"Each of us human persons has the ability to stand in judgment over our own desires. Unlike animals, in humans these higher-order wants can and sometimes do win out over baseline feelings and biological drives."
No, I have seen dogs resisting doing bad, and also not resisting and acting guilty afterwards. Higher order animals like dogs have more sophisticated awareness and reasoning ability than most give them credit for. They do know when they have done wrong.
Dogs don't understand good and bad. What you've seen is dogs respond to natural signs, albeit in a sophisticated way that has co-evolved with humans after many generations of breeding. Anything else is anthropomorphizing the behavior from your point of view.
Maybe you're used to being hostile, aggressive, disagreeable, and picking fights elsewhere online, but I don't allow that low-energy behavior here. If you want to chat, great, but I don't allow the low standards of the greater internet in my comments section.
To step back to the first-order question:
That's what anthropomorphizing means. I don't doubt that dogs have some clever cognitive abilities and are highly intelligent animals. That's quite different from the ability to strong evaluate desires, which requires language and the reflective awareness that it involves.
Dogs know what to do but they don't know that they're doing it. The "know that" makes the difference.
And you don’t know that you are guessing. And guessing in a way biased towards assumptions that are considered quaintly reductionistic by modern neuroscience.
Oh noes someone dared question your 19th century reductionist ideas that deny conscious ideation to animals, sob. How dare anyone question your ideas without the proper deference sire.
Anyone who is high minded in the low art of squashing debate of ideas is an automatic unsubscribe for me.
For the record, I don't care about anyone challenging my ideas. It's not about that and never has been.
I do care a great deal about grown men acting like immature children -- and then trying to pass off "tolerance" of awful behavior and sub-par thinking as a requisite for debate! As if.
It's so simple to not act like this, but the emotional incontinence always wins.
In any case, calling me a reductionist is laughable given that everything I've written here is as anti-reductionist and anti-materialist as you can get.
It took me years to stop actively seeking. When I seek, my focus is too tight and I miss countless possibilities. When I refuse to seek, I am open to and often receptive to those possibilities.
"Each of us human persons has the ability to stand in judgment over our own desires. Unlike animals, in humans these higher-order wants can and sometimes do win out over baseline feelings and biological drives."
No, I have seen dogs resisting doing bad, and also not resisting and acting guilty afterwards. Higher order animals like dogs have more sophisticated awareness and reasoning ability than most give them credit for. They do know when they have done wrong.
> I have seen dogs resisting doing bad
Dogs don't understand good and bad. What you've seen is dogs respond to natural signs, albeit in a sophisticated way that has co-evolved with humans after many generations of breeding. Anything else is anthropomorphizing the behavior from your point of view.
Welcome!
Let's go meta for a second.
Maybe you're used to being hostile, aggressive, disagreeable, and picking fights elsewhere online, but I don't allow that low-energy behavior here. If you want to chat, great, but I don't allow the low standards of the greater internet in my comments section.
To step back to the first-order question:
That's what anthropomorphizing means. I don't doubt that dogs have some clever cognitive abilities and are highly intelligent animals. That's quite different from the ability to strong evaluate desires, which requires language and the reflective awareness that it involves.
Dogs know what to do but they don't know that they're doing it. The "know that" makes the difference.
And you don’t know that you are guessing. And guessing in a way biased towards assumptions that are considered quaintly reductionistic by modern neuroscience.
Oh noes someone dared question your 19th century reductionist ideas that deny conscious ideation to animals, sob. How dare anyone question your ideas without the proper deference sire.
Anyone who is high minded in the low art of squashing debate of ideas is an automatic unsubscribe for me.
Bye!
For the record, I don't care about anyone challenging my ideas. It's not about that and never has been.
I do care a great deal about grown men acting like immature children -- and then trying to pass off "tolerance" of awful behavior and sub-par thinking as a requisite for debate! As if.
It's so simple to not act like this, but the emotional incontinence always wins.
In any case, calling me a reductionist is laughable given that everything I've written here is as anti-reductionist and anti-materialist as you can get.
But you go on being mad at the screen.
It took me years to stop actively seeking. When I seek, my focus is too tight and I miss countless possibilities. When I refuse to seek, I am open to and often receptive to those possibilities.