Patricia McConnell Re-Homes One of Her Dogs

    • Gold Top Dog

    The most humourous part of it all is that i present such a straight persona, and seem so steady to most that they have difficulty believing in it when i self disclose. 

    Like for stocks, past performance is no predictor of future results.  In my mind, no higher-order living subject can be adequately fathomed by another.

     

    So, I don't think dogs have an expressed need to connect, as one might describe in humans. But if we describe it that way and it gives humans a better way to relate to and treat their pet dogs, then I could overlook it. I just don't think it's accurate. To suggest that dogs have this human like emotion of needing to connect, and yet, in the next breath, do everything possible to deny they have ToM or that they can communicate and other "human"-like characteristics is also an interesting dichotomy. Or, it could be salad bar theory. Pick out some leaves and carrots and leave what you don't want. (I recommend any of the dressings by Paul Newman.)

    Very well said, my thoughts exactly.

     

    One might just as easily say the propelling impulse of the cosmos is for individuation - to disconnect - to be free of the network.  Indeed, my favorite philosopher, Robert Pirsig, quips that "all evolution is evidence of attempts to defy gravity."

     

    You don't need Freud to explain why your dog is pulling on the leash...your dog wants to be free of the constraint.

     

     

    • Gold Top Dog

    Well, Poodle, it depends on how you define treatment. AA, for example, is not a cure or treatment, certainly not medicinal or involving pathologies. It is a support group totally dependent on the honor system. If you lie to the group, you lie to yourself. So, when you come into an AA meeting and say "My name is John Public and it's been 12 hours since I had a drink", they will take you at your word. And that places the responsibility on you. And part of their process is for you to realize that you are unable to help yourself and that you need a higher power. But, in the end, it is you who has to develope other methods of dealing with stress, life, or just the urge to drink. I do think some people use substance to medicate. But I think others use just because they like the feeling. It becomes handy to hang the addiction on earlier psychological trauma and it removes some of the "blame."

    And many a rehab may include an alternate substance to take that helps steady the nerves while getting off of the real stuff, such as using methadone to overcome heroin. But the biggest chunk I can see of some rehabs is the lock-down status of the patience. You are kept clean because you are in a place with no substances to use and are forced to do without in order to get the stuff out of the system and hopefully reduce the need. Most addiction is involved in maintaining a certain level of inebriation, rather than switching from totally clean and sober to blotto.

    I have seen some treatment programs that claim that they treat by addressing the neuro-chemical dependency that triggers that actual physical craving for a substance. I am not sure how effective those are but I appreciate the aspect of their different attitude, in that you are not powerless, you can defeat this and keep it defeated, you can affect your destiny, you can turn down that next drink, or toke, or snort.

    I'm not sure how much interventions work. And most of the people that have had interventions relapse. And I think that is bound to happen. Intervention is yet one more time of a loved one asking the user to quit. If that worked, it would have worked the first time a loved one asked the user to quit, not the 100th time with a counselor leading the confrontation.

    • Gold Top Dog

    Hi Ron,

    As usual much food for thought (and rebuttal?)... Let's see where this takes us...

    ron2
    I must say, LCK, if humans thought of dogs as needing to connect with things in the environment, it might improve their relations to a dog, even though I think it's anthropromorphising, again.

    I'm glad you agree that my idea might help dog/human relations. That's certainly one of my goals (the main one).

    However, I don't think it's anthropomorphic to suggest that there's a universal force that impels dogs to form connections any more than it is to say that a similar force is what impels hydrogen and oxygen atoms to connect in order to form a water molecule. Like dogs, atoms don't "think" about it; it's an energetic process. That particular connection (H2O) was the start of the evolution of life on earth. And evolution couldn't do its work if it didn't have a mechanism at its disposal to impel, motivate, or induce all organisms -- from amoebae to plants to fish to human beings -- to be motivated to connect to the kinds of energy (food, water, sunlight) necessary to sustain their particular physical apparatuses long enough for make another kind of connection -- this one sexual in nature -- to ensure that each organism's genetic material would be passed on. Without those two forms of attraction life on earth could not exist.

    ron2
    Dogs scavenge because that is how one gathers resources.

