The claims about the dog are ridiculous - especially evident with the "love you" word. In fact, most of the article is describing a much more humane version of the famous Pavlov's dog experiment - the dog learned to associate the sounds of the "bells" with certain needs and persons, and uses them as such.
The Japanese research is much more interesting, and in a related comment I also cited a published article that proved that my claims, while fundamentally ok, are wrong in the details - animal calls are fundamentally simpler than human language, but some do show simple syntax.
> Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.
I never claimed dogs aren't conscious, I only claimed they don't have language in the sense humans do. Infants also don't have language, but they learn it natively. All humans learn complex structures, even the mathematically illiterate, no idea where that came from. The only exceptions are people with serious brain disorders, and those people, indeed, don't "speak".
That, again, doesn't mean that they are not conscious beings.
None of that addresses the issues of whether the dog understands. Yes, humans have a higher level of understanding in the sense that we understand abstractions, but our greater abilities in that area don't disqualify the dog's simpler ability from being called understanding.
If the dog can tell the difference between being told to fetch the paper vs fetch my shoes, then he understands.
Beyond that, the statement...
> their brains are merely receiving a signal and performing an associated action
Equally applies to humans; our brains just have a more complex form of association. There is no inherent meaning to any of the noises we make that we call words other than they're associated to something. Your associations to those noises is far more complex than the dogs, but you can't call yours understanding and not his; his understanding is simpler, but if he performs the correct trick, then he understands the word in the same sense you do, he associated some kind of meaning to that word, just like you do.
>I laughed to think that HUMAN'S analysis of whether a dolphin is intelligent is whether WE can understand their language.
>Using that logic, it seems my dog is more intelligent than me: He can understand some of my language as well as his own, whereas I can only understand my own.
That's a false equivalence, as well as untrue.
It takes intentional effort on our part for a dog to learn even a small subset of our vocabulary. When dogs learn our language, they only learn the few words that we make an effort to teach them, and these typically correspond directly to an action we demand of them in exchange for a reward. Dogs cannot pass this knowledge amongst themselves, each dog has to be taught by a human individually.
Dogs have made no specific effort to teach me, at least none that they managed to make recognizable to me, yet I can tell when they are excited, hurt, angry, &c, but mostly because a subset of body language and vocal attitude are instinctive or socially universal to most mammals (shouting and sharp poses convey aggression, for example).
I believe I understand more dog body language than dogs understand human body language. There is no human equivalent of a wagging tail, yet I understand that. There is no dog equivalent of a pointing finger, and they do not understand it: dogs will look at your finger instead of where you point.
> For example dogs don’t really seem to recognize single syllable words well if at all.
I'm pretty sure most dogs understand "no" (and the equivalent word in other languages is often 1 syllable). I haven't done anything approaching a study, but I've trained many dogs in my life and my experience disagrees with you. Some other common words they know really well include: treat, sit, off, here - basically anything you teach them.
I doubt many dog owners would agree with you that we have not deciphered the language of dogs. We viscerally understand how they communicate, it’s simply hard to systematically describe it.
This study isn't treating dogs as if they were not conscious or intelligent.
It's isolating a particular aspect of intelligence to determine if it exists in a particular fashion. In this case, the question of if and how dogs are aware of human agency. This is a very interesting question.
The exact same falsifying process is used with studies about humans. Using these processes we've significantly changed our understanding of human cognition in the last century so it seems like it's working!
No one's suggesting that dogs or people aren't intelligent. The question is exactly how this intelligence functions, because there are many ways to reach a particular conclusion.
Indeed! The article talks about some kind of rare "genius" trait, but the findings just seem to demonstrate that there exists some dogs that were able to demonstrate a big vocabulary in their tests. Many people with dogs already knew that, but it's a sound finding to have citable anyway (especially since some people still hold weirdly dismissive beliefs about everyday animal intelligence).
But it doesn't say anything scientific about whether this is an inherent trait rather than a contextual outcome, what the frequency of any such trait might be, whether the dogs that failed the tests were incapable rather than indifferent, etc. Of course, the exact same pattern of ovverstatement shows up in human behavioral and psychological research, so we shouldn't be surprised to see it here :)
"Forget all that. Judged against where AI was 20-25 years ago, when I was a student, a dog is now holding meaningful conversations in English. And people are complaining that the dog isn’t a very eloquent orator, that it often makes grammatical errors and has to start again, that it took heroic effort to train it, and that it’s unclear how much the dog really understands."
