But the subject matter one thinks about has to be collected through sensory data processing before one can formulate any concepts. — Vera Mont

Sure. But it lacks any meaningful point in the discussion for the topic rational beings and rational thinking. What is there to dispute or be surprised in that? It is like saying, if you wore sunglasses, then the whole world will appear darker to you.

It is not talking anything about rational beings or thinking, but it is just a description of a obvious mechanism of perception, that if you are lacking something in your retina, you cannot see things in proper way. If a being lacks sensory organs, then it cannot form any concepts. What is new or interesting?

Normally, we do indeed believe what we see, etc and that is unproblematic. But sometimes we find ourselves with incompatible beliefs, or simply confused. Then we start asking questions, making diagnoses; very often, but not always we can resolve the situation and then we turn on the perceiver and conclude that there is something wrong or at least different going on - colour-blindness, astigmatism, etc. — Ludwig V

Only if you have some external source of information that contradicts your defective senses. without that contradiction, you would ask no questions.

What is new or interesting? — Corvus

Nothing at all. One old, uninteresting point is that concepts are formed from sensory input, not independently.

My goodness, so much concern about the dog knowing the time. Did the dog have a watch? Is there a clock on the wall of the train station? How is the dog informed about the time?

In case of mysterious or abnormal visual perception case, you would try to resort to the biological or psychological probes and explanation in clarifying the problems, rather than rationalisation. — Corvus

I agree with that. I was thinking, however, that deciding what the physical explanation is would be applying rationality.

Only if you have some external source of information that contradicts your defective senses. without that contradiction, you would ask no questions. — Vera Mont

That's right. But that external source has to be, or be based on, perception.

How is the dog informed about the time? — Athena

The same way you are. The biological clock that came with our brain, plus changes in the environment, plus experience, plus memory. People and other animals kept daily and seasonal routines long before anybody built a stone circle and very long before we let ourselves be ruled by mechanical horologes. I have no idea why other people think this is remarkable, when we all not only have a sense of time, but can witness every living thing around us respond to the passage of time.

It is perfectly clear to me. I am a part of the universe. We all are. Parts of the universe are aware of themselves, and of the universe as a whole. Maybe our planet is the only place in the universe where this is happening. But it is happening. The universe is waking up to its own existence, and coming to comprehend itself. — Patterner

I don't dispute that parts of the universe are aware of themselves and of the universe as a whole. But I can't see that it follows that the universe is aware of itself or its parts. I don't think that my car is aware of anything just because I'm driving it, though I can see some sense in such an idea. But the idea that my car is aware of itself just because someone is sitting in it makes no sense to me.
But I do think that there is something important about insisting that we are a product of the universe, not some alien imposition.

I have no idea why other people think this is remarkable, when we all not only have a sense of time, but can witness every living thing around us respond to the passage of time. — Vera Mont

I agree with you. It seems to me that there are two concepts of time in play. There is the idea of time as a rhythm or repetition, and our biological clock maintain what is called a circadian rhythm, making us more inclined to sleep and night and wake up during the day. (The human biological clock is located in the hypothalamus in the brain.) Then there is our clock time - which actual is a more sophisticated system that does the same thing. It's not unreasonable to suppose that dogs and other animals do not comprehend that system. But it is unreasonable not to recognize that they also have biological clocks that do give them an effective sense of time - it's a well established fact.

Circadian rhythms have been widely observed in animals, plants, fungi and cyanobacteria

Wikipedia - Circadian rhythm

I don't dispute that parts of the universe are aware of themselves and of the universe as a whole. But I can't see that it follows that the universe is aware of itself or its parts. I don't think that my car is aware of anything just because I'm driving it, though I can see some sense in such an idea. But the idea that my car is aware of itself just because someone is sitting in it makes no sense to me.
But I do think that there is something important about insisting that we are a product of the universe, not some alien imposition. — Ludwig V

I'm not saying the universe has one unified consciousness that is aware of itself. Just that some parts of the universe are aware. It may be all that ever happens. It would only be a scifi story where all the bits of consciousness merged into one.