    Yes, but don't you see? My explanation (borrowed from Freud, who theorized that there's a universal force that impels us to make connections) is far less anthropomorphic than the idea that dogs are concerned with gathering "resources." Does a dog go for a walk and think to himself, "I think I'll sniff around a bit to see if I can gather some resources," or does he just feel attracted to certain things he sees and smells, and is not as attracted to others? In your explanation the dog is thinking about what he's doing; in mine he's just feeling something, physically and emotionally.

    Then there's the very real dilemma of explaining why a dog who's fed regular meals would need to scavenge. It can't be because he's hungry. There has to be something else going on.

    ron2
    Your dog turned to you, which shows just how different he is from the coyote or wolf. ... Now, of course, I must ask, if your dog was not just recently fed, would he have come to you as quickly ... He who gets the resources survives. And perhaps the dog thought you had a greater resource than the lucky treasure he found. [italics mine -LCK]

    Again, you're relying on a rather complicated, linear mental thought process to explain the behavior. And that's fine. It's not unheard of. But according to Ockham's razor and Morgan's canon, we should always look for the more parsimonious explanation first.

    ron2
      Because it is rewarding to follow the resource that leads to survival. Survival of the fittest is not just who is the fastest or strongest. It is also who is smartest and the dog that finds the easiest, quickest way to resources lives.

    Do you think dogs are aware of their own mortality? Do they understand what death is? Do you believe they understand what "resources" are? What does "smartest" mean in this context?

    When I think of a dog's level of intelligence -- in comparison to that of another dog, eg. -- I see it more as a matter of who's better at making connections between himself and the salient objects in his environment. He's not thinking about survival. He's just thinking about what feels good to him at a particular moment. This is something dogs excel at. In fact, they're quite brilliant in this regard.

    ron2
      So, I don't think dogs have an expressed need to connect, as one might describe in humans. But if we describe it that way and it gives humans a better way to relate to and treat their pet dogs, then I could overlook it. I just don't think it's accurate. To suggest that dogs have this human like emotion of needing to connect, and yet, in the next breath, do everything possible to deny they have ToM or that they can communicate and other "human"-like characteristics is also an interesting dichotomy.

    You're right. This is a very interesting discussion.

    Just to be clear, though, I never said that dogs can't or don't communicate. I said very specifically that there are two basic types of communication, 1) reporting information and 2) expressing an unconscious emotional state. The first requires both the use of language and a very highly developed theory of mind (a theoretical construct used by cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind which may or may not relate, in a complete and accurate way, to what's really going on in our minds and in the minds of us or our dogs).

    Remember, there are 3 levels of ToM: sensory, emotional, and mental. In order for dogs to have the third they would have to have somehow cut in line on the evolutionary ladder, way ahead of many other species. And they would also have to have a very different type of brain, with millions (perhaps billions) more neurons, etc., and have more complex structural components to their brains than they do. This would mean that one of the key principles of evolution is invalid, and that the size and structure of an animal's brain has no real correlation with its cognitive abilities, at least not where dogs are concerned.

    So the real question is, how do we account for a dog's abilities without rewriting the laws of evolution and neuroscience?

    I think the answer is simple, yet perhaps not as easily "understood" as the idea that dogs are "smart." They manipulate us into doing their thinking for them. They hijack our brains through a process called embodied, embedded cognition.

    Excerpt from the article linked to, just above:

    Dogs read us and react, read us and react, read us and react, over and over. And we project our own emotions and thought processes onto their reactions, based in large part on our personal beliefs and identities. As a result, our reactions, in the moment, reinforce whatever small behavioral changes the dog exhibits in response to us in an almost continuous loop. This happens repeatedly, countless numbers of times every day, even when we're not thinking about it. And as a result, the dog begins to reflect back to us many of the same things we're unconsciously projecting onto them.

    And:

    The human mind is designed to find reasons for things, even things that don't have reasons ... whenever we see a dog stop for a moment to make choices about which action he wants to take, or pause to "feel things out," we automatically (and mostly unconsciously) believe the dog is "thinking things through," i.e., using an innate ability to reason.

    There are several reasons for this. One is that dogs have faces. And one of the primary social circuits in the human brain is designed to recognize not only the faces of people we know but to 'intuit' what the expressions on those faces 'mean.' These [pattern-recognition] circuits are equipped with a lot of dopamine receptors, making face recognition a kind of natural high.

