> 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.
A friend of mine had two kittens -- siblings, who were very close to each other. One of them was hit by a car and killed. I had adored this kitten, so in memory of her I did a chalk drawing portrait of the kitten, and brought it over to my friend as gift, about a week after the kitten had died. The surviving sibling had, during that time, seemed somewhat morose and unresponsive, but also kind of cryptic in the way that cats can be. Hard to read.
But when the surviving kitten saw my drawing, he began crying so piteously, reaching out and clawing towards the drawing -- and this went on for most of an hour -- that there was absolutely no mistaking the emotion behind it, and soon everybody else in the room was bawling as well. (Also, I was impressed that he responded to a drawing; it was a decent drawing, but quite abstract relative to (say) a photographic representation. Cats usually seem oblivious to photos in any case, and this is one of the things which confounds animal consciousness research: it's very hard to tell the difference between something that an animal can't do, and something an animal doesn't want to do. I suspect that most of the time, cats simply can't be arsed to process static 2d imagery, because what's really the point of doing so -- but in this case, an overwhelming emotional imperative overrode that natural disinclination, proving that both the cognitive and the emotional capacity is there.)
Anyhow, ever since witnessing that display of emotion, anybody who tells me that animals aren't conscious or don't have real feelings immediately gets ranked -- per my personal hierarchy of the spectrum of consciousness -- as being far below the level of that kitten.
That's sweet and sad. I've had cats and rabbits that mourn, and it is impossible to mistake. Some cats don't care, but others become very close. And bonded rabbits mourn for months.
Recognizing the chalk drawing isn't as surprising as you might think. Cat vision emphasizes movement, edges, and contrast. Photos are very flat, but sharp lines catch the eye. An image doesn't have to be perfect to summon a strong memory.
According to this video, cats’ frame rate is 50 hz, a bit slower than humans’ 60 hz, but with much sharper vision. So perhaps it’s the pixel size and not the frame rate that matters most. Dogs do have a higher frame rate, so your hypothesis could fit their behavior if dogs don’t watch TV.
This reminds me of a story of my friend who had two cats who were brother and sister.
One time when my friend went on a trip and left his roommate in charge of catsitting, the male cat was tragically killed by a car. The roommate found the body and, not wanting to leave it on the street, put it in a duffel bag and brought it home.
Of course the sister cat smelled the bag and knew exactly what was in there. She came to her own conclusions and carried a grudge against the roommate for years (hissing, glaring, etc) until they finally moved out. It was especially peculiar because she is one of the most friendly, cuddly cats with everyone else.
> 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.
This reminds me of Feynman’s famous essay about the rat mazes and how the rats used all kinds of unexpected cues to navigate like the sound of their feet in the floor and the position of the room lights.
Funny you should mention that Feynman story. Because probably more apropos is the story he talks about being able to identify which book on a shelf was recently manhandled - SOLELY BY THE SCENT. I kid you not it if you’re not familiar with that one but I distinctly recall that story from one of his books.
My thoughts didn't go to scent but to environment change; things moving can signify the presence of another animal, one that is trying to hide itself. Could be an ambush predator.
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.)
Ability to reflect non-heuristically on stimuli and not fall back into stress-reflex behaviour like schizophrenia. A animal that things god/the government/everyone is after them like a mice, is less concious then somebody able test that hypothesis and leave that fear filled fever dream. Its a scale though, and in my opinion, with considerable overlap, depending on situation and adaption.
I also agree with the article that "consciousness" is an overloaded term. I believe you and I would agree to it as something more akin to "sentience" but that is not the case for everyone.
I feel this topic always seems to unknowingly devolve into disagreements on first principals.
Yes, that's common. But in everyone's defense, when I researched it myself, it gets as messy as itt in mainstream pholosophy. You can never be sure what a person really talks about and for five minutes it sounds reasonable, but then you meet a claim that yanks a carrying wall from your comprehension.
We sure there’s a strong actual difference between the things? If consciousness is a spectrum, it seems likely connected to intelligence at a sort of fundamental level. The more intelligent, the more obvious it is that consciousness is there, at least.
> 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.
Dogs definitely have Theory of Mind. There was a study done that placed a treat in a room where the dog was instructed not to eat it. A handler was in the room with the dog. When the lights were turned out, the dogs would eat the treat, because they knew that the human couldn't see in the dark.
Or they tried the strategy in the past, and they had learned behavior that by eating things at night, they can get away with it. If you read the methods of this study, they used dogs that lived as pets [1].