The only definition of the universe that I think makes sense is to list everything in it. Which, obviously, is far from possible. Everything would have to be listed as its individual self, as well as as a party of any group or system that is a part of, etc. etc. So we could only ever list a ridiculously minuscule number of things. But on that list would be you and me. You are a part of the definition of the universe. If you did not exist, the definition of the universe would be different than it is. And the part of the universe that is you is aware. Aware of yoursrlf individually, aware of a billion other things, and aware of the universe as a whole. A part of the universe is aware of itself.

A part of the universe is aware of itself. — Patterner

The parts of the universe that become aware of themselves and other parts only do so by distinguishing themselves and other parts from everything else.

I believe you are correct. It seems to me interaction with others plays a huge roll in the development of our consciousness.

And the part of the universe that is you is aware. Aware of yoursrlf individually, aware of a billion other things, and aware of the universe as a whole. A part of the universe is aware of itself. — Patterner

I don't disagree with that. I must have misunderstood you.

The parts of the universe that become aware of themselves and other parts only do so by distinguishing themselves and other parts from everything else. — Janus

Indeed. That is one of the unique attributes of living beings. The hallmark of organic life is that it has to maintain itself rather than being subsumed into whatever chemical or energetic process is going on around it, as non-organic matter does. This is one of the distinctions that Evan Thompson makes in Mind in Life. But humans go a step beyond that. They're aware that they're aware.

I agree with that. I was thinking, however, that deciding what the physical explanation is would be applying rationality. — Ludwig V

I am not sure if deciding what physical explanation is applying rationality. Reasoning is either deductive or inductive reasoning. Deduction infers from the valid premises to the valid conclusions such as A > B, B >C therefore A>C. All men is mortal, Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Induction is reasoning which infers the future case from the observed previous cases such as Sun have risen from the east. The sun rises from the east. Therefore sun will rise from the east.

Reasoning yields new knowledge or conclusion from the premises or observations. Reasoning can be ground for the actions, speakings, beliefs, knowledge and explanations. But reasoning itself is not explanations or beliefs or actions. You seem to be still in confusion telling the difference between reasoning and intelligence (or knowledge).

Nothing at all. One old, uninteresting point is that concepts are formed from sensory input, not independently. — Vera Mont

So how does that point relate to your stance that animals are able to do rational thinking?

It doesn't. The preponderance of evidence does.
The teeny-tiny, microscopic point I attempted to make in this context was in support of the previous argument by Ludwig V was that conceptual thought depends on concepts, which are formed from sensory input.

If my data is wrong, despite my assessing it rationally, then my rationality is not in question. It would be if I became better informed and failed to change my assessment. — Ludwig V

Rational thinking and reasoning takes place in conceptual level, not physical or biological level. — Corvus

Just that, nothing more. Any entity, of any species that thinks rationally can, nevertheless, draw false conclusions if they are working with inaccurate data.
If there ever was such a point worth making, its moment has long passed.

So

I am not sure if deciding what physical explanation is applying rationality. — Corvus

I don't see what your problem is. If my question is "Why can't S tell red from green?", I will want to work out my answer rationally, because that guarantees that my answer will be reliably correct.

Reasoning can be ground for the actions, speakings, beliefs, knowledge and explanations. — Corvus

"ground" is a bit vague. I hope you mean "justification". I notice you include explanations in your list. I'm especially happy with that.

I believe you are correct. It seems to me interaction with others plays a huge roll in the development of our consciousness. — Patterner

I've little doubt that is true. Which gives me one more reason for not understanding what it would mean for the universe to be conscious. There isn't anything else for it to distinguish itself from.

conceptual thought depends on concepts, which are formed from sensory input. — Vera Mont

I hope you'll forgive me nit-picking at something that is broadly true. But I think it is important, in order to ensure we avoid various well-known philosophical traps, that we never forget, that actions (interactions) with the world are critically important, not only in learning how to interpret our sensory input, but also in understanding what concepts are - knowing what "gate" means means knowing how to use (and abuse) the gate.