    When we see footage of wolves hunting together, for example, our analysis of what we think is going in their minds (which probably goes back to the Darwinian idea of species having adaptive "strategies";) is that the wolves are planning their attack; they've got a "game plan." We see it in their faces. Yet when we see a spider go into a hole and pull a leaf over himself to "hide" from his prey, do we believe the spider is thinking this through logically? Does it have a game plan? [A theory of mind?] Of course not. And one of the reasons we don't [anthropomorphize spiders the way we do our dogs] that is that a spider's "face" is expressionless.

    Another reason we believe dogs use logic and reason may be that dogs don't feel themselves to be separate from us, and on a certain level we don't feel separate from them. Many pet owners report that they grieve more over the loss of a favorite pet than they do over the loss of a parent, a close friend, or a spouse. These owners say that losing the pet is like losing a part of themselves. That may be because parents, spouses, and friends have ego boundaries. Dogs don't. As a result it becomes easier for us to see our dogs as indivisible from our own thoughts, making us susceptible to the belief that they think more like we do than the size and shapes of their brains would suggest or support.

    I have no illusions that I'm going to pry the idea that dogs think logically, rationally, or conceptually out of some people's minds. No matter how simply and logically I present these ideas, some people -- even some of the most brilliant scientists! -- are so heavily wedded to their bedrock, dead certainty that dogs think like us (just on a simpler level), that it's impossible to get them to even consider alternative explanations for their behavior.

    That said, there are certain self-evident facts that need to be taken into account. Nature is an economist. So is evolution. What I mean by this is that they both have to act in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics, particularly when it comes to the first law: the conservation of energy. I will admit that dogs seem to be able to act independently of this law. No matter how amazing dogs are, I just don't see how it's possible for them to circumvent the laws of nature.

    So until science can show us how a dog's mind could act independently of the laws of physics, evolution, and some of the most basics tenets of neuroscience, I don't see any other course than to look for simpler explanations for their behavior. And it seems to me that the idea that dogs are always looking to make connections is far less anthropomorphic than the idea that they're thinking about resources or their own survival.

    Anyway, that's how I see it,

    LCK

     

    • Gold Top Dog

    Lee, as for your constant admonition to seek the simplest explanation for things, you should take notes on one of the foremost philosophers of the modern era, David Hume: 

    Next to the ridicule of denying an evident truth, is that of taking much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow'd with thought and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never escape the most stupid and ignorant.

    To say the physical energies that bind atoms are identical with the mental activity of a sensual, perceiving, conscious dog is to ignore a whole lot of evolutionary emergence (biology, comes to mind).  A dog is not a cell phone.  Go ahead and make up your own NDT science-by-hunches in the face of real findings from cognitive neuroscientists, ethologists, et. al.  But remember: if it is so for Fido, it must be so for you.

    As for LCK's take on dogs feeling but not thinking

    Does a dog go for a walk and think to himself, "I think I'll sniff around a bit to see if I can gather some resources," or does he just feel attracted to certain things he sees and smells, and is not as attracted to others? In your explanation the dog is thinking about what he's doing; in mine he's just feeling something, physically and emotionally

    Most of what we do is prompted by subconscious activity.  When I amble out into the back yard and look and smell and just sense things around, with the exception of words that might be coming up with this or that observation, I am doing just what my dog is - looking to see what interests me.  And how would we know what interests us?  Well, that is based on previous subjective experiences we have had with things  and, thru time and exposure, have LEARNED to VALUE up or down. 

    We have long since stored the experience of a blooming crepe-myrtle or a fresh urine spattering in our memory - this memory consists of images, scents, and other impressions along with our valuation of the experience.  This valuation is more than an automatic emotional response, like being startled by a gunshot, it is a complex of emotions and feelings that we personally learned to associate with the impressions.  Each new blossom viewing or urine sniff adds and/or alters what we previously learned and we advance along.

     

    Oh, we also seek novelty and adventure. If we see a big doghouse in the middle of the yard that just appeared, you can bet that more is at work than the initial 6 emotions Darwin attributes to us and doge.  While surprise, fear, joy, etc. might be the first reaction to novelty, the learning process of our forming impressions and valuation begins - our curiosity is simple proof of the learning function of a brain.

     

    That's not how I see it, that is how professional cognitive researchers following in Hume's footsteps see it.

