Ixas_girl
Posted : 5/13/2007 8:34:38 PM
A 17th century idea: dogs are a series of mechanical responses to stimuli.
"Although the idea of an intelligent, reasoning, and feeling dog persisted for many centuries, we might say that in the seventeenth century dogs lost their minds. However, according to one of the most influential French philosophers of the time, René Descartes, dogs had no minds to lose. An exceptional mathematician, Descartes also performed some important experiments in physiology, but it seems likely his strong Catholic religious feelings, not his scientific findings, led him to this conclusion. To Descartes, granting dogs any degree of intelligence was equivalent to admitting that dogs had consciousness, which would include awareness and the ability to plan future actions. According to religious doctrines at the time, however, anything that had consciousness also had a soul, and anything that had a soul could earn admission to heaven. That dogs might go to heaven was unacceptable to both Descartes and the Roman Catholic Church at that time.
This left Descartes with the problem of explaining how, in the absence of intelligence, reasoning, or consciousness, dogs could have such complex behaviors. His answer came when he visited the gardens of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the birthplace and home of Louis XIV. Those gardens featured the seventeenth-century equivalent of animatronics or robotics in the form of elegant statues designed by the Italian engineer Thomas Francini. Each figure was a clever piece of machinery powered by hydraulics and carefully geared to perform a complex sequence of actions. Thus one statue might play a harp, while another danced, and so forth. Descartes reasoned that dogs might be the biological equivalent of these animated machines, but instead of being driven by hydraulics and gears, they are controlled by physical reflexes and unthinking responses to things that stimulate them. The observation that dogs respond to their environment does not invalidate his argument, since those statues also responded to outside events, such as when a person stepped on a particular paving stone, which triggered the switch that in turn activated the statue. "
Exerpt from
How Dogs Think
Understanding the Canine Mind
by Stanley Coren