The question is one of what has been learned. It seems possible that an animal could learn, from experience, that outcomes can be different depending on whether it is light or dark, without developing any intuition as to why that might be so.
I'm all for the 'consciousness as a spectrum' view, but as TFA says, anyone looking for a eureka moment [in this matter] will be disappointed.
Oddly, I’ve found that pit bulls won’t wrap themselves around a tree. We’ve had several in our house that are/were walked daily, and we volunteer at a dog shelter where my wife and I walk other pit bulls on a regular basis. There are exceptions, but my experience is that the vast majority will not let anything (like a tree) between themselves and their handler if on leash. Just when I think “ah, ha! You’re going to do it…”, they will course correct and go around to avoid trouble. It’s the oddest thing. I have never come up with a plausible theory, but it sure is nice.
(And it is not our dog handling, as our control groups are happy to wrap circles around a tree.)
Yup, other breeds won’t pay attention, and get a signpost between themselves and their handler, and now the leash is stuck. And then they can’t figure out how to undo it. Pit bulls don’t do that. Why? I have no idea. I mean, I suppose you can breed for anything, but seems like a slightly odd feature to breed for.
Hilarious comment. Without fail, my neighbor's dog wraps himself around the tree within 30 minutes of being outside. It's been 2 years now, and he just can't get the hang of it.
Cats do the same thing if you take them outside on a leash. My cat is dumb enough to get tangled, but smart enough to know that I will guide her in reverse every time.
Frankly, as a parent of three I'm not at all convinced that human infants lack object permanence, much less adult dogs. I've never observed anything in my infants that would indicate they lost track of something's existence, and I've seen plenty of things that suggest the opposite.
See also the section of that article entitled "Contradicting evidence".
As a parent also, I think it simply varies from child to child. There is a point in time between vision developing and object permanence being learned where peek-a-boo is absolutely magic.
Peek-a-boo is a ton of fun with infants but I don't buy the explanation that it has to do with object permanence. At the same stage where peek-a-boo is hilarious my kids have also each been perfectly capable of watching me hide something and then going looking for it.
I mean, I'm pretty sure rats also have a theory of mind. My data point is exactly one of the little buggers who used to be my pet. Whenever he was running around my room, he'd peek around to see if I was looking at him before jumping on the couch. If he couldn't see me, he'd jump. If he could, he wouldn't.
> 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.
To the contrary, I do think landing on the moon and QM requires a different kind of mental process than a beaver.
However, the problem is that this implies that consciousness is a function of intelligence, and if only exceptional intelligence is sufficient evidence of consciousness, then would less intelligent people be considered having no consciousness, just like animals?
If one entertains the additional argument in the form of "all humans are the same, and some are shown to be smart (spaceships, QM, etc), thus all humans are conscious", then the question becomes why don't we apply the logic to all animals/mammals/apes, since it's clear the biologically we are constructed with the same parts?
My cat can’t comprehend code written on my screen and the world that is internet.
Maybe other being exists and our notion of intelligence would collapse the same way a cat can’t possibly understand what internet is.
Compared to them, would we be conscious beings ?
Would they consider us conscious beings ?
Your grandma can comprehend but maybe don’t want to. We know humans are equipped with what’s needed to comprehend.
Or maybe some humans might never comprehend some things and it raises the question : « does all humans have the same consciousness ? ».
My take is organic breathing = consciousness. There may be different levels of it.
Otherwise it’s like trying to say all colors can be trimmed down to two values, black and white. There is a variety of consciousness and the definition we try to make of it orient the whole debate. It will never be the same between humans and animals but it doesn’t mean because it’s not human it doesn’t exists.
> 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.
"Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons."
- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
I’m at a lost as to why I should care? Everything comes down to force. Those animals can opine all they want, but humans have the means, motive and opportunity to make them into tasty food. Their conscious or lack there of has no impact.
Then I'm at a loss as to why you read the article and are participating in this conversation.
> Those animals can opine all they want, but humans have the means, motive and opportunity to make them into tasty food. Their conscious or lack there of has no impact.
So might makes right, all the time? One can quite reasonable hear some like King Leopold II of Belgium uttering this as he committed atrocities throughout the Congo. Many European settlers and American slaveowners held the exact same view of African humans.
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]
Haven’t read the first paper but the second is a fairly naive straw man argument. If anything, it’s arguing against free will, which many panpsychists reject anyway. Free will or “outside forces” is not at all a prerequisite for panpsychism.
