> Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses was seen as a cardinal sin. The argument went that projecting human traits, feelings, and behaviours onto animals had no scientific basis and there was no way of testing what goes on in animals’ minds.
What's always been funny to me about the scientific approach to animal consciousness/emotions/empathy is that in a perfectly rational world the default assumption would be that animals and humans exist along a spectrum and there isn't a sharp cliff where humans are 100% conscious and empathetic but dogs are 0%. The claim that humans are categorically different than other animals is the extraordinary one, not the claim that we are made of mostly the same stuff.
The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one—the Bible has typically been read as placing humanity in a category of its own. And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to that perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.
I think there is also a misguided razor that people who self identify as rationalists often apply, which goes, "the most cynical or disenchanted answer is likely the correct one." An overcorrection to superstition, perhaps.
I personally did this, and one of the symptoms was being overly skeptical of animal consciousness. People would tell me this dog was smart or that it was feeling a certain way, and I dismissed it, thinking them fanciful. One moment that showed me I was misguided was when I took a cookbook out from a low shelf, and replaced it. I didn't put it exactly where I'd retrieved it from. Several hours later, the cat walked by the shelf, stopped, and started examining the cookbooks.
I was impressed because I wouldn't have noticed those books being out of place. I realized that my cat knew things that I did not. That put a crack of doubt in my facade of cynicism. Eventually I realized that cynicism was hollow and obscured the truth, rather than revealing it.
It's an easy trap to fall into for those who've never spent significant time around animals. After owning a few dogs you realize that they have their own unique experience of the world, and it's probably somewhere along the same continuum that we are. They know family, they go through a rebellious adolescent phase, they throw tantrums, get bored, excited, happy, horny, etc.
I'll never know what it's like to experience the world through my nose the way my dog does, and he'll never know what it's like to read a book, but it doesn't mean that we don't love each other dearly. And I don't need to read his mind to know that, because it's plainly obvious in his actions and body language.
One of our cats was very old (18+) and sick. We made the choice to have her euthanized to end her suffering and the vet came to our house to do it. One of our other (male) cats loved her and always tried to cuddle her. My wife took the old kitty out of the room where they were cuddling, and after it was done she thought she would let him say goodbye. He got very upset at my wife and hissed at her for days. He's normally very sweet with my wife, but he was clearly distraught at losing his friend and seeing her dead. He didn't just think she was sleeping, and he blamed my wife.
I've always known our cats have emotions and understand a lot about the world they're in, but after that experience, I have no doubt that they are conscious.
> I was impressed because I wouldn't have noticed those books being out of place.
Orthogonal to any argument about conciousness in cats, the most probable explanation is your cat was aware of your scent freshly attached to a book that previously didn't carry it.
In my experience cats are acutely aware of scents, particularly known and especially unknown scents in new places.
Had you been an unknown cat the chances are extremely high your cat would have urinated on your book.
Since you seem to be one of those who denied(?) consciousness of a cat, how do you conceptualize it?
Something like “a cat is just a large finite automaton and I am not”? How do you draw the line? Through “soul”? Through “neocortex thickness”? Why a cat would not experience its life like you do when e.g. drugged or seriously drunk? I mean, cats aren’t drunk, but isn’t it easy to experience or at least imagine the “animal mode” in yourself? At times when you were startled or in rage or had sex like an animal, so that your intellectual parts didn’t work properly, did that pause your consciousness? Have you thought about it and if yes, what’s the answer?
Also why is it so surprising to you that a cat noticed a change and… how exactly does this connect to yes/no consciousness?
(These are all curiosity questions, I’m not an animal rights fighter or something like that.)
> I think there is also a misguided razor that people who self identify as rationalists often apply, which goes, "the most cynical or disenchanted answer is likely the correct one." An overcorrection to superstition, perhaps.
> I personally did this, and one of the symptoms was being overly skeptical of animal consciousness.
This approach wouldn't be inconsistent if you were cynically skeptical of human consciousness as well.
The most cynical and disenchanted answer (and most likely to be true) is that animals are just as conscious as humans and that we just made all this nonsense up to justify our actions.
People identifying as rationalists are also often misguided. It’s a common trope among programmers who think they’re smart and think their intelligence leads to them being logical and unbiased.
I hate to break it to you but if you think you’re smart most likely you are more biased than normal.
> The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one—the Bible has typically been read as placing humanity in a category of its own. And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to that perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.
It's not just the Bible. It's virtually every religion and it's probably pre-religious. There's also no reason to assume that animals don't think the same way. It's probably the case that crows, for example, place themselves in a separate category than other animals. That's how they recognize each other, mate, etc.
I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable. Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
And are all animals conscious? Amoebas? Virions? Bacteria? I reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think there probably are very simple (read: small) animals that aren't conscious.
> I reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think there probably are very simple (read: small) animals that aren't conscious.
Yes, I can definitely agree with this. I'm more reacting to the idea that it's somehow an unresolved scientific question whether dogs and cats and other mammals have emotions.
There isn't a sufficiently large difference in neurology between humans and other mammals for me to believe that they're entirely unconscious machines while we're not.
> I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable. Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
Yes, it's a worthy basis of distinction, but is it a qualitative one or a quantitative one? Do we possess intelligence that is orders of magnitude higher than the next smartest mammals, or do we actually possess something that other mammals have none of?
It's not clear to me that landing on the moon and discovering quantum mechanics require a different kind of mental process than building a beaver dam or discovering a use for medicinal herbs. That feels more to me like the same sort of thing multiplied a thousand fold.
And if it is the same sort of thing, then we're not projecting emotions onto our dogs, our dogs actually do have emotions of the same general sort that we do.
> I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable. Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
Is this not a very self-serving assertion, though? Pointing at things that we humans have accomplished and are proud of, and saying that sets us apart, or are in a sense categorically higher than other animals?
Other animals may well look at this and look down at us for having to do all these things in order to feel accomplished. Octopuses may draw a qualitative distinction between them and us because we lack the means to alter our appearance--surely they're more physically manifest than other animals due to their color shifting abilities! Plants must belittle us for our inability to passively absorb energy from the sun.
We could definitely say that our ability to get to the moon sets us apart. But in doing so, we also have to acknowledge each and every other trait that would set an animal species apart from the rest, and there's no shortage of those unique elements.
I'd guess at the continuum, too — "going against common sense" is, unfortunately, a thing I have seen often enough of true things to reach the conclusion that "common sense" as a phrase means only "inside the Overton window of the person who just said or wrote that".
But it's a guess, it has to be, especially as we're not all agreed on what the thing even is in the first place:
> About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences. The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote
I reject panpsychism on the grounds of the Standard Model.
There are no possible fields at the energy levels we've explored that could have an effect such as panpsychism claims (and fields at any other energy levels couldn't have such an effect). Sean Carroll published a paper on this, and it's worth a read, as is his draft response to Phillip Goff. [1], [2]
> It's not just the Bible. It's virtually every religion and it's probably pre-religious. There's also no reason to assume that animals don't think the same way.
> Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
Not every human knows how to land on the moon or understands quantum mechanics, so how do you make the distinction?
> And are all animals conscious? Amoebas? Virions? Bacteria? I reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think there probably are very simple (read: small) animals that aren't conscious.
Probably worth mentioning Kristof Koch's book, "Consciousness" – who happens to be a Christian. He puts it as a gradual thing correlated to complexity, which makes it more likely that it "feels like something" to be a mycelium network or the internet than an mussel.
> And are all animals conscious? Amoebas? Virions? Bacteria?
Single celled organisms, and multicellular organisms that lack nervous systems seem to be severely limited in intelligence. I think that anyone who argues against intelligence being closely correlated with the complexity of the organisms neural network is arguing against mountains of evidence to the contrary.
> The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one
In your sentence I would substitute ''religious'' with other more specific terms like ''Judeo-Christian'' since Jainism and Hinduism have been talking about a continuum of consciousness in all living things for almost 3,000 years: specifically described by them as the Ātman and the Jiva.
Consciousness and intelligence are orthogonal concepts.
It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the more "conscious" they are.
Intelligence is the ability to abstractly reason and adapt to novel stimulus.
Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain.
Given we're all in the same evolutionary line, there nothing to make me believe that a Dog doesn't have the same sharpness of interior experience vs. a human. Dogs have wildly different sensory modalities, species specific social behavior, and aren't as intelligent, but that wouldn't "dull" their conscious experience.
> Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain.
A better definition I think is to say an entity or system is conscious to the extent it’s world model is encompassing / “complete” and self-conscious when its world model includes itself and its own internal states. By this definition there are many continuous levels of consciousness and self-consciousness and these are not binary all vs nothing.
If you enjoy fiction I urge you to read Blindsight by Peter Watts. One of the central concepts in the plot is "what if consciousness were unnecessary for intelligence"? Along the way it explores all sorts of angles on consciousness and cognition.
Still ranks as one of the best SF works I've read this century.
I do think that in a kind of way intelligence and “interiority” are related. I might have the same “amount” of consciousness as a worm but my ability to investigate my experience is (I think) undoubtedly greater.
“A dog can miss his master, but he can’t expect him to return on Wednesday”
I agree completely. Anyone who spends even a cursory amount of time with a companion animal such as a dog or cat can see that they are emotional beings, and the notion that you can be emotional without also being conscious seems to strain credulity.
Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediately - which can be credibly argued is part of why many humans drink alcohol.
I think this is entirely it - and while we are still reliant on animals for meat and food production, they are no longer made to toil to anywhere near the degree they once were in the developed world, and so this has allowed a shift in our sensibilities.
As you say, it’s a practical issue. In much the same way as esteemed 19th century scientists argued that black people, brown people, Irish people, women, were not truly people, as this made for an easier moral justification for ill-treatment, slavery and genocide, they argued that animals were also insensate simulacra, only giving the appearance of life - for again, it is harder to beat and enslave a living, feeling, thinking being than it is a dishwasher.
Much of what we take as straightforward facts of reality are actually just old, bad ideas, and only in the cold light of the morning after do we start to see the error of our ways in the dark that came before.