In the case of the AI for dogs, I wonder if the person who suggested this owns a dog. If so, it seems rather bizarre. Dogs are not particularly cryptic. They're relatively easy to read if you put your phone down and pay attention to them. Humans and dogs have been communicating for thousands of years. The idea that an AI would have greater canine emotional intelligence than a human is dubious.
I agree with the general sentiment but want to add: Dogs certainly process human language very well. From anecdotal experience of our dogs:
In terms of spoken language they are limited, but they surprise me all the time with terms they have picked up over the years. They can definitely associate a lot of words correctly (if it interests them) that we didn't train them with at all, just by mere observation.
A LLM associates bytes with other bytes very well. But it has no notion of emotion, real world actions and reactions and so on in relation to those words.
A thing that dogs are often way better than even humans is reading body language and communicating through body language. They are hyper aware of the smallest changes in posture, movement and so on. And they are extremely good at communicating intent or manipulate (in a neutral sense) others with their body language.
This is a huge, complex topic that I don't think we really fully understand, in part because every dog also has individual character traits that influence their way of communicating very much.
Here's an example of how complex their communication is. Just from yesterday:
One of our dogs is for some reason afraid of wind. I've observed how she gets spooked by sudden movements (for example curtains at an open window).
Yesterday it was windy and we went outside (off leash in our yard), she was wary and showed subtle fear and hesitated to move around much. The other dog saw that and then calmly got closer to her, posturing towards the same direction she seemed to go. He made small very steps forward, waited a bit, let her catch up and then she let go of the fear and went sniffing around.
This all happened in a very short amount of time, a few seconds, there is a lot more to the communication that would be difficult and wordy to explain. But since I got more aware of these tiny movements (from head to tail!) I started noticing more and more extremely subtle clues of communication, that can't even be processed in isolation but typically require the full context of all movements, the pacing and so on.
Now think about what the above example all entails. What these dogs have to process, know and feel. The specificity of it, the motivations behind it. How quickly they do that and how subtle their ways of communications are.
Body language is a large part of _human_ language as well. More often than not it gives a lot of context to what we speak or write. How often are statements misunderstood because it is only consumed via text. The tone, rhythm and general body language can make all the difference.
> Everything I see in dogs suggests that they are sentient, they just don’t seem to need language. They speak when it is useful, like for getting attention from people in different rooms, but they don’t really need it beyond that. So they don’t go any further.
If you haven't check out whataboutbunny [1] on Instagram to get an indication of how far dogs can go when given an opportunity. Bunny is trained to use buttons to "speak". A lot of it is very simple and functional ("outside", "play") that could easily be handled by body language and the odd bark, but occasionally you get fairly complex conversations which seems to indicate introspection and fairly complex reasoning that as you say they "just don't seem to need" to be able to express in language in normal conditions.
Yale University has a whole dog cognition center? I'm glad that we are plumbing the depths of the canine mind. That we are studying dogs doesn't prove that they're sentient.
It goes without saying that I think dogs are sentient and aware, but hard evidence will probably always elude us at least until we understand what consciousness even is.
Even though the study looks very clear and crisp but the paper talks about theory of mind, etc. whereas dogs IMO are body language masters.
It's not obvious that they need to model what the other animal (us) are "thinking" when they just need to pay attention to how we're moving our limbs which is correlated with wether something is by accident or intentional
Dogs are not lower consciousness thought. They are not fully aware of themselves nor behave like that. I'd love to talk to the higher form if they can take a few minutes to chit chat.
> Animals with very limited language capabilities have the ability to run their own lives, and to some extent manipulate their environment.
This makes me think of the ongoing effort by some people to train their pets to use talking buttons to communicate. These include the animals occasionally trying to convey relatively complicated ideas with simple sets of words, like "play help" ("I'm bored, come entertain me") [1] and "dog settle" ("make that dog outside stop being annoying") [2].
The Japanese research is much more interesting, and in a related comment I also cited a published article that proved that my claims, while fundamentally ok, are wrong in the details - animal calls are fundamentally simpler than human language, but some do show simple syntax.
> Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.
I never claimed dogs aren't conscious, I only claimed they don't have language in the sense humans do. Infants also don't have language, but they learn it natively. All humans learn complex structures, even the mathematically illiterate, no idea where that came from. The only exceptions are people with serious brain disorders, and those people, indeed, don't "speak".
That, again, doesn't mean that they are not conscious beings.
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