The same way you are. The biological clock that came with our brain, plus changes in the environment, plus experience, plus memory. People and other animals kept daily and seasonal routines long before anybody built a stone circle and very long before we let ourselves be ruled by mechanical horologes. I have no idea why other people think this is remarkable, when we all not only have a sense of time, but can witness every living thing around us respond to the passage of time. — Vera Mont

Your comments are perfect for continuing the conversation.

The animals will not be ruled by our modern cultural understanding of time. They will never rely on clocks to regulate their lives. The forces of nature will always regulate their lives. None of them will ever complain they want to be lazy and stay in their pajamas all day, but they have to go to work. A dog will never understand the reasoning behind our modern-day way of life and excitingly, not that long ago, no human being would understand our modern way of life. Comparably we are not living our lives but like puppets, our rationale controls us while we do not perceive life in the raw. It takes something like a hurricane to get us out of our heads and back into life.

Our rational notions of life are pretty disconnected from nature. :lol: That is to say we do not experience the tree, but what we think about the tree. Does that make sense?

The parts of the universe that become aware of themselves and other parts only do so by distinguishing themselves and other parts from everything else. — Janus

Nice thought. Does this link compliment what you said?

1. Representationalism
Representational theories of consciousness reduce consciousness to “mental representations” rather than directly to neural states. Examples include first-order representationalism (FOR) which attempts to explain conscious experience primarily in terms of world-directed (or first-order) intentional states (Tye 2005) as well as several versions of higher-order representationalism (HOR) which holds that what makes a mental state M conscious is that it is the object of some kind of higher-order mental state directed at M (Rosenthal 2005, Gennaro 2012). The primary focus of this entry is on HOR and especially higher-order thought (HOT) theory. The key question that should be answered by any theory of consciousness is: What makes a mental state a conscious mental state? https://iep.utm.edu/higher-order-theories-of-consciousness/

I believe you are correct. It seems to me interaction with others plays a huge roll in the development of our consciousness.
— Patterner
I've little doubt that is true. Which gives me one more reason for not understanding what it would mean for the universe to be conscious. There isn't anything else for it to distinguish itself from. — Ludwig V

Again, we could come up with a scifi idea that would work. But that's all it would be.

A part of the universe is aware of itself. — Patterner

Chardin was a Catholic priest who lived in China and the Chruch forbade him to publish his book.

He said something like this, "God is asleep in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals, to know self in man".

Thanks. I should look into him. I know his philosophies were a huge basis of Julian May's Galactic Milieu series, which is an incredible scifi/fantasy series about humanity gaining psionic abilities.

Yep. It's hard to imagine an organism that does not interact with the world - if only to anchor on something and feed itself. With blythe disregard to potential philosophical pitfalls, I kind of presupposed being alive means being in the world. As I noted earlier, in the absence of outside sources of information - i.e. memory, experience, input from other organisms - one has only one's imperfect, unaided senses upon which to base understanding of anything. One would form concept s (a functioning mind cannot help forming concepts, even if it has no name for them) and thus make decisions that were only as accurate as the available data.

The animals will not be ruled by our modern cultural understanding of time. — Athena

Our pets and service animals are ruled by whatever schedule society set for their owners/handlers. Farm animals are,too, to a lesser degree, as their needs influence - though do not determine - the farmer's routine.

Our rational notions of life are pretty disconnected from nature. :lol: That is to say we do not experience the tree, but what we think about the tree. Does that make sense? — Athena

It does to me. When sequestered from the elements, the environment and denizens of nature, we let ourselves make up fanciful theories about those things, for a variety of reasons. One of these, as I said before, is exploitation. A major one has been to bolster theologies and thereby, the lifting of Man half-way to Heaven. There are strong vestiges of that mindset in the secular realm. Another reason is nostalgia: an ache for the loss of a dimension of our selves. A pervasive one has been art; the appreciation of natural beauty. Yet another is entertainment and profit through entertaining humans.

