From Phoebe Southworth at the Daily Mail:
Scientists have found ‘strong evidence’ that dogs use gestures to communicate with people in one of the first systematic attempts to decode their language.
…
Sometimes dogs use a variety of signals in order to get their message across if it is not understood the first time, the study showed.
And different dogs were found to use different signals for the same request.
Amazing. Simply amazing.
It appears that most of the time the object of interest is their food bowl. More.
What’s more, there is anecdotal evidence that some dogs will even bring the food bowl, the water bowl, the leash, or the ball to their human friends, in case anyone forgot the things that really matter in life.
If only they awarded the Nobel for animal cognition studies…
Seriously, naturalist (materialist) science is getting nowhere dealing with things like human consciousness. Three current strategies are to claim or imply that
1) consciousness is an illusion
2) everything is conscious (panpsychism)
3) many animal species really do think like humans, according to breathless reporting on a study (although the same species shows no evidence of human-level intelligence otherwise). A variant on this last one is to point to a commonplace fact about the animal in question and pretend that it is a discovery of previously unknown abilities. File this story as being of possible interest in group 3.
Hat tip: Ken Francis
See also: Animals take turns when communicating? Who would have imagined that? That’s what “communication” *is,* as opposed to display.
Not only that but … pigeons understand probabilities! In short, the pigeon does not do any abstract thinking and therefore works only with remembered outcomes. This is one of those circumstances where greater intelligence can be a handicap.
… And bees understand the concept of zero too!
Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain?
From Inside Higher Ed: Consciousness studies – “Is This the World’s Most Bizarre Scholarly Meeting?”
A cautious defense of panpsychism (everything is conscious) as an alternative to naturalist despair of the whole field of consciousness
and
Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself