Does having a dog mitigate loneliness (make it a little more bearable)?
You have to be able to relate to the dog as a companion. Verbal communication is a major component of companionship for most people, if not all--I think our species is just wired that way since speech is the key to all of our accomplishments for the last 50K years or so. (Anthropologists look at the things humans have done since then and say it couldn't possibly have happened without language.)
Dogs are extremely sensitive to our feelings through our pheromones and our body language, and most short-muzzled breeds have photoreceptors concentrated in the center of their retinas so they can read our facial expressions. They communicate back with body language, touch, licking and occasionally sound. But they can't understand more than a few words of our language (the world record is something like 200), and they can't talk back. Still, their unwavering loyalty provides a dependable constant in our life that can make bad times more bearable. And even though they can't talk to us, we can talk to them and they listen with great interest. I've often joked that the reason we have dogs is so we can talk to ourselves without looking weird.
Having a dog is also a bit like having a child: having someone to care for gives you a purpose and takes your mind off of your troubles. I don't mean to short-change people who bond with other species, notably cats, parrots and various primates, all of whom communicate in their own way with a significant bandwidth. But dogs were the first domesticated non-human animal so we've had longer to adapt to each other, and we have even interfered with their evolution to make the bond stronger. For example, their alpha instinct is much weaker than that of the wolf, so we don't have to argue over who's in charge. They're also much more gregarious than wolves and are happy to live in a gigantic multi-species pack that would drive a wolf bonkers.
What are the odds that an intelligent person can find other intelligent people to interact with on a science forum? Has anybody done a study about the average intelligence of science forum members? I'm thinking they are higher than average over the general population.
There are different dimensions to intelligence. Join a poetry forum and you'll find people who can blow your ass away when it comes to ferreting out the hidden meaning in poems. Join an online chess or go group and you'll be humbled by how much smarter those people are in formulating those kinds of strategies. Music, history, literature, art... people are intelligent in different ways.
Anyway I find myself getting lonelier when my Internet connection goes down and it's a very real feeling.
As I've often noted, our species's uniquely massive forebrain gives us the ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. (Some of our companion animals have a limited ability to do this, but not like ours.) Speech was the first communication technology and as I noted it was probably invented at least 50KYA. Writing was the second, invented in the Bronze Age around 5KYA. Then electronic communication was invented in 1834, with the first commercial telegraph. These new kinds of communication created a kind of "companionship" that is divorced from physical proximity.
Look at us right here. We regard each other as companions even though we've never seen each other's faces or heard our voices. Many of us don't even identify our gender and we often guess at age and nationality (male, 69, USA). And it works. You've provided the perfect example of this transcendence of virtual companionship over physical: You miss us when your electronic link is down, even though you've never seen or heard us.
It's become a cliche that when families sit around the dinner table (if they even do that anymore), each person is absorbed in a texting exchange with someone outside the group and they hardly talk to each other.
As I've said before, I applaud this extension of our sense of companionship. I believe it represents our future and promises the ultimate merging of our disparate nations into one more-or-less peaceful global civilization. Our shit-for-brains government has been telling us for 30 years that Americans and Iranians hate each other. Yet when Neda Aga Soltan was gunned down in the streets of Tehran and her friends sent real-time cellphone videos of the event out over the ether, Americans wept for her and wrote songs about her.
I like this future. Billions of companions!
