Again, the Atlantic amazes me. This morning, I read an article entitled “How Animals Think.” Numerous times through the article, I leaned back in my chair and said, “Whoa.”

I can’t possibly mention all of the realizations I had during the article, so I’ll just mention the passage that surprised me the most:

At the same time, it also helps to have a sympathy for the creatures you study, a feeling that is not far removed from love. And this sympathy is bound to lead to indignation when those creatures are dismissed or diminished. That response certainly seems justified when you consider the havoc that the ladder-of-nature picture has wrought on the “lower” creatures.

But does love lead us to the most-profound insights about another being, or the most-profound illusions? Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Catherine would have differed on that too, and despite all our theory-of-mind brilliance, we humans have yet to figure out when love enlightens and when it leads us astray. So we keep these emotions under wraps in our scientific papers, for good reason. Still, popular books are different, and both sympathy and indignation are in abundant supply in de Waal’s.

What I have found is that love, and emotions in general, involve a lot of movement, they’re volatile. They oscillate up and down, bringing us closer and pushing us farther apart. Which means they present shifting realities.

Holy shit. I just realized while typing this that the shifting between two realities is the exact same thing that quantum physics talks about. That a quark can be in a positive spin or a negative spin, and that we actually don’t know which state it is in. When we observe it, it changes its state. Now my mind is reeling on how we believe that the middle, static, and stable answer is the truth, and thus we avoid the emotions because they are mobile. And yet, what quantum physics tells us is that the world around us is constantly in flux, constantly vibrating, jumping from state-to-state, and that actually is the reality.

With that in mind, what would the world look like if instead of us having an indifferent relationship with non-human animals, we had an emotional one? We already see this with humans who have pets, who develop emotional bonds often stronger than they do with other human animals. What if we could extend this empathy and dignity to other non-human animals? Sure, they’d piss us off as our dogs do, but maybe we could love and respect them more for being what they are.

Read the article if you’re curious about the actual purpose of the article, talking about whether non-human animals think and are inherently “lesser than” we human animals 😀