
WHAT’S IN A NAME? WHAT’S IN A DOG? (part
two)
In my last entry, I promised a quote from well-known psychologist and dog expert Stanley Coren, taken from his excellent book, The Consciousness of Dogs. I’m going to deliver on that promise, but first, what exactly is consciousness?
If you look in the Random House College Dictionary, you get this: “the state of being conscious; awareness. the thoughts and feelings, collectively, of an individual or of an aggregate of people. full activity of the mind and senses. awareness of something for what it is: consciousness of wrongdoing.”
Of these definitions, “awareness of something for what it is” strikes me as the key. To be possessed of consciousness, I have to know what I am, and I have to know what other things are that aren’t me. You don’t have consciousness unless you can make this distinction. I have read that children are only partially conscious until sometime around the age of five. At this point, they have fully lost their sense of the w…
In my last entry, I promised a quote from well-known psychologist and dog expert Stanley Coren, taken from his excellent book, The Consciousness of Dogs. I’m going to deliver on that promise, but first, what exactly is consciousness?
If you look in the Random House College Dictionary, you get this: “the state of being conscious; awareness. the thoughts and feelings, collectively, of an individual or of an aggregate of people. full activity of the mind and senses. awareness of something for what it is: consciousness of wrongdoing.”
Of these definitions, “awareness of something for what it is” strikes me as the key. To be possessed of consciousness, I have to know what I am, and I have to know what other things are that aren’t me. You don’t have consciousness unless you can make this distinction. I have read that children are only partially conscious until sometime around the age of five. At this point, they have fully lost their sense of the w…