Why would material conditions matter? Hunters and gatherers used animals they hunted, and began domestication. And so has almost every society since. Even if it’s to help plow their crops or to fend off wild animals and keep the vermin population in check.
Had to log in to upvote this. The sheer arrogance of this not being obvious to people is telling.
Even very stupid animals can think about the future and have anxiety which is pretty direct evidence they are thinking about the good things and the bad things that happen to them. You could argue well yeah, but they don't have an opinion about it, but Occam's razor suggests otherwise. We are built from the same plumbing in most cases even if ours is better.
Now that you mention it, I don't remember any Biblical support for animals not being conscious. Humans being special, yes - animals being unconscious automata, no. A quick Google search suggests the opposite conclusion can very easily be drawn, although I see no reason to elaborate on those arguments here.
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26 King James Bible
Don't believe the bible weighs in on animal consciousness. It does weigh in on the question of our use of animals. Modernity believes that consciousness is special, and that we should not eat or use conscious animals, thus, if the bible says that we can eat cows, cows must not be conscious otherwise the bible would be condoning immoral behavior. It's a logical jump, but it is correct moral reasoning based on the premise that consciousness is special.
Maybe "Biblical Support" as in a strict reading of the bible .
But definitely Christians have 'interpreted' the Bible in ways to minimize animals as sub-human, without souls, no spirit, etc...
These discussions are ancient times stand-ins for what today we might label 'consciousness'.
To say the bible didn't strictly discuss 'consciousness' or 'automata' is ignoring that Christians think 'self' resides in the 'soul' so if animals don't' have them, then what are they? automata seems logical, but they didn't have the word for it. What is something that moves around but doesn't have a soul to move it?
i love how humans always put themselves outside of nature, and like you point out, that scientists, even though they dispute where that notion comes from, cling onto it religiously :D. There's even animals with more developed / complex brains as us, but surely, they can't be conscious!
My dog isn't dreaming about anything, he's just flapping his feet and snorting and making cute sounds in his sleep at random, likely just spazms.... Like any normal dog.
Not only that, but my dog has enough theory of mind to ignore a toy/food resource until another dog turns up, at which point she will grab it and parade in front of the other dog to show they can't have it. She knows she can demonstrate dominance by holding the resource that she thinks the other dog wants, even though she doesn't want it herself.
Harari gave me some insights when he explained that when humans lived closer to nature, as hunter gatherers, we tended to see the continuum of life on earth. "God" was in everything. After the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry it became necessary to change our views in order to raise animals to slaughter and eat them.
Religions after that time separated humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and provided the justification we needed from a "higher power".
Projecting human traits, feelings and behaviors onto other people has no scientific basis, because there is no way of testing what's going on in their minds (assuming they even have minds).
The dismissal of the idea that animals could be conscious is a form of solipsism.
No, it has been controversial for at least one other major reason discussed in the BBC article and by Anil Seth—-the near equivalence made between language and consciousness that goes back to Descartes. Descartes viewed the body as machinery, the mind as imbued and linked in a nebulous way to the body, but distinct at some fundamental level.
This split enabled the behaviorist tradition to dominate animal psychology for much of the 20th century.
But that reason relies on a presupposition that human language is categorically different than animal language, which is also a claim that relies on presupposing a categorical distinction which must be disproven, rather than starting from the assumption that human and animal communication exists along an evolutionary spectrum.
And how did we arrive at this categorical distinction becoming axiomatic? As you say, by way of Descartes, who was a devout Christian who famously tried to derive the existence of God from the fact of his own consciousness.
Far from being a separate and distinct reason for downplaying animal consciousness, my sense is that animal language is downplayed precisely because it would imply consciousness, and we're working within a system that axiomatically believes animals are not conscious.
What you explain here also explains the current problems in AGI research. sigh Humans keep thinking that reality, like the sun once did, revolves around them.
> humans exist along a spectrum and there isn't a sharp cliff where humans are 100% conscious and empathetic but dogs are 0%
I disagree, to a certain extent. In my layman terms, I believe "consciousness" is how humans define and differentiate the human mind, so it's exclusive to humans. Other living beings (or even AI) display human-like traits but they should not be defined as "conscious" because that's our own definition of our innate human experience, of how we describe our inner selves. We can grade animals on a scale of human consciousness but the "consciousness" threshold is very high, I believe too high to be awarded to any known species besides our own. Risking becoming a tautology, the "animal consciousness" scale could be a thing, but then it should be a thing on its own.
how did you arrive at that conclusion? i feel like there's still just an element of "it's this way because it is this way" to this argument. the entire point of the article and the discussion is the fact that we perhaps assume our experience to be unique when it's not.
it could be just as possible that animals experience consciousness in the exact way we do but simply have different innate motivations and interests that lead us to believe they're making decisions with less awareness than we do. it's making the assumption that the human approach to living and existing is the correct approach and then everything around us is "below it."
reading the article you see that there isn't even a clear understanding of what denotes consciousness, so it seems weird to just say "well whatever it is, it isn't that" based on the arbitrary desire to set our species apart from others.
This is not a definition I have ever heard anyone use before, and I suspect that's because the definition is so constrained that it's not useful for scientific or philosophical discussion.
If you reserve "consciousness" as a word to be exclusively for humans, what word do you suggest instead when discussing consciousness as experienced by both humans and non-humans? And once you have come up with such a word, how do you plan to convince everyone to give up the common word they have been using for generations and replace it with this new word?
I would suggest, instead, that you co-opt a different, less common word for your unusual use case so as to minimally inconvenience everyone else. "Sapient" seems like a much better option to me, since it is derived from "Homo sapiens" and suggestive of something more unique to humans.
Or, better yet, coin a new word and stop trying to change the definitions of existing words.
I consider the difference between animals and us as ... don't laugh .. the difference between an 8bit video game and a playstation3/4/5 one. We might have 10, 1000, or 100000x more details but the core ingredients are the same.
Who says that you have more detail. An eagle can see much farther and in more detail than you, and yeah it can fly. A bat has sonar. Some orient by Earths magnetic field which we do not detect. Etc.
> The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial
The hilarious part here is that you claim that animals must be conscious, and that humans aren't special and that only the religious would dispute this. But the only reason that we think there is a special quality to human cognition is religious, and now you're wanting to extend that to animals. I see no evidence of human consciousness in my day to day activities, and I would be hard-pressed to describe any evidence I've ever stumbled across in my half-century life. You people keep looking for a soul, even if you're reluctant to use that word. It's bizarre. Have you ever been without a consciousness, such that you can compare the two states and confirm that there is this big difference? Can you deduce consciousness from first principles? Philosophers who believe in inane bullshit like consciousness need to pull their heads out of their own asses.
There seems to be more dimensions to it though. Trivially, a dog and a human might be on one axis, but you can't rank differently intelligent humans along that same axis. The average dog, while strictly and obviously not as intelligent as a human is not impaired, they function at their fullest. While as humans go further down and away from mainline human intelligence become obviously impaired.
We seem to have a notion that intelligence has multiple dimensions to it, so it's more likely that human intelligence exists as some kind of probabilistic gradient on a hyperplane in a high-dimensional space, and sampling from that plane yields any possible human intelligence profile, while sampling away from that space yields something decidedly not human. Other animals thus must be similar hyperplanes, perhaps in their own space, and likely not intersecting with humans at all.
> The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one
How about the rest of the world, since this is not universal? The fact that we mame, kill, and consume them probably has more to do with treating them as "less" and "other", otherwise you feel sad every lunch. I think it's simple avoidance, at a grand scale. Many cultures that do embrace the experience of other animals are also vegetarian, otherwise they would feel sad every lunch.
Humanity observably is in a category of its own. The human authors of the Bible are just some of the many persons who have made this observation.
One obvious example is morality. Take climate change. No reasonable person says that the life forms responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event were doing something immoral. On the other hand plenty of people say that humans causing a comparatively trivial shift in atmospheric composition is immoral.
The Great Oxidation Event was caused by cyanobacteria — which are an extremely far cry from the intelligent, multicellular animals that are under discussion here.
Saying that chimpanzee cognition is categorically different from human cognition because cyanobacteria lack a sense of morality is like saying that you and I have categorically different reproductive functions because mushrooms produce spores.
The way you are phrasing your disagreement with prevailing consensus is just semantics. Ok, let’s say animals are not 0% conscious, let’s say a certain animal is 24% conscious. It’s reasonable to say that, in comparison to a human, this animal is not conscious. Clearly, my cat exhibits some awareness of what’s going on, it’s not totally mindless. But to call it conscious in the way that we apply this term to humans is a stretch.
Even if there was no Bible, it is clear as crystal to anybody who thinks about it that humans are in a category of our own. Any animal that could do even a thousandth of what people are capable of would be the most extraordinary animal.
It is also crystal clear that animals have consciousness. A person would have to be without much consciousness themselves to think otherwise, in my opinion.
Have you, as an adult, had a relationship with an animal, like a cat or a dog?
I was thinking about this once, why I believe my cat was conscious and was a person. I came to the conclusion that the relationship was a sort of epistemology, and that I knew my cat was a person, had a personality, and loved me because I understood the relationship. When my cat was passing, all they wanted to do was spend time with me.
I realized this was true not just of my cat, but with every human in my life, as well. How do I know my friends are people? How do I know they care for me? Because I have a relationship with them and I understand the relationship.
That's not the sort of factual knowledge I can express and transfer to you. But it's real all the same.
My toddler couldn't recognize her reflection in a mirror up until some age, we did the lipstick on face test. Same as a cat or some other animal that can't do it. Complex emotions and consciousness are developmental milestones in kids. Not sure why animals would have it differently, they just don't develop to the same level as we do.
