What Dogs See That We Can't

A dog can stare at you for ten minutes straight and make you feel watched like no human being ever has, but the real question is: what does it see that we don't? René Descartes, the man behind "I think, therefore I am," was convinced that animals had no consciousness and performed vivisections on dogs and rabbits without remorse. One hundred and fifty years later, Charles Darwin turns everything upside down: humans are animals, period. But today, in the age of artificial intelligence, the confrontation has shifted: it is no longer humans versus animals, but humans versus machines. And here comes the shock: the things we thought were most human – reasoning, speaking, calculating – are precisely the things that computers learn most easily. But emotions, the feeling of being alive, remain the domain of animals. Michael Pollan puts it this way: "The higher capacities we thought were uniquely ours – reason, language, intelligence – have been easier to teach machines than the basic emotions we share with animals." Judith Shulevitz, writing about dogs in art, describes the feeling that anyone who lives with a dog knows: that moment when you realize that another consciousness, different from your own, is looking at you and understands you without words. In a painting by Tiepolo, a dog sees a young woman and its gaze unlocks the meaning of the work. In a painting by Goya, a blind beggar has his eyes closed, but his dog instead looks straight at us: he becomes the center of the scene, the point of consciousness and moral conscience. Thomas Laqueur, author of the book "The Dog's Gaze", argues that in paintings, dogs are often placed there to see what humans miss, to tell us where to look. And if you think about it, it makes sense: a computer can even write a novel or paint a picture, but it always lacks that spark, that intuition that comes from a life lived. This is why art made by artificial intelligence leaves us cold, while the presence of an animal – real or painted – gives us something that not even the most brilliant human or the most sophisticated machine can invent. The really strange thing is that it took centuries and a thousand philosophical theories, yet all it took was sitting next to a dog to understand that consciousness is not just thought, but above all feeling. Perhaps, if Descartes had looked into his dog's eyes instead of dissecting it, he would have written a very different story about the mind. Now try looking at your dog – or even just a friend's dog – when it stares at you: it's not just observing you, it's pointing to something that you, as a human, risk never seeing. Here is the perspective that is almost always missing: it is not intelligence that separates us from machines, but the ability to feel and to look at the world with an intuition that cannot be programmed. Dogs, in art and in life, are there to show us the piece of reality that we tend to ignore. If you thought your dog was staring at you just to ask for food, maybe from now on you'll look at it with different eyes. Being conscious doesn't just mean thinking, but really feeling that you exist. If this story has made you see your dog in a new light, you can press I'm In on Lara Notes: it's the way to say that this perspective belongs to you. And if you happen to talk about it with someone – perhaps by describing the scene by Goya or Pollan's quote – on Lara Notes you can mark the conversation with Shared Offline: it's the gesture that keeps track of the ideas that circulate outside of social media. This idea comes from The Atlantic and saves you 8 minutes of reading.