Can dogs think phenominally?

Perhaps a further fine tuning to more specific content can be gained by replacing ‘instinct’ with automatic behavior.

In that way some interveaning ganglia may morph into the more general cognitive function, .

That is what I get from Your pre-existent cognitive mapping of instinct.

Automatic seems more of a transitional function through learning rather then pure instinctive behavior, that may be viewed as some given at certain levels of morphology, leaving the learning process more like a series of validations of hypothetical summations at each level.

Which may beg the question of learning being a repetitive review of various newly formed coalesced or reified structurally reduced toward lower symbolic levels.

Not that lab demonstrations are not useful, but they only affirm the learned reduction through memory storage.

I would think a lot of lab work with the cognitive basis of dogs’ faculties are done to validate the hypothetical assumptions underlying them.

A lot of Russian research with dogs, and of course Pavlov setting the trend.

My approach bases is mode intuitive, and again begs where general hypotheticals about brain-mind function actually come from ,

I am happy

Agreed - this is a technique I use often and I believe all the greats would have similarly been this way. I try not to delude myself; It is of course important to place a reasonable amount of faith in established science and philosophy since they have reached functional conclusions already(establishing usable facts). But it should be known that work in philosophy and science is not even close to being complete - each one of these alone is more than any man can comfortably handle. As you already know(I will place it here however for anyone else who is reading that may not be aware): remaining grounded outside of theory is important.

Yes, I agree. I am glad you are being level-headed about this. As we have witnessed, some people lose themselves into their own theories and negate already useful and functional theories previously developed by other philosophers and scientists(it is also worth noting and some scientists have closed their mind to philosophical inquiry(being lost to established functional theory))).

Yes, it would not make sense to think that basal ganglia and neocortex are not connected in some way. This makes about as much sense as to believe that the mind and brain are not connected. Given that we have both psychology and neuroscience that are very useful already in terms of real world application. It is just that the lay person is ready to accept established knowledge over the anomalous of the new. To say that the triune brain is interconnected with morphological processes happening all the time is I believe a statement of true but not fully established fact - intuitively we can already see that this is making sense.

What you are getting from my pre-existent cognitive mapping is exactly what I had intended to be understood.

Truly, I believe the concept of the instinctive to be useful but I do not think that it has been put into its proper place. It is good to have a point of reference that other things can emanate from >> but to be emitted rather than produced by. These levels of morphology are perhaps waiting to be discovered - inferences begin at a very low level, I already have proof of this through the use of artificial neural networks that essentially use vectors(tensors) to refer to dictionaries and are trained as such to take the dictionaries and make meaning from them. The network itself has no concept of each word - meaning comes from an arrangement of numbers representing distance and relation. Dictionaries are built through training - they are not there before training - words are learned through training. Dictionaries are contained within the mind and not physically arranged like our lay concept of the dictionary(this is the same in real life - each man contains a lot of dictionaries). All of this comes about from seeds and roots - metaphorically speaking of course. We know that when we plant a seed it is already pre-programmed to produce something more amazing than itself. The hardware and later the software are the seeds(ambiguous since hardware can contain the concept of pre-programmed roots) and roots respectively. Another way to think of this is in the format of a substrate containing similar principles that have already been discussed.

You hit the nail on the head Meno, therefore I will not comment directly on this but rather make an extension of previously mentioned material. The aforementioned vectors(>>tensors) have carry over information from previous vectors in the sequence and produce relations between the higher and lower levels - storing somewhere in there, representations of many sorts. Newly formed coalesced knowledge is formed through transfer-relations based on old knowledge - we are talking about generalized learning.

Side quote: “Transfer effects are found when learning one task either facilitates (positive transfer) or interferes with (negative transfer) learning the second task.”
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/transfer-effect

I think I have stated on ILP before along the lines that instinct need not be removed from higher-level functions << not in these exact words – more like >> existence need not be removed from its seeds and roots << but again not in these exact words. The point I am trying to make is that we can completely miss new learning opportunities by too often thinking about things in a pre-conditioned way. It is clear that thinking in a preconditioned way is not how those who make discoveries(all of us) are thinking at the time of the discovery and part of the period leading up to the discovery.

