Also, I can see knowing you is going to get expensive.

And while we’re tatting away (and before I get any deeper in the Shiraz) I just read the first bit of “Figments Of Reality” and if you haven’t already read Von Uexkull’s treatise on the umwelt (A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men) you NEED it. Oh, and “The View from the Oak” too.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

Now you see why I’ve been watching you like a stoner contemplating a lava lamp?

Gibson’s “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception” presents a phenomenological (or outside-in) way of looking at perception as opposed to the traditional cartesian inside-out approach.

For an excellent synopsis of Gibson’s key ideas and some really interesting insights on how modern culture seems designed to turn us all into mindless zombies read Reed’s “The Necessity of Experience.”

Off to bookfinder…

… and back.. I just ordered it as it amazon’s blurb noted that: the author’s schtick is that human minds are produced by complicity between human brains and culture …and lately (along with perception and theories of mind) I’ve been doing a lot of reading / thinking about culture.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD!

I had actually never heard of Gibson or ecological perception before, but I think I see what you mean and it makes sense.

Incidentally, have you read Figments of Reality? That’s the book I’m gnawing through, and after posting on bacterial learning via molecular circuit you mention Luca Turin’s work… both touched on in the same chapter, albeit one in much more detail than the other.

I think you’re right on track with this – and I suspect that if we presented a dog with his scent, perhaps overlayed with another one that he has a locational idea of (his own fresh poop?) – he’d immediately sniff the appropriate place on his body (thinking, do I need to clean my butt?).

The idea of a mirror image as ‘irrelevant’ to a dog makes sense too if one considers sensory input in the mode of Gibson’s ideas on ecological perception. In the flow of perception, that moving thing in the mirror behaves more like a mirage than a concrete object, and is therefore worthy of only fleeting interest.

All my dogs and cats seem to recognize themselves quite well in mirrors.

I’ve tried to trick the black lab with mirrors (the house we bought has some serious mirrorage in the bathrooms). She finds it great fun, but never is “fooled” by my image. Standing in a 4-way image area, she’ll immediately look/respond/ID the real, non-reflected me. But she’ll also glance at the reflection – and if her toy is being held behind my back – immediately try and run around me to get to it.

But I remarked to the Mrs. “Ya know, if you parachuted into one of those villages that doesn’t know about the outside world, and tried to get the average villager there to take one of those square/round or red/blue, or get a treat when a certain whatever happens….

What are the odds that the villager is going to “pass” it?

(Not, by the way, meant to demean the IQ of remote villagers in the stone age – rather that some of these tests seem rather limited in what they might measure, and I’d suspect said stone agers would be quite smart enough to say “Treats? Food? Lots of it? HASSAN CHOP!” and take *all* the treats.)

Reading this reminded me of a so-called intelligence test I once tried with my dogs: take a treat, show it to the dog, then cover said treat under a towel. A “dumb” dog will look at you like, “Where’d it go?” A smart dog will push the towel aside and find the treat.

My smart-ass Chow Shepherd mix had her own solution: she chomped down on the towel and took it and the treat out of the room, and while she was escaping (rescuing her treat) she ate part of the towel to get to the milk bone. Pretty damn smart if you ask me — if a bit impatient, but that’s how she was!

I’m one of those Greyhound idiots who makes fancy collars for her dogs. Over the years I’ve had quite a few who would walk past a mirror when wearing a new one, stop, go back and to all appearances admire themselves.

All my dogs do the follow-the-pointing-finger thing. I’ll have to try it with the horses.

As for scent, clearly dogs recognize their own; compare the reaction of a dog returning to its own peeing spot versus the reaction when some untrustworthy stranger has been there. If all they knew was “this smells like dog pee,” there wouldn’t be a difference.

A couple of additions: dogs (which our own NMxican writer John McLoughlin wonderfully calls “a social hybrid of man and wolf”) have recently proven to be one of the VERY few animals that can get the “point” of a human’s pointing. Great apes can’t.

Also, dog sight varies greatly. All sighthounds — not just my intelligent primitive tazis but greyhounds, which are sweet but dumb as rocks, have surprisingly acute sight, at least for moving objects. I have been alerted by my hounds to coyotes at a quarter mile while they are riding in the truck cab. Our old dachshund on the other hand is blind in one eye and you can’t tell by her behavior that anything has changed.

And they’re supposed to be the smart ones.