Question by : Do cats have consciousness or awareness?
For example, oysters have no actual sense of consciousness, since they lack a brain; they only have reactive fibers.
Cats have a brain, but do they actually have any sort of real awareness, or are they basically like oysters, only living by impulse and instinct?
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Answer by .
Best way to discover that is to place the cat in front of a mirror and observe the cat’s reaction.
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As far as anyone knows now, humans have no instinct (If they did, every human would react similarly to given stimuli.), but cats do. My best guess is that cats have consciousness, but aren’t capable of as much as humans. Cats are also capable of REM sleep (Watch a cat sleep sometime, and you may see its eyes and limbs twitch. That means the cat is dreaming.). Since they can dream, I assume that their lives aren’t completely revolving around outward stimuli.
Think of it this way, an Oyster has consciousness but a smaller ‘decision space’. A cat has consciousness with a larger decision space than the Oyster, and a human has consciousness with even more decision space than the Cat.
Think of the brain as not the creator of consciousness and you may surprised at how many things start to make sense. The way Science understands consciousness today is very limited in knowing who we actually are. Although there is science that does understand this but it’s on the fringe for now. It will change over time to more mainstream when the dogma and beliefs are eroded.
An example would be how genes don’t control us as we are led to believe . Bruce Lipton found this out years ago. http://www.brucelipton.com/ If you are interested and serious to find an answer have a look at his work and interviews . There are plenty of other people besides him to learn from 🙂