We also have to entertain the idea that some essential knowledge is passed down through genetic information - trial and error based upon the whole survival of the fittest and evolutionary concepts.

I disagree wholeheartedly here.
My dog is highly sociable. She does not know about Darwin so is not concerned with offspring or coupling, nor does she persue maximal “survival behaviour”.
And this is how it should be. Natural Selection has ensured the preservation of traits, as well as traits that have little or no bearing on mating ot survival. Natural and “Domestic Selection” (which is far more apt) provides her with feelings. She feels she needs to make friends with almost everyone. It provides her with feeling like she wants food. Were she to have an unlimited supply she would eat until she was sick and end up killing herself from obesity.
She has her special doggy friends, and others that she would be more interested in if they were more interested in her - this is all very human as far as I can see.

I disagree again.
She feels the need to be social and needs companionship. She has no alterior motive and has no understanding of survival in any sense.

You could, if you wanted ,also reduce human behaviour to survival. But how poor would such a view be?

Well yes, point taken but as poor as it is, fact is, that existential survival does measure in toward the efforts of being fit to overcome the hazards and hardships of life by a primary will , where the only the fittest survive.

But does not begin to address the THREAD subject.

And actually unfit dogs are common survivors. Like humans they have the benifts of health care.

@ Meno.

“Can dogs think phenomenally?”

A note on language:

The question is not only whether dogs know and use a vocabulary, beacuse the question is also whether they furthermore use a grammar and thus a language, a dog language.

It’s not only a vocabulary, it’s even a grammar, albeit a very primitive grammar. Moreover, even a vocabulary is of no use at all without meaning and the grammatical linking of these meanings. All this must have a sense. All creatures have to do with a meaning. Life differs from death by sense.

Inorganic systems have no sense (besides a possible metaphysical one), but organic systems (systems of life) would not exist at all without sense, so they need a sense.

This implies that at least the higher creatures have a more complex grammar than the lower creatures. But all these grammars are of course as good as nothing if one compares them with the grammar of the human language.

The word “vocabulary” here must not be understood humanly; also the word “word” must not be understood according to human language.

The dog, which is to be talked about here in this thread, does not understand the human language as a “human language”. For example: “Words” - regardless which one of them - are not understandable for the dog as “words”, but as something that the phonetic sequence means to the dog. The dog hears sounds that mean something, and relates - i.e. interprets - them in/to “dog language”, which in turn is based on what the dog has experienced; e.g.: “ball” means then approximately: “my master and I go outside and play there with the ball” or “I will fetch the ball, because I should/want to fetch the ball” etc… The phonetic series “ball” means all this and much more to the dog. And in any case it means a good thing/situation.

So indeed, a creature’s language is just a very, very, very simple language, but a simple language - regardless how simple it is - is a language. Needed for a language are signs, consisting of the signifier and the signified, as well as their meanings (semantics) and relations as rules (grammar).

A thoughtful and concise post Otto. I know you were communicating with Meno and not me but something caught my eye. I hope you don’t mind me interjecting.

Are you talking about external sense here?

I am also curious what you mean by inorganic systems.

There is a grammar of scent and body language dogs have that we cannot be party to,
When dogs learn human words, as they do, they are learning not only a foreign language but a xenomorphic one.
They have also evolved a system of barks, and other noises that no other similar species has, and relate directly to their human-dog interaction.

@ Otto and Sculptor

Learning begs the question of how those associations arise between the various signs to producing the signals that become meaningful to both man and dog; which are recognized as other than what they were and what they have become.

The dog comes to recognize higher orders of signals, that ringing the bell means the promise of food, sAlivating to sound and nit smell.

This type of change is characteristic to both , and this is a premarket for advance to simularity, of ever widening forms of identifiable objects.

Simulation becomes possible in cognitive function , where substitution of cues gradually is learned both ways. Ideas arise in this way ,in a sense logic precedes language.

It occurs to me that my dog also has rudimentary grammar in English.
When I set down the food, she will go for it immediately unless I tell her not to, then she will wait, for instructions.
THe phrase I use is “ready, steady, go”. She stands on ready, moves forward on steady and eats on go. She understands perfectly what is required of her and is able to understand the phrase in sequence.
Not bad for a completely different species.

By “inorganic systems” I mean systems (and processes) of lifeless nature.

Sense exists exclusively as the sense of the operations that use it, i.e. only at the moment in which it is determined by operations, and neither before nor after. Sense is therefore a product of the operations that use it, and not a world quality that owes itself to a creation, a foundation, an origin.

I speak here as a system theorist, if you will.

It is helpful not to think so much in terms of behaviorism. That does not lead very far.

When I speak of signs, I mean everything that those who have signs and thus meaning (see: semantics) or sense in their operations. Seen in this way, everything is language, e.g. in the semiotic, in the purely linguistic, in the strictly logical, in the mathematical sense.

Non-human creatures do this only on the semiotic level. They can, however, understand a little of the other systems, but only if they can “incorporate” it into their language system, i.e. assign it semiotically. Conversely, humans can also have access to the system of the non-human creatures, but not 100%.

It is interesting that you mention the bell ringing. I mentioned this above, in passing.
Pavlov’s famous experiment is an example of hopeless reductionism. His conclusion was a that a dog upon hearing a bell had become conditioned to salivate; this was a conditioned response. The bell causes the salivation.
However, he failed to recognise the more obvious fact that the dog had learned that a bell meant food, and that as the dog IMAGINED the phenomenon of food with its mind, this thought made the parotid gland respond, because the dog could think.
Pavlov deleted the role of the mind and the imagination.
This conditioning is common enough, and we all do it. Next time you see an advertisment for a favoured food stuff on TV check your mouth. I submit that you too can make your mouth water by imagining chocolate. Why would that be any different from a dog?

I recently watched a video of a dog saving a man from drowning. The dog actually pulled the man to dry ground. What was that dog thinking? One clever scientist noted that the animal mind is confined to the four Fs—feeding, fighting, fleeing and sexual intercourse. I think they think more than those categories allow. A fifth F could be friendship.

Try to reduce a complex living thing to four or five words is absurd is what I think.

Sculptor :

Reductionism as a cognitive process is axiomatic, it happens across the board,
that is a penomenon prevy to man and
dog alike. Such general simplicity may strengthen
the argument for interlocking intrinsic processes

In most cases it stops just this side of absurdity.!.

FIve words: says more about the observer than the observed; it probably indicates the instrumentality of the observer in how the obsevred is to to used.

Then, we’d be back to the dead/ alive cat in the box, the observer unsure to open the box for fear of a sense that the observed would depend on his sense of it.

Reductionism did not just happen, it’s involved in anticipating diminishing verity, and it is probable that the observed acquires this sense on another level.

Does an animal has a sense that soon it is to die on way to the butcher? Even apart from the bleeting which is probably understood by the herd.

I am not pulling this stuff out of a bag, for instance, the dog senses something, that is on a very general level , like pain, bunger, affection, need for someone to takce care of it’s needs. That corresponds to a similar human link, where specific objective correlations have some sense with it.

The logical types differ , but their sense link, connecting the levels of appreception.

The dog can infer man’s actions through learned behavior of various responses, but the human must identify the causally linked response through the chain of relevant cues given.

So the relationship between the observer and the observed can not be quantufied, except maybe a long chain of inputs and responses, as they rise slightly in complexity and subtleness.

Both have to learn from one another, the owner of the dog has to gage the learning in accordance.

Chose your five words, and use them to answer the thread.

Sculptor said:

“Chose your five words, and use them to answer the thread.”

Walkies.
Dinner/food/eat.
Treat.
Get it.
Fetch.