Luca Marchetti is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project "The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts" at the University of Genoa. His research sits at the intersection of philosophy of mind and aesthetics, focusing on visual representation, the phenomenology and cognitive science of pictorial experience and virtual reality, and the imagination and appreciation of non-human animals’ minds.
A post by Luca Marchetti
One of the best popular-science books I’ve read in recent years is Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. It’s a guided tour of how different animals perceive the world: Yong pulls you beyond the confines of human sensing and into the distinct “sensory bubbles” that different animals inhabit, shaped not just by sights and sounds, but by vibrations, pressures, smells, and even electric and magnetic fields. Along the way, he shows what dogs smell on an ordinary street, what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and how a crocodile’s scaly face can be as sensitive as fingertips – all while telling the stories of the discoveries that made these strange worlds intelligible in the first place.
I appreciated the book both for what it says and for how it says it. But I also loved it for a more idiosyncratic – and philosophical – reason: when I read it, about a year ago, I had just started thinking about the possibilities and limits of imagination in trying to understand other animals’ minds, and about the epistemic, moral, and even aesthetic value that this imaginative activity might or might not have. What I found in Yong’s book was a vocabulary – and a kind of conceptual consonance – that resonated with what I was trying to think through myself: that imagination is something we inevitably rely on in these contexts; that it is often a matter of striving to imagine; and that, despite its limits, it can still have profound value. For example, in the book’s introduction Yong writes that in understanding other animals’ minds, “our imaginations will be our greatest assets”: the “ultimate feats of understanding” always require “an informed imaginative leap”; and, even if the task is hard, “there is value and glory in the striving” (Yong 2022, 13). But what kind of imagination is this? And what kinds of value are at stake? Those philosophical questions are not answered in Yong’s book, and they are the ones I will take up – sketchily, partially, and tentatively – in this post.
An Informed Imaginative Leap
In philosophy of mind, the issue of other animals’ minds has been approached mainly as an epistemological problem in the wake of Nagel’s classic discussion of the “what it is like” of alien experience (Nagel 1974). Nagel’s bat case makes the worry vivid. Many bats primarily perceive through sonar (echolocation), a form of perception that operates unlike any sense we possess. And, Nagel writes, there is “no reason to suppose” it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine (Nagel 1974, 438). The deeper point is that our imagination draws on our own experiential materials; so imagining bat-like behavior tends to yield, at best, what it would be like for us to behave as bats behave, not what it is like for bats to be bats (Nagel 1974, 439). My focus, however, is not the question whether and how we can know what it is like to have the experiences of some another animal. Rather, it is the experience we ourselves undergo when we try to imagine another animals’ mind – or one of its features. That activity, I think, is philosophically interesting in its own right.
Recent work in philosophy helps to bring out the centrality of imagination in attempts to understand other minds and the work it can do in partially overcoming Nagel’s worry, mitigating his pessimism. For example, Kind (2019) argues that Nagel’s considerations primarily target accurate imagination, not imagination simpliciter: the fact that our efforts fail to teach us exactly what we want to know does not show that we cannot imagine bat experience at all (Kind 2019, 167). She supports this by discussing Temple Grandin’s claim that her “visual thinking” allows her, in a limited way, to simulate what cattle see and hear, with practically successful outcomes in livestock handling (Grandin 2006; Kind 2019). Godfrey-Smith (2013) suggests that whereas with humans verbal descriptions can “prompt memories and guide the imagination,” eliciting variations on experiences we already know firsthand, with non-linguistic animals we must instead constrain imagination by drawing on what we know about their behavior, sense organs, and nervous systems, sometimes by mapping alien capacities onto familiar ones (Godfrey-Smith 2013; see also Dawkins 1986). In a similar vein, Yong uses the phrase “an informed imaginative leap” for the step beyond third-person data, when your aim is not only to describe what an animal’s sensory system does but to get some grip on what it might be like to inhabit its perceptual world. You can do the standard explanatory work – study the environment, the animal’s behavior, and the relevant neurophysiological mechanisms – and yet the “ultimate feats of understanding” still require “an informed imaginative leap” (Yong 2022).[1] “Informed” is crucial: the leap is not a freewheeling anthropomorphic projection, but imagination disciplined by empirical constraints (ecology, anatomy, behavior, neurophysiology) and meant to push against the limits of the human Umwelt, which distorts how we think about other creatures. Imagination, for Yong, is thus a methodological tool for pressing against our own cognitive boundaries – and it seems to be so for many of the sensory biologists he is in conversation with throughout the book.
