[Buddha-l] Fw: ask mollie about this

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 10, 2011, at 12:47, "Gad Horowitz" <horowitz at chass.utoronto.ca> wrote:

> I would like to know how our namesake, A. Horowitz, knows that dogs know what has gone on "a week ago"?

I share your skepticism. Like Kant, I doubt that any member of any species can do more than speculate how the member of another species experiences the world. Hell, I can't even figure out how Michele Bachmann experiences the world. 

Alexandra Horowitz does say that we can be reasonably sure that dogs have a more nuanced sense of smell than human beings have, because 1) dogs' noses have hundreds of times as many, and more types of, receptors than human nostrils, and 2) a much larger part of a dog's brain is devoted to processing olfactory stimuli than is the case with human beings. About as much of a dog's wetware is devoted to smell as a human being's is devoted to vision. So, says Dr Horowitz, canine olfaction is about as informative to a dog as human vision is to a human being. That much is based on standard assumptions and findings in neurophysiology. But when we begin to discuss how (and even whether) dogs experience time and space, I think we enter the realm of speculation. I find Dr A. Horowitz's speculations charming, but probably because I share her fondness for dogs and love to guess what my dogs are thinking and how the world seems to them and whether they think our cats are sentient beings or robotic stuffed toys. Also, she's from Harvard (the University of Toronto of the south), and no one from Harvard is allowed to be wrong about anything. So I believe everything she says. 

Richard