[azov]

What's your mental model of a dog?.. What's happening inside when he barks or wags his tail? Why does he like carrots more than cheese? How does his memory work?..

The way you think of dogs is probably not very different from the way many people think of computers.

[dreamcompiler]

It's different for me because I know that computers are knowable because they were built by people, and lots of people (including me) know how they work. I believe dogs are knowable too because I believe in science, but nobody really knows (yet) how dogs work at anything close to the same level of detail.

Lets take something I know nothing about: Industrial chemistry. That still seems less mysterious to me than dogs, because I know that I could find books about industrial chemistry at whatever level of detail I wanted. But dogs--not so much, beyond a rather superficial level.