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the animal with access to its sense organs? It’s hard to come up with a definitive answer here. Sometimes it seems like Bran and Summer share their consciousness. Other times, either Bran is just there, silently noting what his direwolf is sensing, or Bran’s consciousness alone is operating “inside” of Summer’s body. The first option could be the case, so it looks as though in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, it is possible to embody more than one point of view, and therefore to be able to know what it is like to be something as strange as a direwolf. Does this tell us anything about the nature of consciousness?
Descartes and Direwolves . . . if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul like us. This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.6
The great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) would have dismissed all of this “what it’s like” talk when it comes to direwolves, or any other animal for that matter, because he believed that animals were not conscious at all. He thought they were more like complex machines. Descartes thought this was true for two main reasons. First, he believed that consciousness required the existence of a soul—a nonphysical substance—and only persons had souls. Actually, saying that persons “have” souls is not quite correct; Descartes thought persons were souls. In other words, for Descartes, you are not your body, but rather you are an immaterial substance that is causally connected to your body. So when Sansa looks at Sandor Clegane and sees this very large dangerous man with half of his face burned off, she is seeing the Hound’s body only, and not the Hound himself. What makes this his body is the fact that when he, the Sandor
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