Canine Cognition of Conveyances

Last updated: Wed Jul 17 2024

Do dogs understand elevators?

I wonder this every time the elevator doors close on Rooibos and I, trapping us in a metal box that will hopefully deposit us on the correct floor. What is Rooibos thinking?

If the elevators open on the same floor we left, he looks up at me, confused, or at least that’s how I read his expression — so he understands that we’re supposed to end up somewhere different than we started. His sense of direction must help — he can immediately tell when I’m trying to head home and resists if he wants a longer walk. I assume as a fellow mammal that he has a sense of proprioception, so perhaps he can feel vertical acceleration.

But does that result in an understanding that our home is on the third floor? Would he know to look up to see me waving from our window?

It may be hard to tell “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”, but we can’t even tell what it’s like to be a dog!

See you in a week or so,
Russell

P.S. I signed on as a software engineer at Descript! I’ll be starting in about a month.

P.P.S Two recommendations this week. First up is Chris Krycho’s talk “Seeing Like A Programmer”, which riffs on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State and Peter Naur’s “Programming as Theory-Building” (two of my favorites) to discuss what software is and what our responsibilities are as software engineers working in society-at-large. In other Seeing Like A State-related content, I loved this long interview with C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher working in an interesting intersection between epistemology, ethics, and game design (!), where he discusses how our values may be flattened by society and how games may provide an escape (among many, many other interesting topics).