The Mouse in the Cage

A laboratory mouse who lives in a cage can be expected to behave in fairly predictable ways. In short, the mouse wants food.

If you teach the mouse to work in exchange for its food, so it will work. It will pull levers, solve puzzles, run on wheels—whatever task it’s taught, it will happily perform.

When he learns to work, the mouse thinks he’s cracked the code of mouse life, connecting his daily meals to his rigorous athletic output, but this is merely something it has been taught. It’s all a setup.

The mouse never knows what’s really going on! Unless—and until—there’s a breakout in the lab and other mice enter the cage to pass along a coded message (“It’s all a setup!”), the mouse remains in the dark.

This is all he knows. These are the rules of order in the lab. Not since birth has the mouse understood there to be any sort of alternative.

One more thing about mice experiments: much of the time, the mice are stand-ins for humans.

Researchers aren’t usually trying to solve problems for the future rodents of the world. For various reasons, it’s not nearly as easy to experiment on humans as it is mice (there are, among other things, ethical considerations to take into account, as well as institutional review boards to appease).

Instead, the mice are our proxies, and we could make all sorts of comparisons about how humans go about their lives in much the way as mice in a cage.

Ultimately, we might say, many humans are just like the lab mice who learn to run on wheels to produce rewards of cheese.

There is, however, one difference between mice and men (and women!). This difference is consciousness. We are not unenlightened mice.

Whereas the mouse on the wheel can live out his days without knowing anything different, we know better. This is a blessing and a curse.

The mouse, after all, might not want to be enlightened. Given the choice, he might say (just imagine that a mouse can talk), “Well, okay—Nietzsche was right, life is meaningless. But what else am I going to do? Might as well just keep running on this wheel.”

So that’s mouse life. But our lives are different—or at least, they can be.

It’s easy to go through life like a mouse in an experiment, blissfully unaware of life outside the cage. We do what’s in front of us. We do what we see others do. If we have enough food (and other resources, in our case), we tend not to complain or look for alternatives.

But every once in a while, like the fictional lab breakout scenario, we get a warning that something better is out there.

When that happens, we face a choice: will we choose to seek it out, or will we keep spinning on the wheel?

At this point someone will bring up free will, and whether we’re living in a simulation, and so on. But here’s the thing: while it’s interesting to consider the simulation concept, the reality is it would have to be a very, very big simulation—and one that allows its subjects a very, very broad range of options to pursue.

When we begin looking outside the cage, we may discover that many of the things we spend our time on—including many that feel like progress—are actually quite meaningless.

Meanwhile, the few things that have meaning can be elusive and hard to identify at first. That’s why it’s so easy to stay in the cage! But remember, you’re not a lab rat. Something better is out there.

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Images: 1, 2, 3