    • Gold Top Dog
    "Dogs read us and react, read us and react, read us and react, over and over. And we project our own emotions and thought processes onto their reactions, based in large part on our personal beliefs and identities. As a result, our reactions, in the moment, reinforce whatever small behavioral changes the dog exhibits in response to us in an almost continuous loop. This happens repeatedly, countless numbers of times every day, even when we're not thinking about it. And as a result, the dog begins to reflect back to us many of the same things we're unconsciously projecting onto them."

    At least this addresses the symbiosis between dog and man. And shows, once again, in the most likely explanation, that dogs do this as a survival mechanism. Being in tune with humans leads to continued survival and species regeneration, i.e., living long enough to mate and produce a new generation. I do not think that the dogs have this need to connect in the level dihydrogen monoxide and I think that is reflecting back to the soi-disant "quantum consciousness" theory that has been raised before and which has not a single shred of proof from any perspective of being proved. At least Newton can be proved by dropping an apple. (note to self, watch out while standing under fruit trees.)

    The survival happens just as surely as it does for wolves that survive because they do not follow man and solve their own problems. Just as surely as it happens for man, who is technically under-evolved in comparison to the mountain gorilla. The mountain goriilla is actually more fully evolved to it's environment with it's natural coat, incredible strength and speed, and omniverous nature.

    As opposed to man who is naked, "decides" to be vegetarian for mystical reasons, is slow and weak in comparison to most animals. What we do have is a large, odd brain, omniverous tendencies, opposable thumbs. We manipulate the environment far better than any other creature, bar none. That allows us to survive in spite of our frailties. We even take upon ourselves the ability to decide whether another creature can think or has a soul, all because we can wear a white lab coat. Reminds me of the story about the scientist who wanted to study a monkey. He put the monkey in a room with some stuff and the door had a peephole so that the scientist could observe. When he looked through it, he saw the brown eye of the monkey looking out at him.

     

    "Remember, there are 3 levels of ToM: sensory, emotional, and mental. In order for dogs to have the third they would have to have somehow cut in line on the evolutionary ladder, way ahead of many other species. And they would also have to have a very different type of brain, with millions (perhaps billions) more neurons, etc., and have more complex structural components to their brains than they do. This would mean that one of the key principles of evolution is invalid, and that the size and structure of an animal's brain has no real correlation with its cognitive abilities, at least not where dogs are concerned."

    Are we defining intelligence by the size and shape of the human brain and language. Perhaps there are beings from other planets that are smaller or look different than we are and to assume that they are stupid in their interstellar craft while we still hop over ponds with internal combustion engines is arrogant. Not that there are other such beings but the rhetoric of the statement is to point out how arrogant we are. Reminds me of the line from the Rolling Stones song "he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me ..." Don't get me wrong. I think there is something to the theory that self-awareness or a level of sentience may have to do with level of complexity. Then again, how can my dog and a Chihuahua have the same level of intelligence with my dog having the nominally physically larger brain? It can't be just about size. It may very well have to do with synapses, etc, regardless of size or number.

    As to whether a dog's bark says something, how do we sound to them. The recognize certain words as sounds but they are not quoting Shakespeare. And I must have mistated my point. I didn't really mean my dog would be saying "yeah, right." But the anthro-like quality of that statement is to show how unimportant we can be if the dog has a more pressing need, such as hunger and you didn't answer the question.

    Nor am I saying the dog consciously thinks the word "resources" in a mix of west coast and texas accent. I think you may have used that as something of a straw boss. But the gathering of resources is what a dog does. Whether he speaks English, Tex-mex, or Swahili. That is, he doesn't have to conceptualize it, he just does it. Which doesn't mean that dogs don't think.

    "I have no illusions that I'm going to pry the idea that dogs think logically, rationally, or conceptually out of some people's minds. No matter how simply and logically I present these ideas, some people -- even some of the most brilliant scientists! -- are so heavily wedded to their bedrock, dead certainty that dogs think like us (just on a simpler level), that it's impossible to get them to even consider alternative explanations for their behavior"

    I think you are mistaking the application of OC to most any living creature as an anthro of saying they think like us but in simpler terms. Another straw boss, even if you didn't mean to do so. It might just as accurate to say that humans think like dogs but more so. I'm not standing by that statement, just rhetorical tete-a-tete. And which is it, by the way? You propose to state as wrong or misguided, much of the work of scientists that, I suppose in the interest of politics, label as brilliant. Which is it? Wrong or brilliant?