Actually his paper is a (decent) argument for panpsychism: we know that we ourselves (as individuals) are conscious, and we know that there’s nothing special at the physical level about our brain-stuff as compared to tree-stuff or rock-stuff or anything else. Particles in a brain are not somehow specially imbued with consciousness "energy", yet they obviously have it. Ergo the reasonable prediction would be that other things have it too and it’s much more a question of configuration that yields more or less of the emergent property of consciousness (much like different configurations and states of atoms can yield more or less magnetic force, conductivity, energy, temperature, etc) - all of which are only possible in certain configurations of energy/matter because all energy/matter itself has the properties required to yield those effects. That is the panpsychist argument, and it has nothing to do with free will.
> 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 first animal in orbit was Laika, a Soviet space dog. She was launched aboard Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. The first animals in space were fruit flies, launched by the United States aboard a V-2 rocket on February 20, 1947.
> 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.
Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains generally see intelligence as a continuum. Humans are at the top and are capable of escaping samsara but there is an idea of being able to fall down or up the continuum due to karma.
It's not a coincidence that these are the religions that have created the largest food cultures around eating vegetarian and vegan.
I can't speak for Buddhism but you got Hinduism wrong. Hinduism explicitly allows all Jivas to attain Moksha. There is an entire song on this called "Gajendra Moksha" where Gajendra (the Elephant) is caught by Makara (crocodile) and is rescued by Lord Vishnu, who grants Gajendra Moksha from Samsara. Another example would be that of Jatayu where Lord Rama gives him the status of his father (King Dasharatha) and performs his final rites, and then granting him Moksha. There are innumerable tales of animals getting Moksha in Hindu scriptures. Just provided 2 such instances.
Yes, but don't forget the law of karma and how most of the humans come from animal bodies in the past life. Everybody has a chance to burn their karma as an animal with no free-will and end up with a human-birth where you do have a free-will, and intelligence to use that free-will.
Right, but that concept is itself very compatible with darwinian evolution. Humans are the current pinnacle of evolution when it comes to intelligence, but that doesn't mean everything else is entirely unintelligent.
When we are judge and party, it’s easier to come with the scoring scale that put ourself on the top of the board.
If intelligence definition is not imposed on us by nature itself, then we can only conclude that we are indeed great at producing evaluation scales that will flatter our egos. I guess many other animals are also very good at that game though.
If you take "survival of the fittest" (species, not individuals, should I recall?) as the criteria, then we measurably can’t bluster anymore. Many other species survived for far longer than we did, and maybe will outlast us after we finished to disturb so much the environment condition on which our lives depend.
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.
There must be some strong correlation there: where a better world-model allows you to be more intelligent. Especially if that world-model contains yourself (e.g. self-consciousness).
I do, however, fundamentally believe that our interior conscious experience IS our world model: e.g. There's some property of the information system we live in* such that any tightly integrated and time-coherent partition of information has an interior experience.
A good question: is it possible to build a system that has a highly sophisticated world model, but minimal intelligence, and vice versa?
I think that highly sophisticated world model / low intelligence is possible (and it would have an amazing interior experience).
A non-existent world model / high intelligence seems impossible, since you likely need a good world model to be able to generally reason.
* Our universe / some exterior reality that's running our universe simulation / something weirder we can't even conceive.
Intelligence can be defined as the ability to accurately predict the future consequences of one's actions. And the only way to make such predictions is by having an internal model of how the world works.
Moreover, for social species that live and evolve in groups, like humans, this world-model must crucially include a model of oneself and other minds. We need to be able to predict how others will think and react to our own behaviors. This is what gives rise to self-consciousness and "theory of mind" - a world-model that is recursive and includes representations of itself.
That said, while our conscious experience seems deeply linked to our world-model, the world-model likely encompasses much more than just conscious awareness. It runs in the background, guiding our reflexes, breathing, balance, and myriad other functions below the level of consciousness. It takes in raw sensory data and interprets it, and uses feelings and emotions as a communication channel to influence conscious thought.
There are known critical developmental windows during which an animal's world-model is shaped by early sensory experiences and social interactions. If key stimuli are missing during these windows, the world-model may remain stunted in certain ways even if the missing stimuli are later provided. The animal may compensate through other means, but its overall intelligence - its ability to model and predict - will be constrained by the limitations of its world-model.
