On dogs, cake and the meaning of life
The other day whilst in a train station I spotted a small dog urinating against a wall. After it had completed the deed it did what dogs sometimes do which was to scrape grass and dirt over the place of the crime with its hind legs. Only there was no grass and dirt because the dog was standing on a solid granite floor, but it scraped away anyway.
Ah, poor creature, I thought. It scrapes away at the floor after urinating because that is the program laid down in its brain by some whim of nature. It does not understand this program, it simply follows it, even when standing on a granite floor. How pitiful! We super-clever humans can watch this behaviour and easily spot that it is only a mechanism that is set in motion — like a wind-up toy — and that the intellectual input is zilch.
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