is thinking or feeling. Now, modern neuroscience has grown by leaps and bounds in its understanding of how the human brain works, but not so much with the canine brain. However, given an evolutionary understanding of life and some inductive reasoning, as well as millennia of intimate human-canine interaction, humans can be fairly confident in their conclusions about the dog's mental capacities and limitations.

Still - and this might be an obdurate anthropomorphic tendency in me - I find it baffling when a dog like this German shepherd comes back after having lost its master, acting as if nothing has happened. For me, it raises a lot of questions: what is the nature of canine memory? Do past memories intrude into the dog's consciousness the way our memories sometimes do? Does he dream about his master? If he does, does he remember them in his waking state? Is a dog condemned by nature to be stuck in the present?

A more interesting question would be: would it be better or worse if human brains were structured like canine brains, living in an eternal present?

Neuroscientists have been working on - and making steady progress with - what are called the Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Now, describing the neural correlates of consciousness doesn't yet offer a robust theory of consciousness - and may never, in fact, achieve such a thing, but understanding these neural correlates is a step toward such a theory.


Maybe someday we'll actually know what it's like to be a dog.