So in that sense, a highly sophisticated but narrowly specialized world-model, as in a mathematical or musical savant, may produce an individual who is brilliant in one domain but quite limited in general intelligence.
Whereas a broad but shallower world-model, as in many animals, can enable robust if limited intelligence that is well-adapted to the animal's ecological niche.
Evolution tends to select for world-models and intelligence that are "just enough" for an animal's lifestyle and no more. The metabolic cost of excess intelligence makes it maladaptive. So we see each species with a world-model and associated intelligence that is tailored to its particular environment and survival needs.
> Intelligence can be defined as the ability to accurately predict the future consequences of one's actions.
That's not what is most essential to intelligence. What is most characteristic of intelligence is intentionality. From there, we can talk about inference, analysis, and so on, which presuppose intentionality. Whereas most animals maintain only a concrete image of the world they encounter, human beings can abstract from the concrete into the general and the universal, so the paradigmatic example of intelligence, as opposed to what may be considered analogues, is human intelligence.
Predictability is effectively a question of practicality. Intelligence is not the ability to predict, but rather, intelligence entails that ability as a consequence of intentionality and reasoning (by sufficiently comprehending the nature of a thing, you can make predictions about how it will behave under certain conditions, something that goes beyond mere cargo cult statistics and enters the realm of reason, which is to say concern for causality).
>What is most characteristic of intelligence is intentionality.
Intentionality refers to the quality of being directed toward an objective or purpose. It involves conscious decision-making and goal-directed behavior. Given that insect have intentionally do you consider insects intelligent?
While intentionality might motivate and guide our actions, the ability to foresee the results of these actions is what defines intelligent decision-making. Prediction requires a deep understanding of cause and effect, which is a hallmark of intelligence. When we predict, we infer potential outcomes based on our knowledge and reasoning. This process involves not just abstract thinking but also practical application. Accurate prediction involves the synthesis of various cognitive functions, including inference, analysis, and reasoning.
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.
> what if consciousness were unnecessary for intelligence
Kind of interesting given we are currently in the midst of a revolution in artificial intelligence. From my playing with it, it seems something like ChatGPT is intelligent in the GP sense of "can abstract stuff and respond to new stimulus" but isn't conscious in the sense of having an interior.
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”
Dogs can hear far better than people. They can see far better. They not only smell better, but they smell differently - two independent nostrils, with the ability to hold a smell across breaths - they smell in stereo and can sense past movements of animals by smell differential. They can also sense emotions, infer intent, and are very aware of, respond to, and participate in social interactions and hierarchies across species.
Their sensory world is richer, deeper, and more complex than ours, and their ability to interact within that environment is, in many ways, quicker and more efficient than we are able to do in our environment.
We obviously have far greater intellectual capability. And have created an environment where these capabilities are needed/required, one where dogs rely on us to survive.
So, I would say that we are more conscious in some ways, dogs are more conscious in other ways.
Consciousness is your mental model of your environment. Dogs have theirs and we have ours. That does leave the question on the scope of consciousness. More processing power equals more, expanded consciousness it would stand to reason.
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.
As currently drunk person, I admit that my senses are impaired. But doubting my consciousness makes me doubt yours. Yes there can be scale of drunkness so is different scale of thinking. Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense.
I'm talking about being extremely drunk. I have a friend that "woke up" walking in a park after a night of drinking. If he was already walking exactly who woke up? My friend the human-animal was walking already. My friend the human-consciousness woke up. It was his consciousness coming back online as the ethanol was metabolized in the parts of his brain that afforded his consciousness.
There is an event that made me reconsider driving by night when sleep deprived.
I was driving back home after spending night at friend's place. It was around 4am, the whole family sleeping in the car. I didn't have any alcohol in my system because I always kept a 0 alcohol policy if I have to drive. I knew the trip well because I was driving it several times a months. A few km before reaching home I realized I had no recollection of having driven past a number of the usual landmarks. Yet I couldn't have possibly been completely asleep as the highway had a number of curves and I would have smashed the guardrails had I been totally unconscious.
So my theory was that I was so tired that my brain wasn't recording anything but I had been conscious enough to actually follow the road.
That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.
> That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.
Excellent move for your family and yourself, congratulation.
There are flow states that seem like this. It can be pleasant and it can also be unnerving. Something about memory and the sense of self fall away and it leaves you with a discontinuity despite some part of you obviously carrying on the show while the self was away.