The other thing to realize is that the brain's available neuro-chemicals are different in different people. For example there exists people where you could kill their mom, but as long as you replaced it with a sufficiently similar person that provides the exact same services, the child would not be sad - all the services would exist and therefor the atomaton human would operate normally. I've seen this in both autistic and non-autistic persons. The bigger issue with that person being capable of handling the change in their life is how other people push emotional baggage onto them. (For example telling people how they should feel - doesn't make them feel it, but rather makes them feel wrong and then the sadness comes)
In other words we have described emotions that we attribute to all people, but the reality is, not all people have the same emotions - they are some idealised state - and in reality everyone is very different in their emotional capabilities.
If using humans as a comparative baseline, then sure, that's trivially true. I don't see any reason to believe there could never be anything 'more conscious' than a human, i.e. >100% conscious when compared to a human.
There are a lot of reasons to put humans atop a sharp cliff though. Ascending the cliff means devising language, farms, fire, steel, math, NFTs etc. Reminiscent of Brin’s Uplift novels about giving dolphins (if you’ll pardon the joke) a leg up.
> The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one—the Bible has typically been read as placing humanity in a category of its own.
Did you just make this up? Because it's obviously not true. And you conflate two concerns, namely, "having consciousness" and "placing humanity in a category of its own".
First, you don't see denial of consciousness in other animals in the ancient or medieval world. If anything, it is much more natural to conclude other animals are conscious based on observation than it is to deny consciousness. Even today, I don't know anyone who denies animals are conscious. Everyone treats their pets, for instance, as conscious beings, because they are. Now, people also anthropomorphize animals, sure, but there's a difference between the two degrees of attribution. Attributing consciousness is far more conservative than attributing human qualities in an equivocal way.
Take Aristotle's De Anima, for example, in which he analyzes the varieties of life according to the kind of "soul" each possesses, and such that each higher soul entails the powers of all the lower souls. The three kinds he identifies, ordered from lowest to highest, are the nutritive soul, characteristic of plants; the sensitive soul, characteristic of animals; and the rational soul, particular to human beings. Even here, we can see both a certain uniqueness to human beings alongside what you might call the consciousness of animals by virtue of the sensitive soul. What differentiates human beings from all the animals is not that they are conscious, but that they are rational.
Second, where the Bible is concerned, I have no idea where you get the idea that it claims other animals lack consciousness. Consider just these two passages from the Old Testament:
Genesis 9:2-3: "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea [...]"
Do you see any mention of rocks in this verse? Do things lacking consciousness live in fear?
Proverbs 12:10: "The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel."
I suppose you could be kind to an unconscious living thing in the sense that can act for its objective good, but it seem a little strange to speak of animals in this way, but not plants, if animals are as unconscious as plants.
Now, yes, human beings are recognized as different from the other animals as early as Genesis, having been created in the image of God, which has to do with a relation of analogous similarity with God, where human beings are understood as personal creatures possessing rational intellect and free will ("analogous" cannot be stressed enough; the infinite God is very much unlike any created being, and so any similarity can only be analogical; see the analogia entis). However, it does not follow that the other animals lack consciousness. The ancients and medievals would find this claim ridiculous.
If you want to know where the denial of consciousness in other animals began, you can thank modern thinkers like Descartes, who posited that the universe is composed of two kinds of things, res extensa and res cogitans. Res extensa is merely extension in space, while res cogitans is the seat of thought, sensation and thus consciousness. According to this anthropology, of the animals, only human beings are a composite of both, and so only human beings are capable of consciousness. The angels are res cogitans, while the other animals are mere res extensa. In other words, according to Descartes's mechanistic worldview, animals are effectively insensate machines.
And so this is a recently development in history, very much occurring within the ferment of modernity. Materialism also finds its roots in Descartes, not because he was a materialist himself, as he admitted the existence of res cogitans that is not reducible to res extensa, but because he framed things in those terms. Materialists, operating within those parameters, reject the existence of res cogitans, instead claiming that all that has been attributed to res cogitans is reducible to res extensa. Of course, it isn't (e.g., the problem of qualia, or the problem of intentionality), which is why materialism was stillborn, but now transmuting into preposterous things like eliminativism among a stubborn remnant of believers.
The challenge is that part of an advanced human society is creating black-and-white lines in structures to promote peace and prosperity.
For example, everything we associate with the magical age of 18 years old. "Adulthood", sexual consent, voting, drinking, smoking, conscription all begin on an arbitrary day and we take no consideration of the reality of the maturity of the person.
(Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and contextual. A harsher world (like one that most of humanity existed in for our entire history) causes earlier maturity. A gentler one (that we are obviously all trying to create) delays it.
So with animals, I see the spectrum, and I see that we are seeking to set a line...somewhere. Some set it just after humans. Humans are special, and everyone else is fair game. Vegans also have a pretty clear line.
Everything else, vegetarians included, are pretty "fuzzy". I'm an omnivore myself, but if you asked me for a concrete logical reason why my personal ethics allow me to eat pig but not dog, I don't think I could give you a ethically consistent one other than "pigs are delicious, and dogs are my friends".
Personally, I do believe that the same way that our generation asked our grandparents how they could've been ok with the racial discrimination & segregation that was ubiquitous in their youth, I think my grandchildren will ask me the same about my consumption of meat.
The reasons will likely be a mixture of climate impact (species of fish going extinct), and cost (because of the energy cost required to create pigs and cows). Society will form an ethical consensus about why it's not appropriate to eat animals to help reduce WW energy costs the same way that early people in the Levant found it helpful to create rules about not consuming pigs or shellfish (for sanitary reasons).
And there'll be "scandals" about rich people that have secret animal farms similar to what we have today about finding out about billionaires in dubai basically having secret house slaves. (AKA, outrage, but no meaningful change)
BTW from where I stand, it seems fairly reasonable to deduce that all mammals are in some way conscious/sentient, and have intelligence comparable to our own. Mammals play, mourn their dead, have a common signal that generally causes us to protect the young of all mammal species and find them cute.
I also think that there is a strong case for a very unique type of intelligence and conscience in Cephalopods. I have personally taken a stance to not eat cephalopods. Because I think they are in greater danger of going extinct vs. mammals (since their stock counts are so invisible to humanity), and I have decided (subjectively) that consuming a distinct type of intelligence from my own constitutes a form of crime. I don't know if I can defend that in court though.
I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.
> I don't think I could give you a ethically consistent
That's what cognitive dissonance is. Giving one's senses (in this case the taste buds or the ego 'I' or the mind) more importance than something factual or apparent.
> I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.
If you take consciousness to mean intelligence, then sure. If you take consciousness to be separate from intelligence and senses, being the energy or force that brings forth the signs of what we call 'life', then I see no reason to believe that every single living entity has consciousness.
The only difference is in the type of body provided to that conscious living entity. Just like how some humans are born without sight, some without hearing, some without the ability to speak. It doesn't mean they're less conscious, they still are an observer observing things through their senses.
Unless and until one can come up with a clear definition of consciousness (you don't need to, just read nyāya philosophy and you'll save thousands of years of efforts), they will not be able to get over their biases based on unintelligent thoughts and cognitive dissonance.
> Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and contextual.
I cannot agree with this. Maturity has a very clear meaning: it is when a human (or animal) has developed enough to be able to sexually reproduce. That people use the word wrongly in everyday conversation is something else.
As for what you write about mammals, I completely agree. Just looking at them and interacting with them in real life and it's clear that they're our brothers.
> And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to that perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.
That's not a reason to distrust scientists, or science in general (although it does display that a fraction of "scientists" had very poor observation skills).
It IS a reason to look for religious dogma, oust it whenever possible, and dismantle it systematically until it no longer exists.
The evidence: animals exhibit numerous behaviors that resemble our emotional responses in various ways. Anyone who has ever had a pet dog or a cat will have countless anecdotes.
The explanation with the fewest moving parts is that our brain and hormonal systems look an awful lot like the brain and hormonal systems of a cat or a dog and therefore the simplest explanation is that cats and dogs have emotions and thought patterns that resemble ours in very meaningful ways.
The actual scientific explanations that people tend to put forward (as discussed in TFA) revolve around us projecting our own thoughts and emotions onto the animals. To me that seems substantially less rational than just believing that similar neurological structures produce similar neurological results.
Ever since Darwin, the scientific view has been descent with modification. We're all branches of the same phylogenetic tree, and many of those branches are very close to us, such as other mammals. We have topologically similar digestive, immune, circulatory, respiratory, nervous, and reproductive systems. While there are important differences between, say, the foods that a cat and a human can digest, the differences in how the overall system works are small compared to the similarities.
Therefore, it's a reasonable starting guess that humans and closely-related animals would have many structural similarities in their mental experience, although with some differences. It tilts the balance towards needing evidence that other animals are not conscious, rather than needing evidence that they are.
And when we look for evidence, we see intelligence even in branches as far away from us as crows and octopuses, suggesting that maybe consciousness (which we guess might correlate with intelligence) has deep roots in that tree, or else emerges independently quite easily.
I’ve never understood these questions. “Are animals conscious?”
Well, could you give me the definition of consciousness? No you can’t. So now you’re asking me both to define it and show if animals have it or not.
Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes.
Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes.
Can animals direct attention? Yes.
Can animals remember? Yes.
Can animals learn? Yes.
Are animals self-aware? Some of them, some only sometimes, some not.
To think of consciousness as a dichotomy instead of a spectrum is baffling to me. As is thinking of consciousness as being a single, indivisible thing.
One my cats attempts to lure me around the back of the shed so that she can then race out the other side, down the driveway, and jump the fence to precious freedom.
She has a number of variations on this theme, and with each failure she tries something slightly different. Until I catch her and bring her back inside.
The reason I know this is because, before I was aware that it was happening, it succeeded at least twice. (I'm picturing people reading this saying, in Lisa Simpsons's voice, "is my brother dumber than a hamster? Hamster two, Bart zero" - because that's what my inner voice is saying right now).
Cows are flippin' amazing creatures and as I age I get closer and closer to ending all meat consumption. I consume very little these days and it would not be a large jump to stop completely.
Cows are intelligent, curious, and they have a sense of humor, a desire to play. They have friends, enemies, and .. well, everything, really. They have different capabilities because their brains and bodies are different than ours, but they're every bit as legitimate of a life form as ourselves, and every bit as conscious and self-aware.
