Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

Out of curiosity we've tried to figure out if there's some external cue he's relying on outside of a very accurate internal 'clock', and haven't found any. He's consistent even in the face of timezone changes and travel across the country (and other mundane tricks that'd eliminate stimulus like daylight cues), different environments / homes (ruling out equipment / building / neighbourhood noises), and different humans (in case his usual companions unwittingly broadcast hints).

I'm forced to the conclusion he swallowed a Rolex at some point.

My own schedule isn't particularly routine otherwise, so it's actually not an unwelcome anchor. He does understand and give up after a couple attempts if you tell him 'later' or have an obvious reason for the delay. He's intent, but not impolite.

We left him with a friend once for a few days who feeds their own dog an hour earlier. The discovery that 5 o'clock dinnertime can be a thing completely rocked his world. He tried to share this revolutionary breakthrough with us but with limited success.

That's actually the plot of a Garrett P.I. novel.

I personally really appreciate the definition of intelligence from Dr. David Krakauer, a mathematical biologist. Krakauer once said on Sam Harris' podcast (episode 40):

Intelligence is, as I say to people, one of the topics about which we have been most stupid. All our definitions of intelligence are based on measurements that can only be applied to humans. An IQ test is not interesting if you’re trying to calculate the intelligence of an octopus — which I would like to know, because I believe in evolution. I think we need to understand where these things come from, and having a definition that applies just to one particular species doesn’t help us. We’ve talked about entropy and computation, and they’re going to be the keys to understanding intelligence.

Let’s go back to randomness. The example I like to give is Rubik’s cube, because it’s a beautiful little mental model, a metaphor. If I gave you a cube and asked you to solve it, and you just randomly manipulated it, since it has on the order of 10 quintillion solutions, which is a very large number, if you were immortal, you would eventually solve it. But it would take a lifetime of several universes to do so. That is random performance.

Stupid performance is if you took just one face of the cube and manipulated that one face and rotated it forever. As everyone knows, if you did that, you would never solve the cube. It would be an infinite process that would never be resolved. That, in my definition, would be stupid. It is significantly worse than chance.

Now let’s take someone who has learned how to manipulate a cube and is familiar with various rules that allow you, from any initial configuration, to solve the cube in 20 minutes or less. That is intelligent behavior, significantly better than chance. This sounds a little counterintuitive, perhaps, until you realize that’s how we use the word in our daily lives. If I sat down with an extraordinary mathematician and I said, “I can’t solve that equation,” and he said, “Well, no, it’s easy. Here, this is what you do,” I’d look at it and I’d say, “Oh, yes, it is easy. You made that look easy.” That’s what we mean when we say someone is smart. They make things look easy.

If, on the other hand, I sat down with someone who was incapable, and he just kept dividing by two, for whatever reason, I would say, “What on earth are you doing? What a stupid thing to do. You’ll never solve the problem that way.” So that is what we mean by intelligence. It’s the thing we do that ensures that the problem is efficiently solved and in a way that makes it appear effortless. And stupidity is a set of rules that we use to ensure that the problem will be solved in longer than chance or never and is nevertheless pursued with alacrity and enthusiasm.”

To add on to your argument in the context of this quote, I also think this is also an extremely compelling argument for not only the arrogance of mankind, but the true stupidity of mankind.

We treat our one and only planet -- source of survival -- like its rental. Hopefully within the next century, we can develop some method to eat those iPhones because we might not have many options left.