As long as we have theories and centuries-old Eurocentric philosophical maxims regarding the nature of nature, we can deny the less adamantine evidence of direct observation, direct interaction.

But humans go a step beyond that. They're aware that they're aware. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure being aware of awareness makes sense. Perhaps it's just that we can tell ourselves that we are aware on account of possessing symbolic language.

Nice thought. Does this link compliment what you said? — Athena

I think so, In line with my response to Wayfarer above I tend to think that whereas other animals distinguish themselves from everything else in having a sense of self but are not conscious of doing that distinguishing we that possess symbolic language are able to reflectively tell ourselves that we are doing that distinguishing and even tell ourselves that we are directly aware of doing that distinguishing. I tend to think the latter is a kind of illusion though.

I have no idea why other people think this is remarkable, when we all not only have a sense of time, but can witness every living thing around us respond to the passage of time. — Vera Mont

There's a well-known - some might say notorious - case which was recounted in a popular book of the 1970's, Supernature, and again in a more recent work, The Human Cosmos, Jo Marchant.

In February 1954 , a US biologist named Frank Brown discovered something so remarkable, so inexplicable, that his peers essentially wrote it out of history. Brown had dredged a batch of Atlantic oysters from the seabed off New Haven, Connecticut, and shipped them hundreds of miles inland to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Then he put them into pans of brine inside a sealed darkroom, shielded from any changes in temperature, pressure, water currents, or light. Normally, these oysters feed with the tides. They open their shells to filter plankton and algae from the seawater, with rest periods in between when their shells are closed. Brown had already established that they are most active at high tide, which arrives roughly twice a day. He was interested in how the mollusks time this behavior, so he devised the experiment to test what they would do when kept far from the sea and deprived of any information about the tides. Would their normal feeding rhythm persist?

For the first two weeks, it did. Their feeding activity continued to peak 50 minutes later each day, in time with the tides on the oysters’ home beach in New Haven. That in itself was an impressive result, suggesting that the shellfish could keep accurate time. But then something unexpected happened, which changed Brown’s life forever.

The oysters gradually shifted their feeding times later and later. After two more weeks, a stable cycle reappeared, but it now lagged three hours behind the New Haven tides. Brown was mystified, until he checked an astronomical almanac. High tides occur each day when the moon is highest in the sky or lowest below the horizon. Brown realized that the oysters had corrected their activity according to the local state of the moon; they were feeding when Evanston—if it had been by the sea—would experience high tide. He had isolated these organisms from every obvious environmental cue. And yet, somehow, they were following the moon.

The second of those two books recounts how Frank Brown was essentially ostracized by the scientific mainstream for the claim that the oysters somehow responded to changes in lunar gravitation. Nevertheless his findings still stand as far as I know.

//I should add, I don't think molluscs are conscious, and these actions are not rational, but that it is very interesting that this behaviour can be regulated in this manner.//

Biology is still beyond our ken. Neuroscience is well behind. Physics and cosmology are ranging off into neverlands of speculation. But we know all about metaphysics.
I have not heard of this experiment. Thanks! Don't quite know what to do with it, or where to file it, but it's fascinating.

The second of those two books recounts how Frank Brown was essentially ostracized by the scientific mainstream for the claim that the oysters somehow responded to changes in lunar gravitation. Nevertheless his findings still stand as far as I know. — Wayfarer

That's a good story. However, I recently happened to hear a BBC radio science programme that answers questions sent in by listeners (often children). There was a question about the effects of the moon's gravity on the earth. The answer was incredibly detailed, but mentioned, unless I misheard, that the moon's gravity had a (presumably measurable) effect on the earth's rocks; it suggested a kind of (mini-) tidal effect on land as well as water. Which doesn't seem fantastic to me, so I believe that. It would entirely explain those results. I wonder who we could ask? (I wouldn't rate that as particularly super, but the way. It's just one of those things that is so obvious one wonders why one didn't think of it before.)