Great question. I would guess he woke up and that this was subsequent to him forming memories again. Memory seems to be a requirement for the kind of self-referential conscious experience that appears to be basically unique to humans. An anesthetic that acts entirely on memory formation and paralyzes the body is in many ways the ideal anesthetic. It's not super unlikely this is how many anesthetics work to at least some degree. If you were administered such a perfect anesthetic it's likely that subjectively you'd experience a distrinct discontinuity in time. Even if you received surgery during that discontinuity, you wouldn't ever suffer from it - not even on some deep non-conscious level. There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.
You are so stunningly Dunning-Kruger wrong here. Neurotransmitters, cortisol and other stress hormones, protein expression, epigenetics, the gut microbiome, all of these and more can lastingly be affected by trauma which is not committed to long term memory.
Nevermind the fact that even if it is forgotten, an awake mind will suffer greatly in the moment - pretending that suffering did not occur because it was forgotten is some next level self-deception.
What about what I said implied anything about various other systems like stress hormones not being lastingly be affected by trauma?
I don't think most surgical patients are concerned with the kind of trauma their cells or gut microbiome sustain during surgery. In fact, if these systems recollected zero trauma it's doubtful the surgical outcome would be positive. When most people discuss suffering they are usually discussing the suffering of their selves. The self requires coordinated effort from the brain. When surgery occurs, it could be well argued you would want to use the least anesthesia necessary to avoid the kind of suffering the patient wants to avoid.
What are you actually on about? Why be purposefully insulting?
I don't think there's a way define suffering without invoking contextualized pain and an entity that suffers (a self). A self is a complex phenomenon that has a bunch of additional requirements not least of which is the capacity for bridging multiple moments of sensory input that happen in the now.
One can remember that one suffered because one can experience pain in the now and bridge that into a context where the self exists. Selfing is the trick of consciousness, it's not necessarily the natural state of all creatures with sensory equipment or memory - it's an additional trick that only a handful of creatures have.
It’s not that your friend “woke up” it’s that his BAC dropped enough for his brain to start correctly forming memories again not that his consciousness “came back online”. It never went away just that no memories were formed during that time
I was trying to explain the relayed subjective experience there. The relayed subjective experience is a discontinuity occurring that's similar to waking up. The self is the thing that relays the experience to other people. You're probably right that consciousness in some expansive sense didn't go away, but that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to what it was like to be the part of my friend that relayed the story to me.
"Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense."
Sure it does, you can see it all around you. It's so incredibly apparent that its actually possible to miss it. It's like a fish denying the existence of water.
Huh? You can absolutely have long in-depth discussions with a blackout drunk person about their current experiences. Are you claiming there’s some level of inebriation where you become a p-zombie?
Of course, there’s also ’incoherently drunk’ which is getting closer to that.
They're conflating episodic memory retainment with consciousness. Consciousness process may result in things to store in memory, but, not being able to store those things long term doesn't necessarily mean consciousness was missing in that moment.
After a brain injury, I had my memory truncated to around 30 seconds for a short time. I would claim I was probably less conscious because the time I could perceive and predict was truncated so incredibly small that I couldn't make sense of the past or future. I could perceive the present just fine, but it relatively meaningless/without context, so couldn't be extrapolated. I think something related to that will end up being a definition of consciousness: meaningful extrapolation of past experience. Or, maybe simply, a meaningful persistent world model, with an update loop.
I think the self can be disrupted by significant alterations in memory storage among other things. I think memory is one of many key ingredients in having a self. When your memory is adequately disrupted your self is disrupted. Without a self subjective experience is radically different than with a self. It's radically different in that it's often described by the self (who stops being blackout drunk at some point) as being a discontinuity similar to sleep. The interesting thing here is that people who are blackout drunk continue to do things that a clinically-conscious person does (eat, talk, stumble around). Your experience is really interesting too - you seemed to still have an intact self, just not extended memory beyond 30 seconds. I think maybe we are talking about different things or my view is wrong.
I think there are levels of inebriation disable your ability to contextualize sensory experience within a self. I think it basically amounts to becoming a p-zombie with some caveats.
Is someone under twilight anesthesia or in a deep k-hole approaching the state of being a p-zombie? I would think so. Maybe I misunderstand the definition of p-zombie?
A p-zombie is something that looks and acts indistinguishably from a person, but doesn’t have an internal consciousness, ie. it provides sensory data, remembers past events, and exhibits behaviour, but it doesn’t “feel” or “experience” anything. A heavily sedated person who’s barely conscious is just a regular ol’ zombie.
