My dog certainly has a theory of my mind, she's always out in front guessing where I'll go and happiest when she gets it right, or suggesting ideas when it seems I lack one.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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Yeah. This stuff where animals don’t know what’s going on, and it’s a surprising breakthrough when we find out they do, must come from people who either don’t know up from down or have never interacted with animals.
Unlike us, they have to survive on their own and so they can’t afford to be clueless about stuff. We have the fancy fancy brain, but they’ve still got all the standard stuff for understanding the world.
Team the medias indicators that science has just discovered it. Is crap. Its more science has just proved or documented something ot has suspected for a long while.
Anyone with a dog knows they have such ideas and thoughts. But recognising it via anecdotal evidence and actually proving it in a way that stands up to challenge are 2 very different things.
Unfortunately modern media really dose not benifit fro pointing that out.
Well... we're not still in the "animals don't feel pain" days of science, but apparently:
The existence of theory of mind in non-human animals is controversial. On the one hand, one hypothesis proposes that some non-human animals have complex cognitive processes which allow them to attribute mental states to other individuals, sometimes called "mind-reading" while another proposes that non-human animals lack these skills and depend on more simple learning processes such as associative learning;[4] or in other words, they are simply behaviour-reading.
Ask any vet about that and honestly nope that is not what science thinks. But some scientists do propose other explanations for events that how science works.
Technically you don't feel pain. Your body sends signals to your brain and muscles. Your muscles react to those signals. And your brain interprets them in a way that results in you changing actions. IE your mind creates pain you don't feel it.
The destination seems non existant in the mind of yourself with your hand on a hotplate. But it is a scientifically accurate one. One that must be considered when considering how pain killerssuch as opiates work.
And it is this gap in human vs scientific language that media loves to sell articles on.
I literally sent you an article with citations, for the idea that ToM in animals is controversial within "science," with some alternate explanations like associative learning, and you're still in the mode of trying to explain it to me, to help me out of my ignorance about it.
Read the article. If nothing else, just read the "History and Development" section where it talks about particular researchers and papers. I get where you're coming from, because it's hard to believe, because most sensible people (probably including pretty much all working vets, yes, or at least I would hope so) understand that animals have a ToM. But within "science," it's considered controversial. I think the question of what the psychology is that leads some people who do science to think that, would be a fascinating question that I don't really have a firm answer for.
We're gonna need a lot of bonobos...
My brother told me this story of the raccoons living in his backyard. The mother had figured out how to defeat a new supposedly raccoon-proof garbage can and lined up the cubs to demonstrate. The first two watched with rapt attention while a third had a kind of dazed look. The mother then came back and smacked him in the head before showing them again. That seems like a pretty good indication to me that she had a good grasp of the mental state of her cubs?
Could be just that the third one mouthed off, but you couldn't understand it. Or maybe the mom's trainer was giving secret hand signals from a hidden location.