The Cat in the Mirror
I know my cat notices the mirror, because it tends to strategically avoid it. If we shift the mirror so it can see itself, it moves to a different location. If I wave at from inside the mirror, it turns around and looks directly at me. On some level it knows, how the mirror works.
It is also not surprised by the mirror. It is a familiar piece of furniture in its world. It doesn't react as if there was another cat in the mirror. There is no fear or hostility towards the mirror. The attitude might better be described as one of deliberate and strategic ignorance.
The cat cannot avoid seeing the reflection, but it does not know what to do with it. Its response appears to be: this is nonsense. Stop this foolishness. Look away and do something useful, like monitoring the situation or cleaning yourself.
Two Skepticisms
This is not really about my cat. Any intelligent creature can ignore, neglect, deny, or rationalize what lies too far beyond its ability to understand. This means that the brain may not register such a thing as a difficult problem. It may simply dismiss it as nonsense that can safely be ignored.
Many people today are proud of being skeptical, as if skepticism were automatically a sign of higher intelligence. But skepticism is ambiguous. There is a disciplined skepticism that protects thought from credulity. There is also an animal skepticism: a practical dismissal of whatever offers no smell, touch, food, threat, immediate use, or stable place in the world. My cat is skeptical in exactly this sense.
The natural condition is be to be skeptical of aesthetic disinterestedness or theoretical thought. Why pay attention to something without obvious benefit or practical purpose? In many respects, the natural intuition is correct, often this is foolish, and even dangerous. However, it is also among the most advanced capacity humans have, to stay with something strange long enough to figure it out.
"Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" John Keats, letter to George and Thomas Keats, 1817
Philosophy and Reality
The unsettling thing is not just the difficulty of a given problem, like identifying oneself in a mirror. A person can fail to solve an equation without feeling threatened by it. At a deep level, what makes a problem psychologically unsettling is that it disturbs the core structures of our psyche; self-image, image of others, or view of the world, and the deep relations between these that we may not even know we hold. Some fields of inquiry raise questions of this kind more directly than others. Philosophy is one of them.
Moral and political philosophy touch our self-image and sense of purpose. They ask what we should do, what we owe, and what kind of creature we are. The bias is toward answers that protect our self-image, commitments, and sense of purpose. Because these questions make a practical difference, people become animated, take sides, and fight for a cause.
More abstract are theological and metaphysical questions about the nature of the world itself, rather than our place and purpose within it. Is reality purposive or indifferent? Is mind fundamental or accidental? These questions can disturb the background against which moral, practical and even our lives make sense.
Explaining Away
The cat's difficulty is not simply that it sees an image. The reflection puts its body in one place and its visible image in another. The image is there, but there is no second cat to smell or touch. It moves exactly as the cat moves. The problem isn't that the cat is unable to see that it is itself in the mirror, but that it has no incentive to do so, and no way to make sense of it that is not destabilizing. So the cat simply ends the problem by looking away.
Human beings do the same under more respectable names. In philosophy we may call something "merely abstract," "just metaphysics," "wordplay," "mysticism," "nonsense," "unfalsifiable," or "impractical." That judgment is sometimes correct, but it can also become a way of refusing the question before we have understood it, and in that case it becomes ignorance, neglect, denial and rationalization.
My cat looks away. We can do the same with an argument or an unfamiliar way of seeing things. The difficult part is noticing when healthy skepticism hardens into dogma: when it stops confronting what is strange and starts explaining it away.
