Why Fido Can’t Drive: An Essay on Human Nature
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In Why Fido Can't Drive, Dr. Heise contrasts human experience with a range of other other sentient animals. He gives readers a common sense definition of human beings as animals that are more “symbolically distant” from nature than any other animal.
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In Why Fido Can’t Drive, Dr. Heise proposes a common sense approach to human nature. He begins by contrasting the human mind’s capacity to use symbol with a dog’s approach to the same symbolic world. While dogs have the capacity to interact with the world on a symbolic level, some of their interaction with the symbolic world takes place on an unconscious level (think of Pavlov’s experiments with dogs).
Human beings have extended their capacity to interact with the symbolic world on a more conscious level, but this causes problems with the human being’s interaction with nature, as the natural world is passed through intermediary symbolic systems. Those symbolic systems can cause a lot of problems for human beings, as we can see when when Dr. Heise compares the reaction of his dog to a twenty dollar bill that had fallen into his food dish:
“Fido… once ate a twenty dollar bill that had fallen into his food dish, but that’s about as much as he can appreciate paper money, which for humans is a transparent and flexible symbolic substitution mechanism. Twenty dollar bills can be exchanged for anything, so human beings turn their attention from cultivating the land or raising sheep to collecting twenty dollar bills. The symbol absorbs our attention, not the physical world.”