I think so, In line with my response to Wayfarer above I tend to think that whereas other animals distinguish themselves from everything else in having a sense of self but are not conscious of doing that distinguishing we that possess symbolic language are able to reflectively tell ourselves that we are doing that distinguishing and even tell ourselves that we are directly aware of doing that distinguishing. I tend to think the latter is a kind of illusion though. — Janus

It seems to me that they most likely have self-awareness, because otherwise they couldn't navigate the world or tell the difference between the things around them moving and themselves moving. I have often seen them exercising self-control - just ask them to sit and stay while you walk away. Other animals I don't know well enough to opine. Self-reflection seems to me to depend on human language so I'm willing to let that go.

I'm not sure being aware of awareness makes sense. Perhaps it's just that we can tell ourselves that we are aware on account of possessing symbolic language. — Janus

The whole business is infected with the fact that the grammar of language allows one to apply recursion, so when S believes/knows/is aware that p, it is not ungrammatical to suggest that S believes/knows/is aware that S believes/knows/is aware that p, and S believes/knows/is aware that S believes/knows/is aware that p that S believes/knows/is aware that p and so on. There's also I know that p, and so now you know that p, and so I know that you know that p, and you know that I know that you know that p. The fact that grammar permits it is no reason to suppose that each step is meaningful.

A major one has been to bolster theologies and thereby, the lifting of Man half-way to Heaven. — Vera Mont

Yes. It is striking though how theologies need to convince us first that we are less than worms (no disrespect to worms, though) in order to be able to lift us up, but only half-way to heaven, with dire threats about what will happen if we break their rules.

Representational theories of consciousness reduce consciousness to “mental representations” rather than directly to neural states.

The question that bothers me about representational theories is that they never explain what it is that is being represented. I know how a picture is a representation, but not how those mental whatsits are. What does a smell/taste represent? or a touch? Or a pain? Representations of sounds seem to be more like mimicries or recreations that representations. It's all completely unclear, and yet people hang on to it. I don't get it.

It seems to me that they most likely have self-awareness, because otherwise they couldn't navigate the world or tell the difference between the things around them moving and themselves moving. I have often seen them exercising self-control - just ask them to sit and stay while you walk away. Other animals I don't know well enough to opine. Self-reflection seems to me to depend on human language so I'm willing to let that go. — Ludwig V

Not sure if you are disagreeing with me here. I believe animals to varying degrees are self-aware. But I find it hard to imagine how they could be reflectively or narratively self-aware given that they don't possess symbolic language.

The fact that grammar permits it is no reason to suppose that each step is meaningful. — Ludwig V

Yes. all that. So what we call reflective self-awareness which some would say elevates us above the other animals I would say is not anything different in any phenomenologically immediate sense than simple awareness of or sense of difference between self and other, but merely the post hoc narrative about our self-awareness which language enables us to tell.

But I find it hard to imagine how they could be reflectively or narratively self-aware given that they don't possess symbolic language. — Janus

Does it matter whether you can tell stories about your thinking? I mean, it obviously matters to the storyteller. I happen to be a teller of fictional stories and it matters greatly to me. I suppose it matters even more to the tellers of stories that liberate or subjugate or eradicate entire peoples. In that sense, it raises humans above species that can't or don't need to tell stories.
(I imagine the dog's record of his internal life as a reel of virtual reality - like a 6D movie. Is it story-telling? Without grammar and syntax, it's hard to tell - in fact, at the time, it's impossible to communicate - but that's the way children with limited verbal skills view their own life.)
But how does it alter rational thought, problem-solving or navigating the physical world?