Understandable

I had a cat. This cat was an ordinary cat until it developed a routine of being fed tablets each day, so this turn was also quite an ordinary twist in a cat’s life.

Each day, I looked over my shoulder at the big wooden clock, and at exactly four o’clock, I marched towards the cat with medicine in my rock-solid hand. No later than the second time, the cat started looking at the clock. At around 15:50, it hid.

This added a bit of a game to our ritual. For long stretches of time, I was the only active player in this game; the cat probably just looked at me from the most obvious place.

During this peaceful time, I wondered: did the cat understand the clock? Or did it merely remember the image of the clock hands that led to the medicine ritual?

This was actually quite an interesting question. Let me see. I started to draft a possible experimental design. Say, at another time, I could feed the cat a treat. A trivial continuation—or, if you prefer, a continuation by linearity—would be to assign a different action to each hour, which would serve as an intervention in the cat’s behaviour.

Would this be enough to claim that the cat understood the clock? Maybe fully understanding it would mean being able to associate the group law with the clock hands.

In the midst of these thoughts, I suddenly recalled that my cat had actually died a week ago.

My wife, however, is still alive. Does she understand the clock?