Can we deduce from your comment that you are in fact, not conscious?
We all know what it's like to be conscious (I presume - my theory of mind is intact but may be flawed). It's obviously the quality of being, i.e. experiencing qualia.
And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. (Living) matter that doesn't experience the world, basically. No frame of reference. Unless you believe in panpsychism; then everything is conscious and we can ask ourselves what it's like to be a rock.
It's just that the hard problem of consciousness states that we haven't been able to define this "state" in its exact physical, neural correlates, but just because we haven't been able to do that yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists, because otherwise no one would be there to ask or hear the question to begin with.
And sure, you can try to break it down into behavior and other properties of a living being, but that is simply side-stepping the hard problem and just ignoring the question of qualia.
Then again, there's something like "aphantasia": some people do not have the capacity to mentally visualize anything, and often aren't even aware of that themselves. I can imagine there's something analogous with the quality of consciousness, i.e. literal "NPCs" who do not experience the world from a frame of reference, but are basically non-sentient, human, autonomous agents. That's just a very dangerous line of thought, so don't take that too seriously :)
> And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not.
I'm not following this line of reasoning. It seems be exactly opposite to panpsychism, which reasons "since I experience qualia, it stands to reason that everything experiences qualia, because I don't know of a state that does not result in qualia". I'm not a confident panpsychist, but that logic seems to make more sense. Unfortunately, it is just as unproveable as the opposite view, just like pretty much everything around qualia.
I think you're over complicating it. When people generally talk about consciousness, they're talking about the phenomenology of awareness in the present moment. It's not really hard to define.
It's difficult to establish whether or not an animal is conscious in the way that it's difficult to establish whether another person is conscious. The only evidence we have for consciousness is the fact that we personally experience it ourselves. And because of that, we can't truly know if other's are conscious from a philosophical sense (i.e.—philosophical zombies) but we can posit scientifically that they must be since they share the same brain structure that we do.
Now when we're trying to establish scientifically whether or not an animal is conscious or not, it's more difficult because we don't have the subjective experience of being that animal, and we can't philosophically transfer the phenomenology of the experience our brain creates onto theirs. So, while I think the question "are animals conscious?" is well-bounded, it's not one that is currently answerable due to the currently private nature of consciousness.
> Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes. Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes. Can animals direct attention? Yes. Can animals remember? Yes. Can animals learn? Yes.
Reacting to stimuli is all possible without consciousness—just like crabs react to noxious, painful stimuli without nociceptors. So the phenomena you're describing is not what people are talking about when they're debating consciousness
Do all people experience your version of consciousness, awareness in the present moment? Or is this overly represented among people debating whether animals have it? Some people don't have an inner monologue.
Now you’ve just replaced “consciousness” with “awareness”. Self-awareness? Awareness of stimuli? Awareness of demarcation of animate and inanimate objects?
I understand it sounds simple, but there are so many different systems interplaying to give rise to whatever definition of consciousness you give, it’s really hard to give exact definitions.
Also, you still talk as if this “awareness in the moment” might be a simple dichotomy. I seriously highly doubt this is the case, especially when it comes to stuff like reflexes and instincts.
> When people generally talk about consciousness, they're talking about the phenomenology of awareness in the present moment. It's not really hard to define.
People often find this line much harder to draw after they have experienced qualia that is radically different from from what they have experienced before. The most common avenues for such an experience are psychedelics or deep meditation, and the experience is often called ego death.
There is much written on people's subjective experiences, but many people would say that they have experienced qualia which was not based on either awareness or the present moment. Of course, the experience still happened within a human brain, which is known to exhibit awareness of the present moment - but the subjective experience can feel as if neither of those concepts matter, or even exist, while still feeling very real.
These experiences often cause people to start thinking a lot more about the distinctions between consciousness, awareness, and qualia. I get that most people use 'awareness' to mean 'experiencing qualia', but I think most people using 'awareness' in that way have not experienced qualia that is bafflingly different from normal human qualia.
So how do you define "aware"? Some inner model reflecting the environment?
A stone is "aware in the present moment". Its temperature is an inner state reflecting the environment, short-term. Its composition is an inner state reflecting the environment, long-term.
As a former owner of several cats, I can say that the cats I had definitely had consciousness. They were able to read my emotions and react to it. They knew how to get what they wanted. One of them loved looking at a mirror while wiping its face (It had observed me doing it). I could go on.
This problem is compounded by a certain class of neuroscientist, who upon hitting the hard (scientifically unresolvable) problem of consciousness, declares that consiousness is something else, like neural correlates of stimulation. This invariably causes disappointment when attending mainstream lectures with the word "consciousness" in the title.
I once watched a spider in a web have to rapidly run around it's web and scoop up it's little baby spiders to escape a flame that was coming close to it. The reaction did not appear to be some kind of mechanical automated reaction - it very clearly had awareness of the danger, and an awareness of it's offspring, and made a coordinated effort to rescue them and move them away to safety.
To me - as someone who is not a biologist or a professional in this field - this appears to be consciousness. I couldn't imagine anyone trying to argue against that.
Optimize a creature for "survival" over billions of years and you get behavior like this. It doesn't require consciousness however. And it's quite hard to ask a spider whether it is conscious or not.
I'm reading this book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and it's quite fascinating to think deeply about what is Consciousness. I think the book does a good job of defining and explaining Consciousness.
Highly recommend it to think critically about the subject, but I think your point is valid, consciousness occurs for many things, and then it doesn't have to many other things. You don't need consciousness to nearly instantly detect that b comes after a sequence of {a,b,a,b,a,?}. You need consciousness to think about _why_ b comes after though. When you go for a swim and then recall the event, you most likely recall it in an objective or third person way mentally - the image or visual in your memory is that third person view.. but that's not actually how you experienced it.
I wonder how much of that applies to animals, and I wonder if we can ever get that answer.
Of course that is a good question, although I would expect that with the most useful or most reasonable or best definition (which is itself not entirely clear, though), that the answer will probably be, yes, animals are conscious (although not always all the time; unconsciousness and partial consciousness can occur too).
Scientific experiments can detect specific things and specific details (if tested in an appropriate way), but this would be something specific rather than just being called "consciousness", is what I should think.
Again, without definition then anything measured against an invisible yardstick are just words on a page. Then again, the few months I spent living in Bakersfield CA, led me to question whether some or indeed most of the folks there were just low fidelity NPC's.
If there is such a thing as consciousness, no matter its variety (like how the viscosity of water varies on a "spectrum" without become its opposites ice or steam), there is by necessity such a thing as non-consciousness. That's just how concepts go.
I presume many people actually mean self-consciousness when they talk about consciousness. It's the concepts of "I" and "will" that puzzle the most. Anything else can be treated as automatic actions (yet very complicated).
I once witnessed a spider controlling a motion activated flood light to catch prey.
At first I assumed the flood light in my backyard was just being triggered by the wind, as a spider had built a web in front of the sensor, however I then noticed that the light would turn on even when there wasn’t any wind.
Upon closer inspection, I found that the spider had created a singular strand of webbing, thicker than the rest (5x-10x), directly over the front of the sensor.
It would then pluck this thicker strand whenever it wanted the light to turn on.
I had previously read a few papers on spider intelligence, specifically the planning capabilities of certain species, but this seemed like another level.
Not only had it discovered the sensor, it crafted a tool to use it for it’s own advantage.
Humans think they’re something forever unique and special in the evolutionary timeline, but the remembered words of our ancestors trick us into thinking individuals are larger than the herd.
Intelligence comes in many shapes and sizes, and claiming to be above the rest parallels, in my experience, the likes of a liar more so than a truth seeker.
What is consciousness? That which separates us from the animal kingdom. A lie we tell ourselves to sleep at night and die for false prophets.
Judging from the spiderwebs clinging to it, the emergency stairway was hardly ever used.
To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along.
Not that the spiders had any awareness of being “patient.”
A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still.
It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died.
This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably.
Don't those motion lights typically use passive infrared sensors? I'm surprised it's sensitive enough to see spider silk moving. Could the strand possibly have been blocking some radiative source behind the strand (the sun?)?
Yeah spiders are uniquely smart for their size. I had one using stone and some complicated physics to catch pray (don’t remember exactly the details but was impressed)
Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by mimicry. IMO I think we're doomed to move the goalposts on intelligence for a while, like with the statistical abilities of LLMs to manipulate language and insects' ability to use tools. Moravec's paradox keeps rearing it's ugly head as more and more complex systems turn out to be relatively easy compared to basic cognition (the system that keeps them flying and identifies threats, flowers, etc.).
It'd take a lot more to convince me that bumble bees are conscious just because of the their brains' simplicity compared to humans or other animals that appear more intelligent like pigs, corvids, octopuses, etc. I'm not categorically against such a possibility, but I think the bar for recognizing intelligence in general has been set too low.
This sidesteps the main problem anyway: What is consciousness? I don't think we're any closer to rigorously defining that anymore than intelligence.
> Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by mimicry.
Humans are the same, try teaching basic math equations to kids. When I was in school, most of us learned math by memorizing steps to solve the problem instead of understanding it. Then on the test if we found something we couldn't recognize, we wouldn't be able to solve it. There were usually only a couple of kids in the class who really practiced and understood the principles. I believe most humans usually learn patterns and rarely have genuine insight or grasp of the subject.
Even as an adult I don't really know how anything works, lol. I just copy whatever's on Stack or GPT, get paid in magical numbers, and exchange those numbers for food like my mom did. At least a bumblebee knows how to make flowers. When we want to grow something, we end up copying them...
> I think the bar for recognizing intelligence in general has been set too low.
I think that the problem is not being too low, but being not very clearly defined, and by assuming that you can just be quantified by numbers; I think that intelligence (and consciousness) cannot be properly quantified by numbers.
> What is consciousness? I don't think we're any closer to rigorously defining that anymore than intelligence.
It is a valid point. You will have to define such things clearly in order to know them scientifically, properly.