    One of the tests of a theory is whether or not it explains any better the process involved and I don't see that NDT has. I understand you want to find the basic or elemental explanation or even the psycho-physiological equivalent of a "quantum" explanation" but that's not making it more accurate or even simpler as an explanation. How many here have heard of the EPR Event thought model in Quantum Mechanics aside from me explaining it before. I know of exactly one person that comes here once in a while who has heard of it outside me mentioning. It is a complex problem that is supposed to answer some questions at a sub-atomic level. And doesn't have proof and doesn't effect how good my smoked brisket tastes. And won't effect how dogs learn or how humans train dogs. And hasn't answered how we get police dogs to run INTO danger and hold a partial bite on a human until we say "aus!"

    OC is a working theory because it has been proven to explain what is happening over and over and over and over and over and over .... ad infinitum. It is the simpler theory and explanation. To falsify it, you have to prove that the theory is faulty or that the results are faulty and moreso, you have to prove why your theory is the correct one. I hate to keep discounting the dopamine study but I don't feel it's conclusive. At worst, it points to short-sightedness in assuming that dopamine was the primary compound present in reward. To me, that's similar to saying that reward training doesn't work because police dogs are trained with tug instead of food treats. Missing the forest of a single tree. The tug is rewarding, as a treat is. So, the reward training is working, regardless of what the actual reward is. Fortunately for a lot of dogs and humans, food treats are rewarding. And for pet dogs who's owners don't want a constant game of tug going on, it had better be something besides tug. My dog thought jumping on people with his Husky hug was rewarding. I found something even more rewarding. Grilled pork chop for breaking off the jumping on people. To be accurate, I should say he found it rewarding, even if he doesn't come up to me and say the words, "I find your butterfly pork chops cooked on the charcoal grill to be most rewarding."

    He does talk to me, too, not in english but in various vocalizations in a pattern, including a low volume bark (his "inside" voice) but I haven't figured out what he is trying to say. I know that will be discounted but I am merely stating what I see and hear, rather than developing a theory and extracting only the evidence that supports that theory. It's easier and simpler to say that he is communicating, whether I understand what he is communicating or not. I don't think he's stupid because he hasn't learn classical german or tex-mex like I have. He understands some word sounds in english. I'm the one with the language problem.

    Most of us have no problem seeing dogs as primarily emotional beings. We have used the two year old human as a guideline to what their mental and emotional equivalency is. It doesn't mean they are humans with four legs and a tail. And we can say that a dog doesn't think like a human and are mostly accurate. But we gloss over the commonalities all animals, especially mammals share. They do seek comfort. So do we. They are social to the benefit of their survival,. So are we. They understand repeated words. So do we. That is, we may not think exactly like each other but we do think like mammals. And may we re-visit for a moment the thing about aggression of wolves in captivity? Humans do the same thing and we have a whole planet. In fact, primates, in general, are quite aggressive. Dogs display aggression to get a stranger or problem to go away. Man displays aggression to win by attrition. We are, indeed, the most vicious animal on the planet.

    • Gold Top Dog

    So until science can show us how a dog's mind could act independently of the laws of physics, evolution, and some of the most basics tenets of neuroscience, I don't see any other course than to look for simpler explanations for their behavior. And it seems to me that the idea that dogs are always looking to make connections is far less anthropomorphic than the idea that they're thinking about resources or their own survival.

    I actually think that WE don't act independently of the laws of physics, evolution, and neuroscience either!  And, what are the "basic tenets" of neuroscience?  Do we actually know enough about how the brain functions to know, down to the last neurotransmitter, how we (or dogs) function at the most complex level?  I think that we do know some things, but other things remain for us to study.  The one thing that occurs to me is that the major difference between us and dogs will lie in those brain structures or chemicals that we have and they lack, or which work differently in one or the other species.  I do NOT think that implies that dogs have zero capacity for at least some of the thoughts which you want us to abandon attributing to them.  I also think that it isn't anthropomorphic to assume a certain level of thought consistent with the brain's capacity - it's just that we have yet to completely ascertain what that capacity is - both in humans and in dogs and other species.  Some people would say that it is impossible to play the piano like Mozart without taking a lesson, yet savants do it.  Something must be going on in their brains that is slightly different than in the average person's brain.  That suggests that there is a continuum of sorts that we still don't understand...

