[ExI] puzzle - animal consciousness

[Giovanni Santostasi]

I think the idea here is to create a situation where the dog makes a
decision based on some form of reasoning, in this case after excluding the
first 2 roads the unavoidable conclusion is that the master has followed
the 3 roads. This indeed would show some form of high reasoning in the dog.
The details are not so important. Neil deGrasse Tyson does a similar
experiment in this video, where Chaser the dog finds a stuffed animal that
never saw before (Darwin) by excluding all the other possibilities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-CAhALUBvk



On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 5:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace
<foozler83 at gmail.com>wrote:

> In Michio Kaku's book, The Future of the Mind, there is a puzzle (page
> 303) that makes no sense to me.  Plutarch and Pliny have written about it,
> Montaigne, John Locke, George Berkeley, and Aquinas have opined about it
> and no one is happy with any solution to whether the dog can
> think/abstract.  Here it is:
>
> There are three roads and the dog's master has gone down one of them.  The
> dog sniffs along two of them, finding no scent of his master, and so,
> without sniffing (!), takes the third.  Did he think?
>
> IMO:  flawed puzzle.  A dog simply would not do this.  Saying 'but if he
> did' begs the question.  A creature of scent, he would sniff the third
> trail just as he had the first two.  To a dog, smell overrides the other
> senses.  Another flaw seems to be this:  how did the dog 'know' his master
> went down any of the roads?  But this is not important.
>
> Your opinion?  bill w
>
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