> IMO I think we're doomed to move the goalposts on intelligence for a while
I'm old enough to remember back when we thought language was the defining element of intelligence. Dogs can't talk - dogs aren't intelligent.
Now LLMs can talk, and we've shifted intelligence to mean animal intelligence - being able to predict the motion of a falling ball, wanting to protect your children, etc.
Some people truly cannot tolerate the idea that our intelligence/existence isn't magical, so they'll desperately move it again and again and again... forever. Watch.
There is some conflation between consciousness and intelligence going on. Consciousness is subjective experiences. Intelligence is cognitive ability. There isn’t a necessary link between the two. We can say LLMs are intelligent but not conscious. We could say a lizard is conscious but not that intelligent.
"Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by mimicry."
Replace bumble bees with human beigns and "pull a string" with an engineering task and you'll find we are not so different.
/sarcasm, but not too much, average human being is quite dumb, tbh.
That's ok. Moving the goalposts (in good faith) is part of the proceed of understanding the question we're trying to answer. Some times you don't realize you don't understand the question until you start thinking about it.
Same way I am convinced of relativity without having recognized experiencing the effects. Deduction and consistent observation. That's just me. Getting people to believe in things, is not a hard problem.
Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. Literally life technology animating the quantum sieve within our neurons. Consciousness isn't a complex deck of cards, it is the singularity inside the quantum sieve.
Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it does not mitigate uncertainty it is not intelligence. All that other stuff about more or faster or sophisticated is something else. obviously we're describing a scalar domain. Your expectations overload and out leverage the simple truths.
Do people not have dogs? They have more emotional intelligence than most humans and love, fear, play, plan, think, reason and communicate well. This is true for many animals. I'd say that most animals are just like human in terms of consciousness but less advanced in thinking and communicating (without debating about whales, dolphins, octopuses etc.)
Less advanced in symbolic thinking and communicating. There are other forms of thinking (like fast tactical thinking, some predators are conceivably better at this than most humans) and communicating (emotional communication; if we could quantify that I would bet on elephants).
Orcas are better at communicating than humans are, their languages more directly resembles telepathy than the “encode thoughts into grunts that then need to be decoded” that we have. They are essentially beaming waveform pictures to each other
I have a dog and I know it is dreaming and having all kinds of emotions and wants. It can communicate with me in its own way and of course has needs for being close and attention. I got it from silly people who could not take care of it well and it was a lot of work to gain its trust so we could be real companions.
But my dog for sure is not pondering mysteries of the universe and is most likely not aware it is going to die one day and is not going to have existential dread thinking about it.
We are made from the same things and share a lot - but at the same time we are so much different that it cannot be just "humans are just the same as animals".
To prove this would require being able to very clearly define consciousness, but we know that consciousness is not “a thing”— it’s rather “a collection of things”, and it’s not either there or not; rather it’s largely a question of degree. And I don’t just mean this as inter-species variation either: even if we only look at humans, humans exhibit the whole spectrum and/or patchwork of states of consciousness, both developmentally and pathologically. And to some extent, physiologically too.
I find it annoying how we’re even entertaining the idea that animals wouldn’t be conscious. Like what does that even mean?
All these people who aren’t convinced that animals are conscious… I’d really like to know what specific behaviour would convince them one way or another. Pick pretty much any behaviour, and you’ll find animals (and even insects) displaying it.
I can't help but believe that people who think animals aren't conscious are starting from that assumption. If you start from the belief that there's some inherent "human-ness" (soul, etc), then nothing you see will convince you that animals have it too.
> I find it annoying how we’re even entertaining the idea that animals wouldn’t be conscious. Like what does that even mean?
it means that "science" has been infiltrated with grifters living off research grant gravy trains producing conjectures entirely obvious for hundreds of thousands of years...and reproduced by the previous round of grifters a handful of years earlier. i say that as someone who sees these faux revelations recur every few years. it's ridiculous...as if we're as a species not conscious of the pattern, ironically.
For a while, science didn't admit to a female orgasm, either. There was "no evidence" in the sense that no one had bothered to perform scientific observation and collect data. There was common sense, and reasonable assumption, but no studies. Then there were studies.
Common sense tells you and I that animals are conscious to some degree. But as there is no current scientific definition of what the system of consciousness actually is (and I'm speculatively calling it a system) it's difficult to say animals have it through observation. We know they respond to anesthetics just like we do. We know anesthesia can shut off consciousness, so there's some physicality to whatever consciousness is. We just don't have a classification for it yet.
How do you "prove" that other people are conscious?
This isn't a gotcha question: to me they're both obviously true. The question is what kind of evidence do you require, and why do people require different evidence for people vs other animals.
> How do you "prove" that other people are conscious?
For sentience scientists mainly look at behavioral cues:
> For example, "if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant." Avoiding painful stimuli unless the reward is significant can also provide evidence that pain avoidance is not merely an unconscious reflex (similarly to how humans "can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building").
I mean, same with gravity, right? In ascending order of complexity, noticing gravity, using gravity for benefit, and explaining gravity are orders of magnitude different.
> We need to ban the word "conscious" until people can agree on what it means.
In modern philosophy, it ultimately mean self-awareness, if i read Chalmers correctly. Which is hard to prove (we do have mirror tests that only some animal pass, which prove they do have self-awareness, but failure to understand it doesn't mean the animal isn't self-aware, as young children also sometime fail the mirror test when left alone in front of it).
The trouble I have with much of this discussion is it assumes many traits of animal behavior are indicative of consciousness. Bees play with balls, therefore consciousness? You can't just jump straight to that conclusion. There is so much our brains do that is subconscious, that we are not aware of. Heck, even signs of self awareness may not be indicative of consciousness. Arguably we are at the point that we could train a robot AI to recognize itself in the mirror.
I'm in the camp that believes animals are conscious, I'm not arguing against that. But what I'm arguing is that the current body of evidence doesn't conclude anything. Until we have a better fundamental understanding of consciousness, I don't think we can make such conclusions merely from observing animal behavior. Who's to say that one behavior is evidence of consciousness and another behavior is not? What do we base that upon?
I don't think it's really the case that "much of this discussion assumes" certain behaviors as being indicative of consciousness. Rather, it has been the case until recently that behaviorists pointed to various behaviors as being unique to humans, and jumped to the conclusion that this indicates that humans are conscious and other animals aren't. What has been happening recently is that one by one these behaviors have been show as not being truly unique to humans. It is becoming more and more undeniable that even when humans are fairly unique in the quantity of some of these characteristics, none of them are completely absent in all other animals, and many can be found to some degree even in very simple animals.
While what you say about drawing conclusions is maybe true, it does not seem to have started with modern scientists. Rather, my takeaway from the article was that everyone is still playing by Descartes’ rules: that is to conflate intelligence, language, and consciousness. So instead of trying to redefine that basis, researchers are simply going with it (however flawed it may be) and saying, “well, if language and intelligence are the only sure ways to detect consciousness, then here are a whole bunch of animals that exhibit intelligence, language, or both.”
It is indeed a hard question that one could also apply to humans. There is no way to know if someone else is conscious. It might be obvious for all people, but what about babies or people with advanced stages with dementia or certain types of brain damage? What about people with mental disabilities? (I have experienced some of these in family members.)
Even for "normal" humans, the point is that consciousness is by definition unobservable from the outside, so everyone else but you can be un-conscious and you would have no way of telling. It's the p-zombies thought experiment.
Readit News
What's always been funny to me about the scientific approach to animal consciousness/emotions/empathy is that in a perfectly rational world the default assumption would be that animals and humans exist along a spectrum and there isn't a sharp cliff where humans are 100% conscious and empathetic but dogs are 0%. The claim that humans are categorically different than other animals is the extraordinary one, not the claim that we are made of mostly the same stuff.
The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one—the Bible has typically been read as placing humanity in a category of its own. And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to that perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.
I personally did this, and one of the symptoms was being overly skeptical of animal consciousness. People would tell me this dog was smart or that it was feeling a certain way, and I dismissed it, thinking them fanciful. One moment that showed me I was misguided was when I took a cookbook out from a low shelf, and replaced it. I didn't put it exactly where I'd retrieved it from. Several hours later, the cat walked by the shelf, stopped, and started examining the cookbooks.
I was impressed because I wouldn't have noticed those books being out of place. I realized that my cat knew things that I did not. That put a crack of doubt in my facade of cynicism. Eventually I realized that cynicism was hollow and obscured the truth, rather than revealing it.
I'll never know what it's like to experience the world through my nose the way my dog does, and he'll never know what it's like to read a book, but it doesn't mean that we don't love each other dearly. And I don't need to read his mind to know that, because it's plainly obvious in his actions and body language.
I've always known our cats have emotions and understand a lot about the world they're in, but after that experience, I have no doubt that they are conscious.
Orthogonal to any argument about conciousness in cats, the most probable explanation is your cat was aware of your scent freshly attached to a book that previously didn't carry it.
In my experience cats are acutely aware of scents, particularly known and especially unknown scents in new places.
Had you been an unknown cat the chances are extremely high your cat would have urinated on your book.
Something like “a cat is just a large finite automaton and I am not”? How do you draw the line? Through “soul”? Through “neocortex thickness”? Why a cat would not experience its life like you do when e.g. drugged or seriously drunk? I mean, cats aren’t drunk, but isn’t it easy to experience or at least imagine the “animal mode” in yourself? At times when you were startled or in rage or had sex like an animal, so that your intellectual parts didn’t work properly, did that pause your consciousness? Have you thought about it and if yes, what’s the answer?
Also why is it so surprising to you that a cat noticed a change and… how exactly does this connect to yes/no consciousness?
(These are all curiosity questions, I’m not an animal rights fighter or something like that.)
> I personally did this, and one of the symptoms was being overly skeptical of animal consciousness.
This approach wouldn't be inconsistent if you were cynically skeptical of human consciousness as well.
I hate to break it to you but if you think you’re smart most likely you are more biased than normal.
It's not just the Bible. It's virtually every religion and it's probably pre-religious. There's also no reason to assume that animals don't think the same way. It's probably the case that crows, for example, place themselves in a separate category than other animals. That's how they recognize each other, mate, etc.