    • Gold Top Dog

    Good post, Anne. It reiterates what I was saying earlier, in metaphor. Quantum Mechanics may eventually one day possibly explain a few things on a level below atomic particles but it doesn't change the applicability of Newton in everday physics. Metaphorically, I was also saying that even if the NDT and dopamine studies change an understanding at the synaptic level of a dog's brain (exactly which synapses are firing and in what order), I don't think it is disproving or replacing OC and I don't see the need to continually devalue or state as wrong the common and applicable theory of OC simply because it didn't anticipate dopamine levels during reward and stress and/or pain.

    The overall effect is still OC. To say that this partial study on dopamine levels totally discounts OC is to misunderstand the principle of OC and/or the role of dopamine. Dopamine is an anaesthetic. I guarantee an accident victim is getting a dope load and it definitely had nothing to do with reward. Perhaps punishment, too. Plus, I didn't see, in the study how much of a time lag there is between experience of pain or punishment and the dopamine dosing increase. That should also be investigated. Like I said, the study, like most, is half-cooked and too much hay has been made of it. It's not enough to overturn OC.

    Certainly not enough to state that McConnell or OC has been a failure.

    And here's why police dogs can be trained to hold non-lethal bites and run at a suspect who is firing a gun at them with bullets whizzing and going "thunk" in the ground (I've been shot at before so I know what the sound is like). Because it is rewarding to do so. The dog has been trained to do that with a reward for successfully doing so.

    When I first got Shadow and he would jump on people and I would scruff and pin him to "punish" him. Dopamine might have been present. He found it rewarding, though I didn't realize it. I just wondered why it didn't work. Then, I realized, he was wrestling with his previous owners when they played so the scruff and pin felt like wrestling and therefore rewarding, though it was technically, from my viewpoint, a punishment. I got him to stop by finding something just as rewarding, if not more rewarding than jumping. Whatever meat I haev cooked. Some treats from the store. Each time is a different jackpot.

    So, I don't need his jumping on people to greet drive being exercised. I exercise his listening to Ron because that brings out the tasty treats drive. Which leads to survival. Like any mammal.

    • Gold Top Dog
    ron2
    The overall effect is still OC. To say that this partial study on dopamine levels totally discounts OC is to misunderstand the principle of OC and/or the role of dopamine. Dopamine is an anaesthetic. I guarantee an accident victim is getting a dope load and it definitely had nothing to do with reward. Perhaps punishment, too. Plus, I didn't see, in the study how much of a time lag there is between experience of pain or punishment and the dopamine dosing increase. That should also be investigated. Like I said, the study, like most, is half-cooked and too much hay has been made of it. It's not enough to overturn OC.

     

    I would have to agree with you, except that the function of dopamine is a bit complex. When we talk about dogs in arousal, dopamine is more a slight stimulant when combined with the other chemicals that may flow.

    There is no need to overturn OC in my view, it is premature and certainly the study stated has a few rather large holes. I am reminded of the uri geller days. I am not a believer one way or the other, but bent spoons don't change my view on anything!

     

    What i am interested in is the compelling "drive" or  need to dispose of the theories behind OC and CC.  Has anyone done a paper or two on that? :)



    • Gold Top Dog

    poodleOwned

    What i am interested in is the compelling "drive" or  need to dispose of the theories behind OC and CC.  Has anyone done a paper or two on that? :)



    Don't tempt me. I might have a compelling drive to write such a paper on that, though I have no degree in psychology.

    • Gold Top Dog

     

    ron2
    Well, Poodle, it depends on how you define treatment. AA, for example, is not a cure or treatment, certainly not medicinal or involving pathologies. It is a support group totally dependent on the honor system. If you lie to the group, you lie to yourself. So, when you come into an AA meeting and say "My name is John Public and it's been 12 hours since I had a drink", they will take you at your word. And that places the responsibility on you. And part of their process is for you to realize that you are unable to help yourself and that you need a higher power. But, in the end, it is you who has to develope other methods of dealing with stress, life, or just the urge to drink. I do think some people use substance to medicate. But I think others use just because they like the feeling. It becomes handy to hang the addiction on earlier psychological trauma and it removes some of the "blame."