I would consider people that are blackout drunk to be p-zombies given this definition. The part of the blackout person other people interact with, their self, simply isn't there - but they are still animated (mostly) like other people with selves. If you are truly blackout drunk I don't think you experience the moment in a traditional sense (a moment from the perspective of a self). There might be an experience there, but it's radically different from what is normally considered subjective experience. The person can have consciousness clinically (as in they show external signs of consciousness) - but their self is not there and their subjective sense is in discontinuity.
The definition of blackout drunk is not remembering what happened. This /could/ simply be a failure to form lasting memories, rather than a loss of 'self-ness.' If we imagine a switch which put a person's long-term memory in read-only mode, would flipping that switch necessarily remove consciousness?
Consider also that brains have different mechanisms for short and longterm memory; functionally, I think we're typically using read-only long-term memory combined with read-write short-term memory, and then writing distillations into long-term memory as-needed. Disabling long-term memory writes in this model may be functionally indistinguishable from a normal operation, at least on shorter time scales.
(For my own part, when I was younger I occasionally got extreeeemely drunk, and would actually flip into some hyper-vigilance around whether I would remember things later; I remember a number of these 'will I remember this later?' moments, though I can't say how many I forgot!)
When my friend found himself walking around in a new place after a complete discontinuity in experience. Was this discontinuity entirely driven by the impairment of lasting memory formation? Seems possible to me. Problem is, I've never experienced this myself - only heard his story from a close friend (repeatedly) and similar stories from others. The stories could be unreliable - but they suggest that the self was offline and came back while the body was still performing complex externally awake actions. Seems p-zombie-like to me.
That's fair. Being blackout drunk is more than just memory impairment though - significant parts of the brain unrelated to memory also have impaired function during drunkenness. I would also suggest that there is a level of impairment where the impaired person lacks a sense of self while still being animated and seemingly conscious. This is what makes me think a blackout drunk person seems like a p-zombie (albeit temporarily).
This is why the concept of consciousness is largely nonsense.
The person that is blacked out is not unconscious. They just are not storing memories in order to remember the experience after the fact.
Can you see it? It is right in front of you that consciousness doesn't exist. It is right in your own example. It is a 21st century superstition and English language flaw. People cling to this idea the way people use to cling to the idea of a soul and some still do.
Like the soul, if you just get rid of the idea and word, nothing changes other than clarity in the language of what we are actually talking about instead of this ill-defined nonsense.
Do animals have a soul? It is the same question.
To come at it a different way. We can't be free of superstition and nonsense in 2024. There must be things we believe are true that simply aren't true and will look silly 300 years from now. What else do people believe in so admittedly in 2024 even though there is not just zero evidence for but we can't even define what we are talking about? It is prime suspect #1 to me when it comes to this category.
There is a condition called aphantasia, in which people are unable to visualise things, but are perfectly capable of doing visual tasks, such as art.
The question "is this animal conscious" is quite close to a question "does this person have aphantasia", and both seem to be perfectly valid and answerable.
You still have to explain why you "see out of your eyes", cause if consciousness doesn't exist, then why the universe doesn't happen silently without an "observer" somehow connected to every complex enough area. Soul is just the closest, religiously crippled interpretation of this idea.
Even if you are the only object in the universe that isn't a p-zombie, you still have it at your end. Why doesn't your physical body operate without "you" being in it most of the time?
I somewhat agree with you. The concept of consciousness needs rethinking. 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 attributes are not binary all vs nothing. As for the soul a better definition for the soul of something is the information required to recreate it. If due to lossy compression or information corruption you can only recreate an approximation then some fraction of the original soul has been lost.
I think the self can come and go. I don't think a blacked out person is always unconscious, but they do seem to lack a subjective self while sometimes still being clinically awake and engaging in complex behavior. When the subjective self comes back online later, it makes understanding the self easier for them by creating contrast.
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 expect that most ancient people believed that animals were conscious. It's impossible to spend a lot of time with any mammal and think of it as not being aware of anything.
For what it's worth, my Googling suggested that the Bible leans in the direction of animals having souls and going to the afterlife, as well.
Of course there are a million opinions on the Bible. I would have said on my quick search it is opposite, animals aren't conscious. But these are rough searches.
My experience with American Christians, Catholic, Southern Baptist, is that animals don't have souls, and are not conscious.
