[ExI] puzzle - animal consciousness

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Tue May 20 09:33:08 UTC 2014


William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> , 20/5/2014 12:30 AM:
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.

I think you are missing the point. Your response is a bit like the student saying: "But no cannon can fire a projectile at that speed! And besides, the air resistance would stop it! Hence, professor Newton, your argument that gravity can make an object orbit the Earth is flawed!" 
Or perhaps more closely to how engineering students often react to hearing the Trolley Problem in an ethics course: they come up with things like ripping out the lever and jamming the wheels of the trolley rather than making any moral choice. Which would be an awesome response in real life, but misses the point about what the thought experiment is about. Philosophical and physical thought experiments deliberately reduce a situation to a pure (often pretty strange) case in order to make a point about the underlying theory. Not playing by the rules means you are not willing to engage with the posed question. Of course, a popular and valid approach is to try to show that a thought experiment makes an unwarranted *internal* assumption - real dogs, cannons and trolleys do not matter, but the stated properties of them in the experiment might have a subtle flaw (like in the Feynman ratchet experiment).
The point of the dog example is to make it clearer what reasoning is, and whether it has anything to do with an internal language, intuitions or deduction. It seems that real dogs are merely interesting examples, while the deep question is whether there is an innate intuition or deduction that if (A or B or C) is true, ((not A) and (not B)) imply C. Even if dogs did behave like in the experiment it might be due to a different mechanism, like running mental models of possible worlds, updating their likelihoods based on accumulated evidence, and acting when the likelihood becomes concentrated enough in one possibility: no deduction needed (at this point a philosopher will complain that my Bayesian Beagle is actually equivalent to his Deductive Doberman, since Bayes rule implicitly contains the above deduction; much barking will ensue). 
Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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