     

    Yes i would agree with most of what you are saying, but the neglect from deep early trauma is often an inability to do quite simple things in life.My personal opinion is (and also much like with dogs) knowing the exact nature of the trauma and spending time in it is futile.Repoorting of it is inexact. Very non freudian. Acceptance is a pretty good idea. I have found that a pretty good way of getting self acceptance is to get out there and do something that is worthy of self acceptance. :)

    The neglect has to be adressed. I needed to work out when to go to bed, how to not wipe myself out with anxiety, what to eat. Now one of the things that many therapies assume is that the answers to these things lie within me.. which quite frankly was BS. What i needed was to be taken through some other choices. Try asking some one when to change your sheets or your clothes.It ws eye opening to say the least. I did not have a partner to fall back on, had had periods of homelessness.

    I think that you can transfer this approach to dogs. Give them safety, show them an alternative way of doing things. it makes me quite empathetic to dogs in a similar situation.

    BTW i went from being wiped out to totally sober and clean. I don't suggest it is the only way in fact for many i would argue against it. I am not in their body or mind.

    I was always blown away by the fact that there is usually very little difference between  compulsory and voluntary admission to rehab in success.

    I am always spooked by the tiny success rates over time.

    I am troubled for solutions, but think that  some i would suggest are politically untenable, like decriminalisng many of the drugs.

     


    • Gold Top Dog

    ron2

    One of the tests of a theory is whether or not it explains any better the process involved and I don't see that NDT has. I understand you want to find the basic or elemental explanation or even the psycho-physiological equivalent of a "quantum" explanation" but that's not making it more accurate or even simpler as an explanation. How many here have heard of the EPR Event thought model in Quantum Mechanics aside from me explaining it before. I know of exactly one person that comes here once in a while who has heard of it outside me mentioning. It is a complex problem that is supposed to answer some questions at a sub-atomic level. And doesn't have proof and doesn't effect how good my smoked brisket tastes. And won't effect how dogs learn or how humans train dogs. And hasn't answered how we get police dogs to run INTO danger and hold a partial bite on a human until we say "aus!"

    OC is a working theory because it has been proven to explain what is happening over and over and over and over and over and over .... ad infinitum. It is the simpler theory and explanation. To falsify it, you have to prove that the theory is faulty or that the results are faulty and moreso, you have to prove why your theory is the correct one. I hate to keep discounting the dopamine study but I don't feel it's conclusive. At worst, it points to short-sightedness in assuming that dopamine was the primary compound present in reward. To me, that's similar to saying that reward training doesn't work because police dogs are trained with tug instead of food treats. Missing the forest of a single tree. The tug is rewarding, as a treat is. So, the reward training is working, regardless of what the actual reward is. Fortunately for a lot of dogs and humans, food treats are rewarding. And for pet dogs who's owners don't want a constant game of tug going on, it had better be something besides tug. My dog thought jumping on people with his Husky hug was rewarding. I found something even more rewarding. Grilled pork chop for breaking off the jumping on people. To be accurate, I should say he found it rewarding, even if he doesn't come up to me and say the words, "I find your butterfly pork chops cooked on the charcoal grill to be most rewarding."

     

    Why oh why throughout history has the method got confused with reality?

    Sure i talk about neurochemicals and i am pretty keen on playing with my two poodles that are  trained for higher levels of obedience etc and i just happen to have  a ball doing it, but for many dogs it just doesn't get there as a reward. If i had a Lab you can bet your bottom dollar that the tuggy would stay in my pocket and the other pocket would be full of his evening meal :)

    OC And CC are a level of abstraction . They work, they are easier to communciate and for ninety per cent of times they are just right.I really don;t think that because my lab ran over the food on his track makes a blind bit of difference to the validity of OC or CC.

     I just need to make this point. I don't


    • Gold Top Dog

    ron2

    One of the tests of a theory is whether or not it explains any better the process involved and I don't see that NDT has. I understand you want to find the basic or elemental explanation or even the psycho-physiological equivalent of a "quantum" explanation" but that's not making it more accurate or even simpler as an explanation. How many here have heard of the EPR Event thought model in Quantum Mechanics aside from me explaining it before. I know of exactly one person that comes here once in a while who has heard of it outside me mentioning. It is a complex problem that is supposed to answer some questions at a sub-atomic level. And doesn't have proof and doesn't effect how good my smoked brisket tastes. And won't effect how dogs learn or how humans train dogs. And hasn't answered how we get police dogs to run INTO danger and hold a partial bite on a human until we say "aus!"

