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Article 6691 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Consiousness
Message-ID: <1992Aug24.095016.3313@otago.ac.nz>
>From: barryp@otago.ac.nz
Date: 24 Aug 92 09:50:16 +1300
Organization: University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Lines: 40

Path: otago.ac.nz!barryp
>From: barryp@otago.ac.nz
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive
Subject: Re: Consciousness
Message-ID: <1992Aug24.094452.3312@otago.ac.nz>
Date: 24 Aug 92 09:44:52 +1300
References: <705@trwacs.fp.trw.com> <1992Aug23.014900.16178@news.Hawaii.Edu>
Followup-To: sci.cognitive
Distribution: sci
Organization: University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Lines: 28

In article <1992Aug23.014900.16178@news.Hawaii.Edu>, lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady) writes:
> 
> It seems to me that one of the things that distinquishes humans from
> other animals is that humans (at least in most cultures) have a real
> sense of time, a sense of the past and future.  While certainly other
> animals have memory in some sense, I don't think they have a real sense
> of the past.  When a dog's owner comes back from being away at college,
> for instance, and the dog seems totally overjoyed, I think it is only our
> anthropomorphism that interprets this as meaning that the dog has been
> aware that the owner was gone a very long time.  I realize that this is
> pretty fuzzy speculation on my part, but there it is, for what it's worth. 
> 
> weeks or even years in the future.  Birds flying south for the winter or
> building a nest in the spring don't seem to have this same sort of
> conscious intentionality, although we anthropomorphically attribute it to
> them.  Do beavers building a dam have some sort of awareness that it will
> be nice to have a dam, or do they just enjoy dam building as an
> activity?  I guess one could figure out experiments to test this.  
> 
One could figure out experiments but teh problem with animals is that we can't
ask them what there reasons for their actions are.  My feeling is that the
time sense is more developed in humans than most other animals but it is
impossible to argue that it is totally lacking elsewhere.  A good point to 
remember is that humans are just animals and any faculty found in humans is
found elsewhere in nature.  Dogs probably think something similar about 
humans.

Barry Phease


