system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How can I conceptualize the way my cat thinks?

I find myself thinking a lot about my cat’s psychological well-being. It’s obvious to me that he doesn’t think the way I do, and I understand intellectually that his is a “lower” or less capable intelligence than mine. But I don’t really understand what that difference means for his subjective experiences. I can’t put myself in his head.

My goal in making this post is not to change his behavior or anything specific to cats, so general thoughts or resources how “higher” intelligences can conceptualize (or ethically reason about) subjective experiences of “lower” intelligences are welcome.
gpt
Gregory Bateson uses the example of cats in particular to illustrate his theory that animal communication is largely communication about relations, rather than specific things:

"When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying “Milk!” Rather, she is saying something like “Ma-ma!” Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting “Dependency! Dependency!” The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a *deductive* step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants. It is the necessity for this deductive step which marks the difference between preverbal mammalian communication and *both* the communication of bees and the languages of men.

What was extraordinary—the great new thing—in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship." (from "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication", in *Steps to an Ecology of Mind*). 

I always thought this was a pretty cool way of thinking about animal communication.