    OC is a working theory because it has been proven to explain what is happening over and over and over and over and over and over .... ad infinitum. It is the simpler theory and explanation. To falsify it, you have to prove that the theory is faulty or that the results are faulty and moreso, you have to prove why your theory is the correct one. I hate to keep discounting the dopamine study but I don't feel it's conclusive. At worst, it points to short-sightedness in assuming that dopamine was the primary compound present in reward. To me, that's similar to saying that reward training doesn't work because police dogs are trained with tug instead of food treats. Missing the forest of a single tree. The tug is rewarding, as a treat is. So, the reward training is working, regardless of what the actual reward is. Fortunately for a lot of dogs and humans, food treats are rewarding. And for pet dogs who's owners don't want a constant game of tug going on, it had better be something besides tug. My dog thought jumping on people with his Husky hug was rewarding. I found something even more rewarding. Grilled pork chop for breaking off the jumping on people. To be accurate, I should say he found it rewarding, even if he doesn't come up to me and say the words, "I find your butterfly pork chops cooked on the charcoal grill to be most rewarding."

     

    Why oh why throughout history has the method got confused with reality?

    Sure i talk about neurochemicals and i am pretty keen on playing with my two poodles that are  trained for higher levels of obedience etc and i just happen to have  a ball doing it, but for many dogs it just doesn't get there as a reward. If i had a Lab you can bet your bottom dollar that the tuggy would stay in my pocket and the other pocket would be full of his evening meal :)

    OC And CC are a level of abstraction . They work, they are easier to communciate and for ninety per cent of times they are just right.I really don't think that because my lab ran over the food on his track makes a blind bit of difference to the validity of OC or CC.

     I just need to make this point. I don't want to be inadvertently supporting a debate against OC which is a fantastic tool which i rely heavily on.


    • Gold Top Dog

    That's just it, Poodleowned. LCK is saying that the model of OC, wherein a creature seeks reward and avoids punishment, is wrong. Primarily because he says so in order to present his own theory. Then, he presents a study showing dopamine present in both rewarding and non-rewarding situations and feels that supports the contention that dogs do not learn by the process in OC of reward, they learn by noting differences. But I think that theory lacks an explanation of why the learning takes place, the motivation. I don't think dogs learn just for the sake of learning, like humans think of themselves as doing. That is, it is not my idea to prove OC wrong or inadequate. And OC is working, even in some classical conditioning, with or without a human directing it. And I have often thought that an initial behavior can be learn as an operant and done enough times, becomes classical and generalized, such as my command, off.

    And yes, one could say that OC and CC are "abstractions." Though I find the more elemental theories to actually be more abstract and fanciful. But down to at least the structural level of organism survival, they work.

    • Gold Top Dog

    What i am interested in is the compelling "drive" or  need to dispose of the theories behind OC and CC.  Has anyone done a paper or two on that? :)

     I think I anticipated this question when countering the hunch-theory that 'evolution occurs because there are forces that connect things'.  In the counter hunch-theory, the status-quo evolves when entities and subjects effectively differentiate themselves from their  environment by disconnecting from it - by dissing it.  

    Attempts to distinguish oneself will occasionally lead to creative advance, but alas, evolution theory shows that the vast majority of such self-differentiation fades to extinction.  Such contrariness explains superstars - like Lady Ga-Ga - but creative advances tend to result from more subtle and cautious change.

    NDT (No Dogs Think) is not creative advance.

    Some good common-sense in these recent combox posts.  It helps in lowering my blood pressure Big Smile

     

      

    • Gold Top Dog

    I was always blown away by the fact that there is usually very little difference between  compulsory and voluntary admission to rehab in success.

    If we are going to hypothesize about that, I would venture to suggest that it's because the reasons for addiction (and mental illness) are predominantly organic, and not based on either intention or weakness.  I suspect that, just as with other substances, including such ordinarily benign things like eggs or strawberries, different people metabolize differently or suffer allergies to.  It would seem to follow that different people also have alterations in the brain pathways that are susceptible to substances that cross the blood brain barrier (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, for example).  I acted as chauffeur for a friend of mine to many AA meetings, and it was interesting to hear that a lot of alcoholic people describe taking a first drink and "loving it" such that they were addicted from the get go - I suspect that, unlike me, many people also take their first drag on cigarette and feel the same way.  I can take or leave the alcohol, and detest cigarettes.  However, please pass the caffeine:-)))