DoCatsHaveMinds

When you get involved in ArtificialIntelligence, sooner or later you will come up against the question of: but is the machine really intelligent?

And if you are lucky, that will send you down the rabbit hole of PhilosophyOfMind and eventually you'll bottom out at the realisation that the question is just a special case of TheQuestionOfOtherMinds. And while philosophy has a lot of good and interesting thinking about that, the one thing it can't offer is a nice convenient and satisfying answer to the question of whether it's like something to be a LargeLanguageModel.

But anyway, as a way to distract yourself from that conundrum, I invite you to consider the fate of the question : "do cats have minds?"

The thing about this question is that there are millions of cat lovers in the world who already have a perfectly good answer to it.

And it won't matter how rigorous your experiments are, or that your paper got published in Nature because the reviewers really loved it.

The cat lovers of the world will not give a flying fuck.

Of course their Tiddles has a mind and a rich personal relationship with them.

Cat lovers are literally the limits of science when it comes to the question of cat minds. They define a frontier beyond which science can go no further.

Ultimately, you may harrumph, but science is a social phenomenon. And the cat lovers of the world can and will hold that line. Any story to the effect that cats don't have minds is going to get firewalled around a few cognitive research geeks, while the rest of the world is protected from it.