I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable. Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
And are all animals conscious? Amoebas? Virions? Bacteria? I reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think there probably are very simple (read: small) animals that aren't conscious.
Yes, I can definitely agree with this. I'm more reacting to the idea that it's somehow an unresolved scientific question whether dogs and cats and other mammals have emotions.
There isn't a sufficiently large difference in neurology between humans and other mammals for me to believe that they're entirely unconscious machines while we're not.
> I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable. Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
Yes, it's a worthy basis of distinction, but is it a qualitative one or a quantitative one? Do we possess intelligence that is orders of magnitude higher than the next smartest mammals, or do we actually possess something that other mammals have none of?
It's not clear to me that landing on the moon and discovering quantum mechanics require a different kind of mental process than building a beaver dam or discovering a use for medicinal herbs. That feels more to me like the same sort of thing multiplied a thousand fold.
And if it is the same sort of thing, then we're not projecting emotions onto our dogs, our dogs actually do have emotions of the same general sort that we do.
Is this not a very self-serving assertion, though? Pointing at things that we humans have accomplished and are proud of, and saying that sets us apart, or are in a sense categorically higher than other animals?
Other animals may well look at this and look down at us for having to do all these things in order to feel accomplished. Octopuses may draw a qualitative distinction between them and us because we lack the means to alter our appearance--surely they're more physically manifest than other animals due to their color shifting abilities! Plants must belittle us for our inability to passively absorb energy from the sun.
We could definitely say that our ability to get to the moon sets us apart. But in doing so, we also have to acknowledge each and every other trait that would set an animal species apart from the rest, and there's no shortage of those unique elements.
But it's a guess, it has to be, especially as we're not all agreed on what the thing even is in the first place:
> About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences. The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#The_problem_of_d...
There are no possible fields at the energy levels we've explored that could have an effect such as panpsychism claims (and fields at any other energy levels couldn't have such an effect). Sean Carroll published a paper on this, and it's worth a read, as is his draft response to Phillip Goff. [1], [2]
[1] The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884
[2] Consciousness and the Laws of Physics: https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33
Indeed. I wonder do they see us as special at all? It'd be pretty funny if they didn't
> Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics
Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years before they did either of these things
except Hinduism.
Not every human knows how to land on the moon or understands quantum mechanics, so how do you make the distinction?
For most of the history, neither did humans.
Probably worth mentioning Kristof Koch's book, "Consciousness" – who happens to be a Christian. He puts it as a gradual thing correlated to complexity, which makes it more likely that it "feels like something" to be a mycelium network or the internet than an mussel.
Single celled organisms, and multicellular organisms that lack nervous systems seem to be severely limited in intelligence. I think that anyone who argues against intelligence being closely correlated with the complexity of the organisms neural network is arguing against mountains of evidence to the contrary.
What harm has our manner of animal had on the rest of life on earth thus far?
Probably due to walking upright and eating meat
Isn't this conspiracy theory? One species of mammals actually did.
In your sentence I would substitute ''religious'' with other more specific terms like ''Judeo-Christian'' since Jainism and Hinduism have been talking about a continuum of consciousness in all living things for almost 3,000 years: specifically described by them as the Ātman and the Jiva.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiva
I'm a Christian myself but I definitely think that the Indian religions get animals and animal rights far more correct than we usually do.
It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the more "conscious" they are.
Intelligence is the ability to abstractly reason and adapt to novel stimulus.
Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain.
Given we're all in the same evolutionary line, there nothing to make me believe that a Dog doesn't have the same sharpness of interior experience vs. a human. Dogs have wildly different sensory modalities, species specific social behavior, and aren't as intelligent, but that wouldn't "dull" their conscious experience.
A better definition I think is to say an entity or system is conscious to the extent it’s world model is encompassing / “complete” and self-conscious when its world model includes itself and its own internal states. By this definition there are many continuous levels of consciousness and self-consciousness and these are not binary all vs nothing.
Still ranks as one of the best SF works I've read this century.
“A dog can miss his master, but he can’t expect him to return on Wednesday”
Why not?
> Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain.
The more complex and detailed the model, the more conscious. Why not?
Fundamentally it's really "practical" issue. We want to use, abuse and kill animals and we make up justifications.
It won't change until the material conditions we live under change.
As you say, it’s a practical issue. In much the same way as esteemed 19th century scientists argued that black people, brown people, Irish people, women, were not truly people, as this made for an easier moral justification for ill-treatment, slavery and genocide, they argued that animals were also insensate simulacra, only giving the appearance of life - for again, it is harder to beat and enslave a living, feeling, thinking being than it is a dishwasher.
Much of what we take as straightforward facts of reality are actually just old, bad ideas, and only in the cold light of the morning after do we start to see the error of our ways in the dark that came before.
Even very stupid animals can think about the future and have anxiety which is pretty direct evidence they are thinking about the good things and the bad things that happen to them. You could argue well yeah, but they don't have an opinion about it, but Occam's razor suggests otherwise. We are built from the same plumbing in most cases even if ours is better.
Don't believe the bible weighs in on animal consciousness. It does weigh in on the question of our use of animals. Modernity believes that consciousness is special, and that we should not eat or use conscious animals, thus, if the bible says that we can eat cows, cows must not be conscious otherwise the bible would be condoning immoral behavior. It's a logical jump, but it is correct moral reasoning based on the premise that consciousness is special.
But definitely Christians have 'interpreted' the Bible in ways to minimize animals as sub-human, without souls, no spirit, etc...
These discussions are ancient times stand-ins for what today we might label 'consciousness'.
To say the bible didn't strictly discuss 'consciousness' or 'automata' is ignoring that Christians think 'self' resides in the 'soul' so if animals don't' have them, then what are they? automata seems logical, but they didn't have the word for it. What is something that moves around but doesn't have a soul to move it?
My dog isn't dreaming about anything, he's just flapping his feet and snorting and making cute sounds in his sleep at random, likely just spazms.... Like any normal dog.
Religions after that time separated humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and provided the justification we needed from a "higher power".
The dismissal of the idea that animals could be conscious is a form of solipsism.
This split enabled the behaviorist tradition to dominate animal psychology for much of the 20th century.
And how did we arrive at this categorical distinction becoming axiomatic? As you say, by way of Descartes, who was a devout Christian who famously tried to derive the existence of God from the fact of his own consciousness.
Far from being a separate and distinct reason for downplaying animal consciousness, my sense is that animal language is downplayed precisely because it would imply consciousness, and we're working within a system that axiomatically believes animals are not conscious.
I suppose we mean the ability to learn language.
more like Aristotle
Whether they’re self-aware, understand death, how intelligent they are, etc. are where the debates are and have been for a very long time.
Then why do we have a subhead the likes of "A series of experiments have led a number of scientists to say animals may be conscious."
Makes it seems as though some major discovery is afoot.
I disagree, to a certain extent. In my layman terms, I believe "consciousness" is how humans define and differentiate the human mind, so it's exclusive to humans. Other living beings (or even AI) display human-like traits but they should not be defined as "conscious" because that's our own definition of our innate human experience, of how we describe our inner selves. We can grade animals on a scale of human consciousness but the "consciousness" threshold is very high, I believe too high to be awarded to any known species besides our own. Risking becoming a tautology, the "animal consciousness" scale could be a thing, but then it should be a thing on its own.
it could be just as possible that animals experience consciousness in the exact way we do but simply have different innate motivations and interests that lead us to believe they're making decisions with less awareness than we do. it's making the assumption that the human approach to living and existing is the correct approach and then everything around us is "below it."
reading the article you see that there isn't even a clear understanding of what denotes consciousness, so it seems weird to just say "well whatever it is, it isn't that" based on the arbitrary desire to set our species apart from others.
If you reserve "consciousness" as a word to be exclusively for humans, what word do you suggest instead when discussing consciousness as experienced by both humans and non-humans? And once you have come up with such a word, how do you plan to convince everyone to give up the common word they have been using for generations and replace it with this new word?
I would suggest, instead, that you co-opt a different, less common word for your unusual use case so as to minimally inconvenience everyone else. "Sapient" seems like a much better option to me, since it is derived from "Homo sapiens" and suggestive of something more unique to humans.
Or, better yet, coin a new word and stop trying to change the definitions of existing words.
The hilarious part here is that you claim that animals must be conscious, and that humans aren't special and that only the religious would dispute this. But the only reason that we think there is a special quality to human cognition is religious, and now you're wanting to extend that to animals. I see no evidence of human consciousness in my day to day activities, and I would be hard-pressed to describe any evidence I've ever stumbled across in my half-century life. You people keep looking for a soul, even if you're reluctant to use that word. It's bizarre. Have you ever been without a consciousness, such that you can compare the two states and confirm that there is this big difference? Can you deduce consciousness from first principles? Philosophers who believe in inane bullshit like consciousness need to pull their heads out of their own asses.
We seem to have a notion that intelligence has multiple dimensions to it, so it's more likely that human intelligence exists as some kind of probabilistic gradient on a hyperplane in a high-dimensional space, and sampling from that plane yields any possible human intelligence profile, while sampling away from that space yields something decidedly not human. Other animals thus must be similar hyperplanes, perhaps in their own space, and likely not intersecting with humans at all.
How about the rest of the world, since this is not universal? The fact that we mame, kill, and consume them probably has more to do with treating them as "less" and "other", otherwise you feel sad every lunch. I think it's simple avoidance, at a grand scale. Many cultures that do embrace the experience of other animals are also vegetarian, otherwise they would feel sad every lunch.
One obvious example is morality. Take climate change. No reasonable person says that the life forms responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event were doing something immoral. On the other hand plenty of people say that humans causing a comparatively trivial shift in atmospheric composition is immoral.
Saying that chimpanzee cognition is categorically different from human cognition because cyanobacteria lack a sense of morality is like saying that you and I have categorically different reproductive functions because mushrooms produce spores.
Intelligence is not consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that animates otherwise dead matter.