But, there is some cute story about some cute kid asking the Pope if dogs go to heaven, and he said 'good dogs'. So that might have accidentally opened the doors.
That’s actually an interesting case of using LLM: statically what is the mundane perspective of a religious perspective.
Here is a prompt to play with:
In Abrahamic religions, what is the ontological status of animals in general and other life forms? Are they considered generally equals or sometime far superiors?
In Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the ontological status of animals and other life forms generally places them as part of God's creation, but humans are typically seen as having a unique, superior status. Here's a brief overview of each religion's perspective:
### Judaism
In Judaism, the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) describes God creating animals and humans, with humans given dominion over animals. This is based on the Genesis narrative:
- *Genesis 1:26-28*: God gives humans dominion over all living creatures.
- *Genesis 2:19-20*: Adam names the animals, indicating a role of stewardship and authority.
While animals are respected and their welfare is considered (e.g., the commandment to not cause unnecessary suffering, tsa'ar ba'alei chayim), humans are seen as having a special role and responsibility.
### Christianity
Christianity inherits much of its view on animals from Judaism, with additional interpretations from the New Testament:
- *Genesis 1:26-28*: Same as in Judaism, humans are given dominion over animals.
- *New Testament*: Jesus emphasizes the value of every creature (e.g., Matthew 10:29-31 where sparrows are valued by God), but humans are considered more valuable.
Christian thought often emphasizes stewardship and care for God's creation, including animals, but maintains the superiority of humans.
### Islam
In Islam, animals are also seen as part of God's creation with humans given a special status and responsibility:
- *Qur'an 6:38*: Animals are considered communities like humans and are part of God's creation.
- *Qur'an 16:5-8*: Animals are created for human benefit, but humans must treat them with kindness and care.
Humans are considered superior and responsible for stewardship of the Earth and its creatures, but there is an emphasis on compassion and justice towards animals.
### Comparative Perspective
- *Equality and Superiority*: In all three religions, humans are generally considered superior to animals due to their unique role and responsibilities assigned by God. Animals are valued and their welfare is important, but they do not have the same status as humans.
- *Stewardship*: There is a common theme of stewardship and responsible dominion, where humans are expected to care for and protect animals and the environment.
- *Respect for Life*: Despite the hierarchical view, all three religions emphasize respect for life and the importance of treating animals humanely.
Overall, animals and other life forms are respected and valued in Abrahamic religions, but humans are considered to have a unique, superior status with specific duties towards other creatures.
and asking GPT in this context, if animals are conscious
In the context of Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—there are varying interpretations regarding the consciousness of animals. While none of these religions provide a detailed scientific explanation of consciousness as understood in contemporary terms, they do offer insights that can be interpreted in different ways regarding the awareness and sentience of animals.
### Judaism
In Judaism, animals are seen as sentient beings capable of feeling pain, which is reflected in the ethical treatment prescribed by Jewish law (Halakha):
- *Tsa'ar Ba'alei Chayim*: The principle of not causing unnecessary suffering to animals suggests an acknowledgment of their ability to experience pain and distress.
- *Genesis 9:5*: After the flood, God makes a covenant that includes animals, implying their significance and value in God's creation.
While animals are recognized as having feelings and some level of awareness, they are generally not considered to have the same level of consciousness or spiritual capacity as humans.
### Christianity
Christianity, building on Jewish teachings, also acknowledges the sentience of animals to some extent:
- *Matthew 10:29*: Jesus mentions that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without God's knowledge, indicating awareness of their existence and experiences.
- *Proverbs 12:10*: "The righteous care for the needs of their animals," suggesting that animals have needs and can suffer.
However, like in Judaism, animals are not seen as having the same level of consciousness or soul as humans. The emphasis is more on human responsibility and stewardship rather than the intrinsic consciousness of animals.
### Islam
Islam also recognizes that animals are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain and distress:
- *Qur'an 6:38*: "There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings, but they are communities like you," suggesting a form of consciousness and social structure.
- *Hadiths*: There are several hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) that emphasize the humane treatment of animals and acknowledge their suffering.
In Islam, animals are seen as part of God's creation with their own purpose, but humans are considered to have a higher level of consciousness and spiritual awareness.
### Comparative Perspective
- *Recognition of Sentience*: All three religions recognize that animals are capable of feeling pain and experiencing distress, which is why they emphasize humane treatment.
