₦airaland Forum

adefash: this is a philosophy class where if you cannot prove your points, though you may be correct, but will not be acceptable. We once raised a dog brought from village.we started feeding him with wet garri.it was gladly eating it. We started adding sugar, it started rejecting garri without sugar. We graduated to giving him solid foods. With time he started rejecting garri even when it had sugar. A tenant parked into our house. She normaly comes in with fast foods and will take the remnants to the dogs. She was always doing this. What we noticed was that the dog started reject eba,amala,rice without plantain we were offering him.he became our tenant's pet.when our tenant packed out, the dog stopped eating from us since we were not feeding him with fast foods. This is not thinking.if you do that to 100 dogs, you get the same result. You cannot get the same result if you that to 100 sane human beings. Human being for reasons do that which is not convinient to them because they taught over it.as we see some children who become wayward because their parents cannot cater for their needs while we have seen alot who will not do that for integrity sake.we have seen people who are upright today when ppl could vouch for them and tomorrow, they are some thing else and the same ppl are suprised that so this brother can do this. Animals are predictable because they cant think to do otherwise but sane humans are very unpredictable because they think.
My opinion!

adefash: i like the way you statrted your post by saying you would like to believe that animals think for so so reason. We can not ascertain that they think or otherwise but we can infer from what we think they do since we have not been in their forms before, at least i have not been an animal before.
Back to your points, i like your analysis because they are very educative. But from what you have analysed so far cannot possibly say thats how thinking comes up.if every elephant will return to die where their parents or companions were buried, and no one will think he should do something different, i dont think thats thinking, its stereotypic. What i am saying is that in human, we can choose where to be buried, which hospitals to go, which school to go,who to have sex with, which food to eat for known reasons. These reasons are products of thinking.you may not know what to expect from the next person to you always but you can predict what a dog will do 100 times whenever he see a stranger, you can predict where an elephant will return to die 100 times provided he knows where his parents were buried, you can predict 100times what a dolphine will do whenever he feels like having sex. You cant predict these 100 times in human. A man who loves having sex may not want to have sex with the available ladies around because they are not his tastes. I think this is what we call "thinking".lions dont eat animals not killed by them. You can predict this 1000000 times. This is not thinking, its a hard-coded programe which differs from animal to animal. You may train a dog,as you claimed,to do calculations,computers do calculations as well and we cant say it is thinking, the trained do you trained 1+1=2 can never tell you $1+$1=$2, but a man you teach 1+1=2 could tell the answer to the second question.
Conclusion: from my own view, animals cannot think.