It is also crystal clear that animals have consciousness. A person would have to be without much consciousness themselves to think otherwise, in my opinion.
I was thinking about this once, why I believe my cat was conscious and was a person. I came to the conclusion that the relationship was a sort of epistemology, and that I knew my cat was a person, had a personality, and loved me because I understood the relationship. When my cat was passing, all they wanted to do was spend time with me.
I realized this was true not just of my cat, but with every human in my life, as well. How do I know my friends are people? How do I know they care for me? Because I have a relationship with them and I understand the relationship.
That's not the sort of factual knowledge I can express and transfer to you. But it's real all the same.
In other words we have described emotions that we attribute to all people, but the reality is, not all people have the same emotions - they are some idealised state - and in reality everyone is very different in their emotional capabilities.
If using humans as a comparative baseline, then sure, that's trivially true. I don't see any reason to believe there could never be anything 'more conscious' than a human, i.e. >100% conscious when compared to a human.
Did you just make this up? Because it's obviously not true. And you conflate two concerns, namely, "having consciousness" and "placing humanity in a category of its own".
First, you don't see denial of consciousness in other animals in the ancient or medieval world. If anything, it is much more natural to conclude other animals are conscious based on observation than it is to deny consciousness. Even today, I don't know anyone who denies animals are conscious. Everyone treats their pets, for instance, as conscious beings, because they are. Now, people also anthropomorphize animals, sure, but there's a difference between the two degrees of attribution. Attributing consciousness is far more conservative than attributing human qualities in an equivocal way.
Take Aristotle's De Anima, for example, in which he analyzes the varieties of life according to the kind of "soul" each possesses, and such that each higher soul entails the powers of all the lower souls. The three kinds he identifies, ordered from lowest to highest, are the nutritive soul, characteristic of plants; the sensitive soul, characteristic of animals; and the rational soul, particular to human beings. Even here, we can see both a certain uniqueness to human beings alongside what you might call the consciousness of animals by virtue of the sensitive soul. What differentiates human beings from all the animals is not that they are conscious, but that they are rational.
Second, where the Bible is concerned, I have no idea where you get the idea that it claims other animals lack consciousness. Consider just these two passages from the Old Testament:
Genesis 9:2-3: "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea [...]"
Do you see any mention of rocks in this verse? Do things lacking consciousness live in fear?
Proverbs 12:10: "The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel."
I suppose you could be kind to an unconscious living thing in the sense that can act for its objective good, but it seem a little strange to speak of animals in this way, but not plants, if animals are as unconscious as plants.
Now, yes, human beings are recognized as different from the other animals as early as Genesis, having been created in the image of God, which has to do with a relation of analogous similarity with God, where human beings are understood as personal creatures possessing rational intellect and free will ("analogous" cannot be stressed enough; the infinite God is very much unlike any created being, and so any similarity can only be analogical; see the analogia entis). However, it does not follow that the other animals lack consciousness. The ancients and medievals would find this claim ridiculous.
If you want to know where the denial of consciousness in other animals began, you can thank modern thinkers like Descartes, who posited that the universe is composed of two kinds of things, res extensa and res cogitans. Res extensa is merely extension in space, while res cogitans is the seat of thought, sensation and thus consciousness. According to this anthropology, of the animals, only human beings are a composite of both, and so only human beings are capable of consciousness. The angels are res cogitans, while the other animals are mere res extensa. In other words, according to Descartes's mechanistic worldview, animals are effectively insensate machines.
And so this is a recently development in history, very much occurring within the ferment of modernity. Materialism also finds its roots in Descartes, not because he was a materialist himself, as he admitted the existence of res cogitans that is not reducible to res extensa, but because he framed things in those terms. Materialists, operating within those parameters, reject the existence of res cogitans, instead claiming that all that has been attributed to res cogitans is reducible to res extensa. Of course, it isn't (e.g., the problem of qualia, or the problem of intentionality), which is why materialism was stillborn, but now transmuting into preposterous things like eliminativism among a stubborn remnant of believers.
For example, everything we associate with the magical age of 18 years old. "Adulthood", sexual consent, voting, drinking, smoking, conscription all begin on an arbitrary day and we take no consideration of the reality of the maturity of the person.
(Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and contextual. A harsher world (like one that most of humanity existed in for our entire history) causes earlier maturity. A gentler one (that we are obviously all trying to create) delays it.
So with animals, I see the spectrum, and I see that we are seeking to set a line...somewhere. Some set it just after humans. Humans are special, and everyone else is fair game. Vegans also have a pretty clear line.
Everything else, vegetarians included, are pretty "fuzzy". I'm an omnivore myself, but if you asked me for a concrete logical reason why my personal ethics allow me to eat pig but not dog, I don't think I could give you a ethically consistent one other than "pigs are delicious, and dogs are my friends".
Personally, I do believe that the same way that our generation asked our grandparents how they could've been ok with the racial discrimination & segregation that was ubiquitous in their youth, I think my grandchildren will ask me the same about my consumption of meat.
The reasons will likely be a mixture of climate impact (species of fish going extinct), and cost (because of the energy cost required to create pigs and cows). Society will form an ethical consensus about why it's not appropriate to eat animals to help reduce WW energy costs the same way that early people in the Levant found it helpful to create rules about not consuming pigs or shellfish (for sanitary reasons).
And there'll be "scandals" about rich people that have secret animal farms similar to what we have today about finding out about billionaires in dubai basically having secret house slaves. (AKA, outrage, but no meaningful change)
BTW from where I stand, it seems fairly reasonable to deduce that all mammals are in some way conscious/sentient, and have intelligence comparable to our own. Mammals play, mourn their dead, have a common signal that generally causes us to protect the young of all mammal species and find them cute.
I also think that there is a strong case for a very unique type of intelligence and conscience in Cephalopods. I have personally taken a stance to not eat cephalopods. Because I think they are in greater danger of going extinct vs. mammals (since their stock counts are so invisible to humanity), and I have decided (subjectively) that consuming a distinct type of intelligence from my own constitutes a form of crime. I don't know if I can defend that in court though.
I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.
That's what cognitive dissonance is. Giving one's senses (in this case the taste buds or the ego 'I' or the mind) more importance than something factual or apparent.
> I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.
If you take consciousness to mean intelligence, then sure. If you take consciousness to be separate from intelligence and senses, being the energy or force that brings forth the signs of what we call 'life', then I see no reason to believe that every single living entity has consciousness.
The only difference is in the type of body provided to that conscious living entity. Just like how some humans are born without sight, some without hearing, some without the ability to speak. It doesn't mean they're less conscious, they still are an observer observing things through their senses.
Unless and until one can come up with a clear definition of consciousness (you don't need to, just read nyāya philosophy and you'll save thousands of years of efforts), they will not be able to get over their biases based on unintelligent thoughts and cognitive dissonance.
I cannot agree with this. Maturity has a very clear meaning: it is when a human (or animal) has developed enough to be able to sexually reproduce. That people use the word wrongly in everyday conversation is something else.
As for what you write about mammals, I completely agree. Just looking at them and interacting with them in real life and it's clear that they're our brothers.
What about crows?
That's not a reason to distrust scientists, or science in general (although it does display that a fraction of "scientists" had very poor observation skills).
It IS a reason to look for religious dogma, oust it whenever possible, and dismantle it systematically until it no longer exists.
Care to elaborate/expand?
PS: Being downvoted for a simple question shows how biased (sometimes toxic) HN can become...
The explanation with the fewest moving parts is that our brain and hormonal systems look an awful lot like the brain and hormonal systems of a cat or a dog and therefore the simplest explanation is that cats and dogs have emotions and thought patterns that resemble ours in very meaningful ways.
The actual scientific explanations that people tend to put forward (as discussed in TFA) revolve around us projecting our own thoughts and emotions onto the animals. To me that seems substantially less rational than just believing that similar neurological structures produce similar neurological results.
Therefore, it's a reasonable starting guess that humans and closely-related animals would have many structural similarities in their mental experience, although with some differences. It tilts the balance towards needing evidence that other animals are not conscious, rather than needing evidence that they are.
And when we look for evidence, we see intelligence even in branches as far away from us as crows and octopuses, suggesting that maybe consciousness (which we guess might correlate with intelligence) has deep roots in that tree, or else emerges independently quite easily.
Dead Comment
Well, could you give me the definition of consciousness? No you can’t. So now you’re asking me both to define it and show if animals have it or not.
Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes. Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes. Can animals direct attention? Yes. Can animals remember? Yes. Can animals learn? Yes. Are animals self-aware? Some of them, some only sometimes, some not.
To think of consciousness as a dichotomy instead of a spectrum is baffling to me. As is thinking of consciousness as being a single, indivisible thing.
She has a number of variations on this theme, and with each failure she tries something slightly different. Until I catch her and bring her back inside.
The reason I know this is because, before I was aware that it was happening, it succeeded at least twice. (I'm picturing people reading this saying, in Lisa Simpsons's voice, "is my brother dumber than a hamster? Hamster two, Bart zero" - because that's what my inner voice is saying right now).
Cows are intelligent, curious, and they have a sense of humor, a desire to play. They have friends, enemies, and .. well, everything, really. They have different capabilities because their brains and bodies are different than ours, but they're every bit as legitimate of a life form as ourselves, and every bit as conscious and self-aware.
We all know what it's like to be conscious (I presume - my theory of mind is intact but may be flawed). It's obviously the quality of being, i.e. experiencing qualia.
And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. (Living) matter that doesn't experience the world, basically. No frame of reference. Unless you believe in panpsychism; then everything is conscious and we can ask ourselves what it's like to be a rock.
It's just that the hard problem of consciousness states that we haven't been able to define this "state" in its exact physical, neural correlates, but just because we haven't been able to do that yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists, because otherwise no one would be there to ask or hear the question to begin with.
And sure, you can try to break it down into behavior and other properties of a living being, but that is simply side-stepping the hard problem and just ignoring the question of qualia.