All this suggests that experts on animal minds take imagination to be central to understanding other minds. It also indicates something about what enables – and limits – this imaginative activity. But it still does not tell us what kind of activity is at issue. I cannot give a full account here (that’s the bigger project I am working on), but here is a first approximation. When we try to grasp another species’ mind, we usually run two kinds of imaginative work in parallel, both constrained by what we know about the animal’s body, brain, behavior, and ecology. On one track, we build an “outside” picture: we form careful claims about what the animal can detect, discriminate, and represent (mainly propositional imagination). For bats, for example, we might say that echolocation gives them a structured sense of “echoic space,” allowing fine-grained spatial discrimination. On the other track, we sometimes attempt an “inside” picture: we try, as best we can, to approximate what it might feel like to inhabit that perspective, without simply projecting human psychology onto the animal (mainly recreative, imagistic imagination). With bats, that might involve trying to imagine echolocation less as “hearing turned up” and more as a way of perceiving space that plays a role similar to vision (Dawkins 1986). When there is no close human analogue, the outside route does most of the work and the inside route can only be metaphorical at best, as the bat’s case suggests. But when that inside approximation seems feasible, it can help discipline and enrich the outside claims. For example, dogs’ color vision seems more tractable than bat sonar: they are dichromats, so the red–green distinctions that structure so much of our visual world largely collapse for them. If you try to imagine a bright red toy on a green lawn, the toy may not “pop” in the way it does for us; the scene looks more like a range of yellows, blues, and grays. That kind of controlled “inside” exercise can then feed back into the “outside” claims about what dogs can and cannot visually discriminate in everyday contexts. Crucially, both tracks are forms of an overall striving imaginative endeavor: they proceed through repeated, revisable attempts to get closer, corrected and refined in light of evidence, rather than by a single leap to a final picture.
There is Value and Glory in the Striving
Like Yong, I think there is value in striving to imagine other animals’ minds. There is epistemic value because, e.g., it can help us push past our own Umwelt recalibrating what we take to be salient in animal behavior and making us better at noticing what their perceptual and cognitive capacities actually allow them to feel and do. There is moral value because, e.g., it can make their peculiar kinds of mindedness harder to ignore, widening the scope of our concern beyond the human case. But, as weird as it might sound, I also believe there is aesthetic value. Here is why.
First, imagination can be a disciplined, heuristically significant ingredient of scientific inquiry, and in that setting the aesthetic reward can be understood as part of the satisfaction of inquiry itself – along broadly Kantian lines, as a constrained “free play” of imagination and understanding in the pursuit of knowledge (Breitenbach 2013). This applies not only to scientists who model animal perception, but also to non-specialists who, through well-informed popular accounts such as Yong’s (2022), retrace some of that imaginative labor.
Second, aesthetic gratification can lie in the striving to imagine as such. When we try to imagine what it is like to experience the world through, say, a sonar-like perceptual system, we can enjoy the struggle of approximation rather than the attainment of a final, correct result – something that likely remains beyond our reach. The exercise captivates because we repeatedly aim to get closer, while our imaginings remain constrained by background knowledge about the animal’s behavior and functions. The pleasure here is, in large part, a pleasure in the exercise of imagination (Feagin 1984) and in the striving endeavor as such – structurally akin to what Nguyen calls “striving play,” developed from Suits’s account of games, where the point is not simply the goal but the struggle of striving toward it (Suits 1978; Nguyen 2020).
Third, aesthetic pleasure can also come from the methods we use to scaffold this striving. In practice, our imaginings are often supported by props – artifacts such as books, films, VR, and soundscapes – that guide and constrain imaginative work. Some supports mainly add information, while others work by altering perception itself and giving imagination new materials – for example, movies, VR, bioacoustics. These methods still fall short – our brains remain human – but they can be aesthetically striking precisely because they foreground the interplay between perception and imagination (Walton 1990), an enjoyable blend that can later enrich further attempts to imagine other minds.
And, last but not least, part of the aesthetic pull lies in the minds themselves that we are trying to reach through imagination and in the effects this encounter can produce: for example, a sense of the weirdness – and even eeriness – of forms of mindedness so unlike our own, or a kind of sublime response to the sheer peculiarity and otherness of other minds.
An Immense World is full of these kinds of beauty. Maybe that’s why Yong’s book struck me so strongly, after all.
Notes
[1] Yong takes the phrase “informed imaginative leap” from Alexandra Horowitz—a cognitive scientist who studies canine cognition—and specifically from her book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. It’s another book I warmly recommend.
References
Breitenbach, Angela. 2013. “Beauty in Proofs: Kant on Aesthetics in Mathematics.” European Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 955–977.
Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Feagin, Susan L. 1984. “Some Pleasures of Imagination.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1): 41-55.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2013. “On Being an Octopus.” Boston Review. URL = https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/peter-godfrey-smith-being-octopus/.
Grandin, Temple. 2006. Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books.
Horowitz, Alexandra. 2009. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. New York: Scribner.
Kind, Amy. 2019. “Mary’s Power of Imagination.” In The Knowledge Argument, edited by Sam Coleman, 161–179. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–450.
Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Suits, Bernard. 1978. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Yong, Ed. 2022. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House.