[dust42]

"It showed that dogs process information from their environment and use it to make predictions"

Exactly that is not what the experiment is about because we all know that dogs will quickly learn the connection between bell and food as dogs are easy to teach new tricks.

If you replace 'dogs' with 'humans', it becomes an empty phrase: "It showed that humans process information from their environment and use it to make predictions" - we all know that.

The groundbreaking part of the experiment was that it showed there are responses which are not part of the conscious mind and which are not willingly controllable by the conscious mind. The dog did not 'decide' to produce saliva.

The experiment was done with a dog because obviously you wont find humans willing to undergo surgery to have the saliva come out of the cheeks instead of into the mouth.

One has to forget about the dog and mentally replace it with a human: now the observation that the human connects the bell with the food is shallow. But the conditioned saliva reflex remains and can't be suppressed - and that is a remarkable insight. It works both with negative and positive stimuli. The latter one being a recipe for a long-lasting happy relationship ;)

[perfmode]

The claim that the conditioned salivary response “can’t be suppressed” keeps getting repeated, and it’s still wrong. Pavlov’s own experiments demonstrated extinction. The conditioned response does weaken and disappear when you stop pairing the bell with food. It’s resistant to conscious override in real time, sure, but it’s not permanent or unsuppressable in the way you keep implying.

The framing that Pavlov’s key insight was about “responses which are not part of the conscious mind” is historically a bit anachronistic. Pavlov was a physiologist, not a psychologist. He wasn’t primarily making claims about consciousness vs. unconsciousness. He was mapping the mechanics of reflexes and their modification. The conscious/unconscious framing is more of a later psychological interpretation layered on top. Pavlov himself was pretty hostile to mentalistic language and would probably have objected to framing his work in terms of what the “conscious mind” does or doesn’t control.

The claim about surgery is also a bit misleading as a reason for using dogs. Pavlov used dogs because he was a digestive physiologist studying gastric secretion. The surgical fistula was created so he could measure salivation precisely, not because the experiment required it conceptually. You could (and people later did) study conditioned physiological responses in humans through things like galvanic skin response, heart rate changes, and eye-blink conditioning, none of which require surgery.

So you have a legitimate complaint about a shallow reading of Pavlov, but you’re building their correction on some inaccuracies of your own, and you keep asserting the “can’t be suppressed” point which is the weakest part of your argument.

[raincole]

> he groundbreaking part of the experiment was that it showed there are responses which are not part of the conscious mind and which are not willingly controllable by the conscious mind.

That's... interesting. How did they know that? Did they interview the dogs and ask them if they actively and consciously decide to produce saliva? Did they ask the dogs to try to surpass the reflex and the dogs failed to do it? Is "dogs have human-like conscious mind" even a scientific consensus?

[estearum]

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

[dust42]

Actually Pavlov did research about the digestive system for which he got the Nobel prize of medicine a few years earlier.

> Did they interview the dogs and ask them if they actively and consciously decide to produce saliva? > Is "dogs have human-like conscious mind" even a scientific consensus?

That's exactly the point - once you have understood the significance of the experiment you understand that it is not important:

A veteran with PTSD can have a surge in adrenaline, heart rate, and cortisol when hearing a car backfiring but he can not suppress it.

Whether the dog was conscious or not about the salivation is completely and utterly irrelevant. In 1907 this was for the first time evidence of a mind-body connection not being accessible to the consciousness. Seriously, forget about the dog. This is all proven beyond any doubt for conscious humans. Nobody cares about what the dog felt.

Associative learning was already known at that time which in its simple form is just circus tricks. The experiment extended this to physiological responses which are not accessible to consciousness in humans.