The original question was : Do dogs know when they're pregnant?

Would knowing necessarily involve thinking...?

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Neptune, Titan, Stars can Frighten...

We'd have real trouble around here if you couldn't!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Moonhead,

I believed it might fly but now I know. I believe knowing is much more satisfying than believing.

Your assumption is correct. Now you know.

Here's hoping life keeps the female dogs tied up and you have a great new year.

Edit: Fast posts. I believe everyone everywhere would be, Gillianren.
Edit 2: That was vague. I thought you were talking about the question, 'would knowing require thinking...?'

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www.bessler007.blogspot.com

Is there any doubt?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Not if you define 'thinking' as any conscious brain activity...

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Neptune, Titan, Stars can Frighten...

Don't you have to think to know. Do brain dead people know anything.

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perfect is an opinion word-3dknight

it doesn't matter if I get 3 hours of sleep or 6, I still wake up just as tired!-Neverfly

These are the questions that boggle my mind-3dknight

Isn't that how the word is usually understood?

And why are we replying to each other with questions?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I think this is a very complete answer.

I say yes. It's useful to define "knowing" as conscious awareness because this definition gives us a neat separation between instinct and reason.

After a few litters, the four asterisks may figure out what's going on, but the power of her genome is such that knowing isn't at all a necessary part of successfully accomplishing the task.

It's five asterisks, folks!

If they lived in packs like wolves, I suspect they could figure it out even on the first time, based on having seen and smelled the changes in some other female in the pack shortly before more little dogs/wolves came out of her and recognizing that the equivalent changes are now happening in themselves. It doesn't seem likely for a species that doesn't pass the mirror test, though.

I am talking about domesticated dogs. Most have never seen another dog give birth so this is not a valid response for my question.

ps: whats the mirror test? If your talking about looking in the mirror and not knowing its you I wouldn't know either unless my mom told me it was me. How did I know that was me the first time I saw it? Did I pass the test? I'm confused.

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perfect is an opinion word-3dknight

it doesn't matter if I get 3 hours of sleep or 6, I still wake up just as tired!-Neverfly

These are the questions that boggle my mind-3dknight

I figure even a relatively small child would recognize himself in the mirror just from noting that it "mirror's" his every move.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

To this day I have a tendency to punch mirrors. Especially when I come across one rather suddenly or just woke up...

Initial reaction, I suppose, that one would have upon seeing an approaching ogre...

Don't you know punching mirrors is bad luck. Don't call yourself an ogre thats mean.

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perfect is an opinion word-3dknight

it doesn't matter if I get 3 hours of sleep or 6, I still wake up just as tired!-Neverfly

These are the questions that boggle my mind-3dknight

Yes you would. It's something particular about the brains of certain animals. It has nothing to do with your mom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

I was going to point out that humans are visually oriented unlike (for example) dogs, but the article covers that in some detail, so I'll quote it:

There is some debate in the scientific community as to the value and interpretation of results of the mirror test. While this test has been extensively conducted on primates, 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. As dogs have very poor visual resolution and acuity with red/green blindness, they have little chance of recognizing themselves or a dot (commonly red) in a mirror. However, dogs do recognize their own scent invariably with 40x more neurons than humans dedicated to processing smell. The key point being that the mirror test is only a measure of ability closely matching humans, not a statement of consciousness, as is popularly believed. Additionally, as mentioned with gorillas, many animals may regard eye contact as a threatening gesture, so the application of the mirror test is unclear. Some mammalian species do not have stereoscopic vision, including rabbits and deer, which may be a factor in determining the value of the test.

(emphasis added) I could imagine a world where doglike creatures with human level intelligence were testing humanlike animals with doglike intelligence by marking them with subtle scents that they either couldn't smell, or would just barely notice, and from there conclude the humans weren't "conscious" for that reason. Meanwhile, they would give little emphasis to the humans' visual abilities, unless they needed them to find things in smugling operations.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

wait. Dogs are color blind. We know this. So if some researcher suggested doing the mirror test by putting a blue dot on a red dog other scientists and researchers would point out that the dog physically cannot see the dot (and scientists have pointed that out, which is why it's in the wiki article)

Similarly, the dog scientists must know from other experiments what human noses are capable of detecting, and would design their experiment accordingly. The situation you propose, where the dog scientists use a sent that humans cannot easily detect, would be rejected on peer review by the other dog scientists. With a properly designed test, it's my contention that humans would pass. What's the first thing you do when you smell excrement? You check your shoes. You wonder if that's you that smells bad.

Compare that with what dogs do - for example, dogs chase their tails. They don't seem to understand that "the tail is part of me." That seems as telling a data point as any we could get from the mirror test. There's something fundamental that's missing in a dog's mind.

And even though, maybe the proper form of the mirror test (where a dot is painted on the animal) can't be used with dogs, certainly we can still learn something from the way they interact with a mirror. A dog clearly has the visual acuity to know that what it sees is a dog. It can tell the difference between a dog and a cat. But it's not, apparently, able to make the mental leap to understanding that "the reflection is me." At least, it's not as easy for the dog to make that leap as it is for primates.

Does this preclude consciousness? Well, how can anything, be it an animal, a computer, or an alien, be conscious without being aware of itself?

Anyway, for those animals that have the visual hardware needed to see a dot on their face, there is a clear difference between the ones who see the dot and reach up to touch their own faces, and the animals that reach out to the mirror. The test is revealing something important, and I don't think it's simply how well the eyes work.

Please provide an objective definition of "consciousness and "aware of self." (By the way, I'm often impressed how unaware we are for both our motivations and how our brains function.)

As pointed out in the article, some of those animals don't see well compared to humans, and vision is not their primary sense. Beyond showing that, it's guesswork.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Not seeing well doesn't matter; a reflection of a dog still looks like a dog. The reflection would still be seen as "well" or "poorly" as real things are seen.

And dogs are not unable to see colors. Their color vision is more limited than ours, but they do see colors as well as a "color blind" person, because even color blind people are usually only color-limited. Basicly, out of the three standard color receptor types we have, two is the actual minimum to be able to distinguish colors at all, and having three just enhances it. Dogs, like almost all "color blind" humans, have two.

... and some (not all) women have two (slightly) different red receptors, so they can differentiate colors that men cannot.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson