Bo, the Obamas’ new dog, may be aware of some things, but not his stardom. Alex, the African gray parrot, was known for his advanced thinking skills.

He’s named after a rock star. He lives in a mansion. His every move is chronicled by a rabid mob of paparazzi.

But just what is going on in the mind of the Obama family’s new puppy, Bo? Is he aware of his status as the much-celebrated and highly exalted First Dog?

The question goes to the heart of a centuries-old argument over how much animals actually think and feel. Are they, as Descartes posited in the 1600s, mindless automatons responding to stimuli? Or are they, as many pet owners fervently insist, complex emotional beings with their own level of sentient consciousness?

Bo the dog is probably no more aware of his celebrity status than he is of Bo Diddley, his namesake. But he may be intensely aware of his status within the Obama family.

“Dogs don’t know fame,”Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Colombia, told The Times’s Douglas Quenqua. But, he added, they know their position in the pack. And with the Obamas treating him like a true alpha dog,“that may be equivalent to fame,”he said.

Professor Coren stressed that this sense of hierarchy was essential to understanding canine cognition.“It’s the first level of consciousness,”he said,“knowing that you are there and a separate entity from everyone else.”

Such opinions have given Descartes a battering in recent decades. One researcher on the front lines has been Irene M. Pepperberg. Her intensive work with Alex, the African gray parrot who died in 2007, suggested that the bird did not just, ahem,“parrot”his 150-word vocabulary.

The Times’s Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review of Dr. Pepperberg’s book,“Alex and Me,”that he understood shapes, sizes, colors and even concepts like“bigger”and“none.”

As Dr. Pepperberg wrote:“By extrapolation, Alex taught me that we live in a world populated by thinking, conscious creatures.”

Some of those creatures even appear to grieve. The Times’s Natalie Angier wrote about monkey and ape mothers who desperately clutch their dead infants for weeks. And George Wittemyer of Colorado State University described the conduct of elephants after a death.

“One female stood over the body, rocking back and forth,”Dr. Wittemyer told Ms. Angier.“Others raised their foot over her head. Others touched their tusks to hers. They would do their behaviors, and then leave.”

The elephants acted in a manner“approaching what we call reverence,”Ms. Angier wrote. But she also cited experts who believe that animals have about as much awareness of their own death as Bo does of his next magazine cover.

The idea that humans are unique in contemplating the future, however, is also under fire. The Times’s Henry Fountain cited the example of Santino, a chimp in Sweden, who has a passion for throwing rocks at human visitors to his zoo (luckily, chimps have bad aim).

It is not just a spontaneous act of aggression, according to Mathias Osvath of Lund University. For 11 years, Santino has been stockpiling and hiding the stones, each time planning another attack. Unlike a squirrel saving nuts for the winter, the behavior is conscious, not instinctive, revealing a cognitive awareness of the future.

The chimps are no doubt smarter. But it could be argued that the behavior of the squirrels is more evolved.