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estearumtoday at 4:38 PM1 replyview on HN

Your opposing theory is that the dogs consciously chose to salivate?


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raincoletoday at 4:57 PM

The parent commenter's claim is:

> The key discovery is that there is a physiological reaction which cannot be suppressed anymore consciously.

My opposing theories are

1. dogs don't have conscious minds that are similar to humans' so the whole experiment can't be extrapolated to humans

or

2. dogs can suppress it consciously if they really want, like we can suppress the 'hanger reflex', it's just we don't have a way to tell dogs to do that

I really don't know how Pavlov experiment nullified these theories, and if it did, why "training animals to do circus tricks" didn't. Are we sure 'doing circus tricks' is equal to consciousness, and how?