Raccoons and Why Humans Are Unable to Think

I’ve recently experienced what some of Donut County, a videogame where you play as a hole and swallow bricks and buildings, has to offer. The thought I keep coming back to is at the end of the game: a raccoon promises a pickle in a jar to another raccoon in exchange for its betrayal of his friends.

From left to right: the raccoon, the hole, the donut, and the friend.

Of course, the raccoon dealer has his hand stuck in a jar, holding onto the pickle which cannot leave the jar. He’s asking the other raccoon to do the same as he did, with his greediness and lack of compassion and pickle-hands. You could say the hand-pickle-jar system is a symbol, along the same lines of eating and having the cake at the same time. Or, it’s the clinginess to the ideal of having a pickle outside the jar, so he keeps trying, no matter if it’s feasible in reality.

It’s also a gag. There’s at least the myth circulating—I don’t know if it’s true—that raccoons will continue to hold onto a food item due to their “cleaning” instinct, and so you may trap a raccoon by having him hold onto food in a small jar. What I’m interested in is this instinct—is the raccoon thinking about what he’s doing, but can’t make the mental connection that he should let go? Or does he not have a consciousness, and is then a machine applied to an inappropriate situation?

Science says there is no consciousness. Science says we’re not even conscious. Science says the unexplainable soul is not part of the observable world, so we must make the claim that our consciousness is part of a vast network of neurons. We think only as an illusion: the neuron firings are related to our thoughts but is not our thoughts.

The same idea finds a voice in Alan Lightman’s book Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. Alan Lightman is a humanities professor at MIT, so his opinion should be taken as fact (only slight sarcasm). He recounts his days at Lute Island and shares his thoughts on the nature of the world, both as a scientist but as someone who has felt spiritually transformed by nature. On of the subjects he lands on is his consciousness, which he claims does not really exist, but he thinks he should just carry on as if it did exist. This is powerful stuff and made me think about consciousness myself.

This is a cover of the book. You really should judge this book by its cover: it's concerned with beauty, it has words in it, and it's written by the author of Einstein's Dreams.

What I come back to is its ineffability. We can say we think about concepts. We can say our thinking is fragmented, linear, hard-to-follow, like it’s a narrative fiction we have playing in our head. But if we try to define what our thinking is, we lose something. If we define our thoughts as impressions, it seems like our thoughts are no longer linked together, while if we call our consciousness a sequence of feelings, we lose the significance of memories and how we categorize them. Consciousness seems null and indescribable to me.

Maybe the reason our mind is special is because we tie our thoughts to language. Every one of our thoughts should be expressed by language, and so we create concrete ideas out of a nebulous undercurrent of neuron connections. To me, this sounds like creation out of nothing, good old creation ex nihilo, which also describes the creation of the universe out of nothing.

This looks pretty cool, and it looks like creation, but I don't see the "nothing" in this picture.

I’m guessing this idea appeals so much to me because I am interested in the concept of “nothing.” I named my blog after it, but I’ve yet to write anything about it. Here we are. But as a cat owner, I see animals fidgeting with toys and reacting weirdly to events, almost like they have thoughts in their heads.

What I’m wondering is if cats do have a form of consciousness. If raccoons are just as conscious as we are, even if they don’t have language to manifest ideas. Maybe they don’t suffer or consciously feel joy; maybe they’re more than machines, and they have trains of thoughts running through their heads that make them unable to let go of pickles. Shouldn’t we believe they do? It makes their racing around the bed in the dead of night much more entertaining.

The mind of a cat is an enigma.

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