Joe Pfeiffer wrote:

dh@. writes:


On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 11:32:26 -0400, Logic316 wrote:


dh@. wrote:


Dogs, cats, cattle, almost all animals "lower" than the
great apes have no sense of self.


You are the last person who would know if they do Goo, that's
for sure. They indicate by their behavior that they do, and there is
absolutely no reason at all to believe they don't.


Even a broken clock can be right once in a while. I would urge you to
look at the following objective studies on self-awareness:

The "mirror test" at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

That's not a test to see if animals have awareness. It's simply an
effort to get them to realise that what they view is somehow a
representation of themselves. It's not surprising that a dog can't
learn it, but it could certainly pass a test of awareness of its own urine
marking its own territory:

"...there is also debate as to the value of the test as applied to animals
who rely primarily on senses other than vision, such as dogs."

which to me means the same thing as it would if they passed the mirror test:
they are aware of themselves.


Well, no. It casts doubt on whether it's a good test for dogs. Note
that at this point it's quite well established that rubbing a puppy's
nose in its messes is useless in housebreaking the animal; this
implies that they aren't aware that they were responsible for the
mess. Whatever a dog's reaction to its own urine means, it's hard to
imagine it would imply real self-awareness.

It's hard for me to imagine my Golden doesn't have self-awareness at
some level when brings me a toy and bumps my elbow to know my hand off
the keyboard. But that's different from real objective evidence.

"No dog knows that there have been dogs before him, and
there will be dogs after him." - Kenneth Boulding