Cats and Freewill

I have a special love for cats. Among all the pets that I can have, I think cats are animals that have something you can call a ‘personality.’ They can be aloof, a bum, sweet, playful, wild (cats playing with yarn balls) or whenever there’s food, they can be all over the place. In short, they can be unpredictable. One minute you’re playing with them, another minute you have a scratch on your hand. Not that it’s their fault. They still think you’re playing them. Maybe I just love cats because of their purring (scientists say it’s some form of communication).

Actually scientists haven’t discovered why cats make that low ‘growling’ sound whenever they purr. The purring process still puzzles scientists as they’re still trying to study how cats or any creature in the feline family could do just that. Some of them thought that maybe it means ‘I’m not a threat.’ That theory is feasible. And yet what about those ‘meowing’ sounds? I have observed that purring (which cats frequently do among humans they ‘love’) is another thing from meowing and trilling (a kind of growling) they produce whenever they teach their kittens anything. If only they could do what Lewis Carrol, author of Alice in Wonderland said:

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens that whatever you say to them, they always purr. If they would only purr for ‘yes’ and mew for ‘no’, or any rule of that sort, so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can one deal with a person if they always say the same thing?”

Cats have been part of humanity’s domestic life for hundreds of years and yet anything about them remains elusive. No wonder they were worshipped in Ancient Egypt (in the form of the goddess Bastet and Sekhmet).

I have this cute cat called “Dadits” (named after a character from Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher), a two-toned (black and white) male cat that has been with us for the last two years. You see, our house seemed to be a cat-haven or the Cat Rivendell of the whole subdivision. One time a three-colored cat just appeared out of nowhere and as if it made a decision for itself, it has stayed in the garage ever since. Other cats visit and take the food from Dadits’ plate, some even stay for awhile for us (my family) to gaze at them and a minute later, they’re gone. I think cats spread rumors that our house is indeed a nice vacation spot or something.

Moving on, Dadits is unique among all the cats that we’ve cared for. Mainly it’s because of his uncanny ability for self-control. While other cats before would jump on the kitchen and eat the food while the whole family’s out, Dadits seemed to have that inner struggle… I mean I can tell that he likes to eat it, but whenever Mom would shout “DADITS!” he seem to understand. No need for spanking or shooing the cat. He has this mannerism of opening the screen windows by using his two paws and whenever he would be caught, he immediately runs and hides under the bed. I mean, come on, he knows right and wrong! haha.

The cat has stayed with us (his sister, Trixia died a year ago, and his mother Monique still visits every so often) despite the fact that we don’t feed him that much. Whenever all the people in the house are asleep, he also sleeps. Sometimes he even sleeps beside me.

Another characteristic that makes him unique is whenever I sit on the computer chair, he would jump on my stomach, sit there, and if I pretend he’s not there, he would use his paw to touch my face to call my attention.

Now, I had this argument with my Mom about why Dadits would still enter the house through the window (even if we’re not home) and get out, and enter again. Mom said “Why can’t THAT CAT learn anything?! Doesn’t he know that when he does that, mosquitoes enter the house? Doesn’t he know that he’ll be thrown out of the window when we arrive???”

And I got into thinking that.. wait. He does know there’s a consequence. I mean whenever he gets caught, he runs and hides, yet he deliberately goes in and out of the windows anyway, leaving the windows open (and letting all the mosquitoes in). Could it be that despite knowing the consequence, he still does that because he simply ‘wanted’ to go in? Has he accepted the eventual consequence of entering the window? I can only speculate.

Even if cats don’t have ‘free-will’ in reality (for they rely on instincts) this got me reminded of what makes a human, human. Almost all the fields of knowledge we know today have reduced man to a machine… Man can be controlled by certain stimuli; Man can be fragmented, deconstructed, and analyzed, Man is just an animal. We have forgotten that man is not a machine nor an animal. We have free-will. We don’t feel emotions as though it were only some chemical reaction that triggered something in our brain or the whole body. Otherwise love, anger, happiness, justice, things that we do not see that matters to us, won’t have meaning. And our lives won’t have significance.

Somehow my cat reminded me that being human is complicated. That unlike him, I have a conscious will to resist my instincts (like hunger) if it crosses the line, and though I foresee the consequences, my choice doesn’t depend on instincts alone or even out of fear of the consequences or anything that can be seen or touched. I can choose to do what is right despite everything.

C.S. Lewis said it best:

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.

~resplend3nt

PS: These pictures are actual pictures of Dadits from my camera phone.