Then again, there's something like "aphantasia": some people do not have the capacity to mentally visualize anything, and often aren't even aware of that themselves. I can imagine there's something analogous with the quality of consciousness, i.e. literal "NPCs" who do not experience the world from a frame of reference, but are basically non-sentient, human, autonomous agents. That's just a very dangerous line of thought, so don't take that too seriously :)
I'm not following this line of reasoning. It seems be exactly opposite to panpsychism, which reasons "since I experience qualia, it stands to reason that everything experiences qualia, because I don't know of a state that does not result in qualia". I'm not a confident panpsychist, but that logic seems to make more sense. Unfortunately, it is just as unproveable as the opposite view, just like pretty much everything around qualia.
To be precise, it's the only thing I can know for sure exists. I can't know for sure if anyone else knows it.
It's difficult to establish whether or not an animal is conscious in the way that it's difficult to establish whether another person is conscious. The only evidence we have for consciousness is the fact that we personally experience it ourselves. And because of that, we can't truly know if other's are conscious from a philosophical sense (i.e.—philosophical zombies) but we can posit scientifically that they must be since they share the same brain structure that we do.
Now when we're trying to establish scientifically whether or not an animal is conscious or not, it's more difficult because we don't have the subjective experience of being that animal, and we can't philosophically transfer the phenomenology of the experience our brain creates onto theirs. So, while I think the question "are animals conscious?" is well-bounded, it's not one that is currently answerable due to the currently private nature of consciousness.
> Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes. Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes. Can animals direct attention? Yes. Can animals remember? Yes. Can animals learn? Yes.
Reacting to stimuli is all possible without consciousness—just like crabs react to noxious, painful stimuli without nociceptors. So the phenomena you're describing is not what people are talking about when they're debating consciousness
I understand it sounds simple, but there are so many different systems interplaying to give rise to whatever definition of consciousness you give, it’s really hard to give exact definitions.
Also, you still talk as if this “awareness in the moment” might be a simple dichotomy. I seriously highly doubt this is the case, especially when it comes to stuff like reflexes and instincts.
People often find this line much harder to draw after they have experienced qualia that is radically different from from what they have experienced before. The most common avenues for such an experience are psychedelics or deep meditation, and the experience is often called ego death.
There is much written on people's subjective experiences, but many people would say that they have experienced qualia which was not based on either awareness or the present moment. Of course, the experience still happened within a human brain, which is known to exhibit awareness of the present moment - but the subjective experience can feel as if neither of those concepts matter, or even exist, while still feeling very real.
These experiences often cause people to start thinking a lot more about the distinctions between consciousness, awareness, and qualia. I get that most people use 'awareness' to mean 'experiencing qualia', but I think most people using 'awareness' in that way have not experienced qualia that is bafflingly different from normal human qualia.
This knowledge now affects my assumptions about consciousness and whether it’s really knowable.
Deleted Comment
A stone is "aware in the present moment". Its temperature is an inner state reflecting the environment, short-term. Its composition is an inner state reflecting the environment, long-term.
To me - as someone who is not a biologist or a professional in this field - this appears to be consciousness. I couldn't imagine anyone trying to argue against that.
Highly recommend it to think critically about the subject, but I think your point is valid, consciousness occurs for many things, and then it doesn't have to many other things. You don't need consciousness to nearly instantly detect that b comes after a sequence of {a,b,a,b,a,?}. You need consciousness to think about _why_ b comes after though. When you go for a swim and then recall the event, you most likely recall it in an objective or third person way mentally - the image or visual in your memory is that third person view.. but that's not actually how you experienced it.
I wonder how much of that applies to animals, and I wonder if we can ever get that answer.
Scientific experiments can detect specific things and specific details (if tested in an appropriate way), but this would be something specific rather than just being called "consciousness", is what I should think.
At first I assumed the flood light in my backyard was just being triggered by the wind, as a spider had built a web in front of the sensor, however I then noticed that the light would turn on even when there wasn’t any wind.
Upon closer inspection, I found that the spider had created a singular strand of webbing, thicker than the rest (5x-10x), directly over the front of the sensor.
It would then pluck this thicker strand whenever it wanted the light to turn on.
I had previously read a few papers on spider intelligence, specifically the planning capabilities of certain species, but this seemed like another level.
Not only had it discovered the sensor, it crafted a tool to use it for it’s own advantage.
Humans think they’re something forever unique and special in the evolutionary timeline, but the remembered words of our ancestors trick us into thinking individuals are larger than the herd.
Intelligence comes in many shapes and sizes, and claiming to be above the rest parallels, in my experience, the likes of a liar more so than a truth seeker.
What is consciousness? That which separates us from the animal kingdom. A lie we tell ourselves to sleep at night and die for false prophets.
To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along.
Not that the spiders had any awareness of being “patient.” A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died. This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably.
Now if the spider knew THAT...
Deleted Comment
(On a serious note, this one always gets me after midnight!)
I was curious what that means in this context and found this research (co-authored by Prof Chittka mentioned in the article): https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by mimicry. IMO I think we're doomed to move the goalposts on intelligence for a while, like with the statistical abilities of LLMs to manipulate language and insects' ability to use tools. Moravec's paradox keeps rearing it's ugly head as more and more complex systems turn out to be relatively easy compared to basic cognition (the system that keeps them flying and identifies threats, flowers, etc.).
It'd take a lot more to convince me that bumble bees are conscious just because of the their brains' simplicity compared to humans or other animals that appear more intelligent like pigs, corvids, octopuses, etc. I'm not categorically against such a possibility, but I think the bar for recognizing intelligence in general has been set too low.
This sidesteps the main problem anyway: What is consciousness? I don't think we're any closer to rigorously defining that anymore than intelligence.
Humans are the same, try teaching basic math equations to kids. When I was in school, most of us learned math by memorizing steps to solve the problem instead of understanding it. Then on the test if we found something we couldn't recognize, we wouldn't be able to solve it. There were usually only a couple of kids in the class who really practiced and understood the principles. I believe most humans usually learn patterns and rarely have genuine insight or grasp of the subject.
I think that the problem is not being too low, but being not very clearly defined, and by assuming that you can just be quantified by numbers; I think that intelligence (and consciousness) cannot be properly quantified by numbers.
> What is consciousness? I don't think we're any closer to rigorously defining that anymore than intelligence.
It is a valid point. You will have to define such things clearly in order to know them scientifically, properly.
I'm old enough to remember back when we thought language was the defining element of intelligence. Dogs can't talk - dogs aren't intelligent.
Now LLMs can talk, and we've shifted intelligence to mean animal intelligence - being able to predict the motion of a falling ball, wanting to protect your children, etc.
Some people truly cannot tolerate the idea that our intelligence/existence isn't magical, so they'll desperately move it again and again and again... forever. Watch.
Dog's can learn new environments and tasks. The simple act of recognizing what a door is and how they work takes quite a bit of intelligence.
As far as I can see, AI still can't make a robotic dog.
Replace bumble bees with human beigns and "pull a string" with an engineering task and you'll find we are not so different. /sarcasm, but not too much, average human being is quite dumb, tbh.
Compared to what? Average human beings are geniuses compared to animals.
Deleted Comment
Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it does not mitigate uncertainty it is not intelligence. All that other stuff about more or faster or sophisticated is something else. obviously we're describing a scalar domain. Your expectations overload and out leverage the simple truths.
This may be the moment to evaluate our questions.
IIRC, canine emotional intelligence has been tested, and dogs have the emotional intelligence of a 14 year old human.
Just don't take my word for it as I've not been able to find an actual citation.
But my dog for sure is not pondering mysteries of the universe and is most likely not aware it is going to die one day and is not going to have existential dread thinking about it.
We are made from the same things and share a lot - but at the same time we are so much different that it cannot be just "humans are just the same as animals".
I find it annoying how we’re even entertaining the idea that animals wouldn’t be conscious. Like what does that even mean?
All these people who aren’t convinced that animals are conscious… I’d really like to know what specific behaviour would convince them one way or another. Pick pretty much any behaviour, and you’ll find animals (and even insects) displaying it.
Anthropocentrism is a hell of a drug.
it means that "science" has been infiltrated with grifters living off research grant gravy trains producing conjectures entirely obvious for hundreds of thousands of years...and reproduced by the previous round of grifters a handful of years earlier. i say that as someone who sees these faux revelations recur every few years. it's ridiculous...as if we're as a species not conscious of the pattern, ironically.
Common sense tells you and I that animals are conscious to some degree. But as there is no current scientific definition of what the system of consciousness actually is (and I'm speculatively calling it a system) it's difficult to say animals have it through observation. We know they respond to anesthetics just like we do. We know anesthesia can shut off consciousness, so there's some physicality to whatever consciousness is. We just don't have a classification for it yet.
Science doesn't admit anything. It is a methodology that is practiced.
This isn't a gotcha question: to me they're both obviously true. The question is what kind of evidence do you require, and why do people require different evidence for people vs other animals.
For sentience scientists mainly look at behavioral cues:
> For example, "if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant." Avoiding painful stimuli unless the reward is significant can also provide evidence that pain avoidance is not merely an unconscious reflex (similarly to how humans "can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience#Indicators_of_sentie...
It's easier to test humans than other animals because it's easier to communicate.
That being said, its obvious to me that many animals have similar emotional complexity to humans, and many outperform humans on some cognitive tasks.
Humans have complex language, and that's about it, to separate us from other animals.
In modern philosophy, it ultimately mean self-awareness, if i read Chalmers correctly. Which is hard to prove (we do have mirror tests that only some animal pass, which prove they do have self-awareness, but failure to understand it doesn't mean the animal isn't self-aware, as young children also sometime fail the mirror test when left alone in front of it).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociception
Deleted Comment
I'm in the camp that believes animals are conscious, I'm not arguing against that. But what I'm arguing is that the current body of evidence doesn't conclude anything. Until we have a better fundamental understanding of consciousness, I don't think we can make such conclusions merely from observing animal behavior. Who's to say that one behavior is evidence of consciousness and another behavior is not? What do we base that upon?
Here you combine "self-aware" with "awake" or "stream of experience" and possibly intelligence.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment