#25 Bob: Ah, is he ‘acting guilty’ because of cues he’s picking up now, or cues (think of them as part of the dog’s perdieved environment) he picked up in the past.

He’s not ‘acting guilty’, he’s responding to past environmental conditioning. It’s YOU that thinks he’s ‘acting guilty’.

Can’t exactly the same questions be asked of humans? Does a three-year old feel guilt or does he just know how he’s expected to act after he dumps Mom’s purse out on the floor?

Exactly correct. The 3 year old feels no guilt. The difference between us and animals is just that small.

A 3 year old human is barely self aware, and is operating in a fully ‘reacting to environment’ mode. (Essentially, the toddler is on autopilot, or ‘sleepwalking’ in the adult frame of reference.) A lot of the programming he is going to need later in life is being set.

It’s going to be a while before the tyke can start comprehending and start taking responsibility for his actions.

But this is the difference between Humans and animals. An animal cannot self program, ever. They start with a pre-programmed set of behaviors set by their genetic heritage (called ‘instinct’) and are then modified by their environment. Humans, on the otrher hand, exhibit no instinctive behavior at all, and are totally programmed by environment at first… at some point (probably between age 2 and 3) their self programming system starts to work (They become self aware) and start to slowly program themselves. This, in my mind, is the very definition of sentience.

This is why I don’t have a problem with pre-birth abortions. It’s the same as not getting pregnant in the first place as far as the potential human involved is concerned. Plenty more eggs where that one came from!

Now, here’s the kicker. a 40 year old human will do the same thing. The difference is, an adult has an active stream of consciousness, and has the ability to adapt future behavior on the emotional analysis of what he sees in the stream of consciousness.

Of course, that’s just my hypothesis.

It may be true that court rulings allow an officer to demand that you exit the vehicle without providing a reason. But, 1) in a non-police state, it shouldn’t be assumed that citizens will know that their only option is to bow down and obey. And 2) it makes no difference, since he was already out of the vehicle when the officer went psycho on him.

In addition, that other cop, who didn’t seem to know why a fight had broken out, should also be brought up on charges, if he corroborated his partner’s false police report. The “blue wall of silence” is actually “the illegal wall of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice” and needs to be prosecuted.

BTW, the anchor might have tried to be fair during the segment, but she says near the end that the cop had a split lip, therefor the driver must have hit him at some point off camera. Bullshit. He might have given himself a pop to the mouth when he was writing up the report and realized he was claiming the suspect jumped him but he was bringing in a beaten-up suspect when he (the cop) was unmarked.

(“Is he dead?” “Well, he’s less dead.”)

He’s not ‘acting guilty’, he’s responding to past environmental conditioning. It’s YOU that thinks he’s ‘acting guilty’.

Can’t exactly the same questions be asked of humans? Does a three-year old feel guilt or does he just know how he’s expected to act after he dumps Mom’s purse out on the floor?

LEOs are, unfortunately, the same people who are known for (now and then) kicking in the doors of the wrong houses and shooting pets. No system can be designed to be completely error-proof.

good link- Prince George’s finest continues to make me proud!

I half-remember a quote that went something like:

I would that humans were half so good as our dogs think we are.

If anyone knows the source and accurate version of that quote, I’d like to find it again.

Oddly, Sir Francis Bacon was impeached by Parliament in 1621 for basically doing the same thing.

Re: Dogs and greetings. My dog, toward the end, would give me, the “Oh, what do YOU want?” look when I came home. But, like BamBam, my pooh-bear and I would lay on my futon together, chilling out.

Jesus, people, what are you doing to your dogs? Mine greets me at the door, tail wagging furiously, as though my homecoming is the greatest fucking thing that has happened ever.

I get the same rock star treatment every day when I come home. However, mine isn’t limited to that one event, but rather any time they see me or I acknowledge their existence. I love my dogs, and I consider myself the alpha of the pack. We even lay on the couch together – myself and 2 big dogs, all flopped on each other. This is what pack animals do :-)

Have to love how ’scientists’ can find a single bone and suddenly it proves their theory.

Don’t take this the wrong way… I’m not getting down on you here. But I would point out the error you’re making.

The analysis the guy puts out is not a ‘theory’. It’s a hypothesis. There is a GIGANTIC difference between the two.

One of the problems is that the general layperson doesn’t know the difference between a ‘theory’ and a ‘hypothesis’. Here is a brief definition:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm

A really good rule of thumb to use is to treat all ‘scientific revelations’ as hypothesis unless clearly specified as a scientific theory, fully backed and bonded by the processes of repeatability, usefullness, and the ability to be disproven.

I blame the scientific community for this confusion. I also blame the school system for not teaching the distinction between a theory and a hypothesis to every kid.

That’s a pretty standard solipsistic argument, but correlation isn’t causation. My nano pet was always looked pretty happy when i remembered to feed it back in fourth grade, but that doesn’t make it so.

I prefer to withhold judgment on the whole thing, and instead embrace my pets’ animal-ness, instead of trying to force my own ideas own them, correct or not. If I dropped dead of a massive coronary right now, I’m pretty confident that my cat would be batting around the little toe-tag as they were wheeling me out. And I’m okay with that.

As the sceptic stated they don’t even know if the Neanderthal was killed by the Homo Sapiens. For all they know it could have been living with them and died normally and then eating. Eating of dead ancestors is not unheard of. Jumping to conclusions is what gives some a bad reputation. Basing the extinction of an entire species on a single bone falls into that category. We know certain dinosaurs ate other ones. Does that mean that is what caused the extinction? They ate each other out of existance?

I have always assumed that 90% of the actions and facial expressions that owners have cited to prove their dogs had emotions were learned behaviors evolved over years of interactions between dog and human. I found this unsurprising.

The problem is this: I have absolutely no way to know that this doesn’t describe other humans.

Seriously, how can I *know* that you feel emotions in the same way that I do? I can’t, any more than I can know a dog or cat does.

But I do notice that my cat has responses to various things that are exactly as I would predict if her emotional make up was similar to my own, at least in certain ways. Therefore, I can conclude that she does have emotions, with at least as much certainty that I can conclude that other humans have emotions.