- *Hierarchy of Consciousness*: Humans are generally viewed as having a higher level of consciousness, with unique spiritual and moral responsibilities.
- *Ethical Treatment*: The acknowledgment of animal sentience in these religions forms the basis for ethical guidelines regarding the treatment of animals, stressing compassion and kindness.
In summary, while animals in Abrahamic religions are considered sentient and capable of experiencing pain, they are not typically regarded as having the same level of consciousness or spiritual status as humans. The ethical treatment of animals is an important aspect of these religions, reflecting a recognition of their sentience and value within God's creation.
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.
Haha love it. we had one which would just shake her head at certain foods. 'nope, not gonna eat it' and just sit nexto the bowl sad :D (we really really tried.. but had to shift foods :D)
There are a lot of things that I was taught growing up that I used to sort of just accept but from the outside don't really make any sense (as an example: where I grew up was pretty homophobic but once I was old enough I realized that the homophobia just literally made no sense and it was stupid to care what other people did). The current state of animal agriculture is one of those thing, growing up I ate meat and I had all these justifications but once I stopped I realized it was all bullshit and the treatment of animals just wasn't okay. It's pretty crazy the way we'll just accept things that are "normal" even if they are absolutely horrifying.
The saddest thing to me is the people that say they "love animals" but eat them pretty uncritically (though obviously I used to be one of these people).
Just put like this, it’s a bit of an opposite extreme. I mean, the rest of your message also give context that mitigate the statement, but alone it sounds a bit drastic: if some people plot a genocide against some other people, the latter would be wiser to care about it.
I genuienly think that this is one of the biggest factors when talking about this topic. Lots of people seem very defensive when talking about it. Because if they admit or speculate that animals have some form of consciousness, they also admit that they're responsible for killing thousands of conscious beings.
As for myself, I can't believe that animals aren't concious.
I never really thought about it that way. killing loads of conscious beings. Until for Eid in Morocco I got the honour of helping to kill a sheep so the family could eat it. (100+ people tribe)
I am still not a vegetarian, but do have a much more realistic view on what's really on our plates now. - I don't think eating meat is bad though. I _do_ eat a lot less meat now. (smaller portions and less frequent). Predators eat prey, but they don't mass produce their prey.
For some random context: the sheep killing there - it was an old sheep, lived a blessed life loved by the community, to be eaten at an old age at Eid someday. Everyday the women in the village and maybe their kids will take the sheep to graze etc. and give them love like any farmer loves his animals. He was only scared moments before the deed was done as then they are moved to a little separate pen and likely realize it's the end for them. The families usually own only a few sheep, different ages. Occasionally when one ages out it's slaughtered. - Cows and other larger animals such as Camels are for extremely special occasions and actually rarely eaten. (once a year, or at a marriage or something special like that.)
I wish it was feasible in my country for example to do similar things, which are much more friendly to the animals involved, but it's litteraly ILLEGAL. funny how that works...
Yeah I guess just the moment of eating it is not the bad aspect, but what comes before this moment. forcefully impregnating animals, taking their kids away from them, letting them live in concrete buildings without much access to fresh air or grass, transporting them in inhumane conditions etc.
> the sheep killing there - it was an old sheep
i frequently wonder if it would be possible to switch to a model where animals at least get to live a full life, before being slaughtered at an old age. probably not profitable at all...
to be fair, as romantic as your moroccan story sounds, i'm not a fan at all of the practice of just slitting an animals throat and letting it bleed out. Sounds like a very traumatic, painful experience if you're a conscious being. and the more i think about it, i'm not sure if giving an animal a good life is enough of an excuse to then slaughter it.
don't get me wrong, i do eat meat (would love to stop), but for me there's no valid, ethical argument towards meat consumption. if people want to eat meat, then they should, as long as they're honest about what exactly it is they're doing.
I want to be encouraging here. Even reducing has a big impact on harm to animals and the environment. I'm down about 95-99% from childhood. I was a strict vegan for a while, but it was just too difficult socially. I realised that reducing my harm and environmental footprint by 95+% was enough. I don't worry too much about the rest. Please don't read this response that you need to reduce by 95%! Even reducing 50% is a huge win. Or you could try to switch to more ethical meat sources -- raised on nice farms with plenty of space. Again: This has a real impact.
> Even reducing has a big impact on harm to animals and the environment
yeah, agree 100%! Almost a year ago i was living vegetarian, but then a couple of months ago some minor depressive moods were enough to destroy my willpower to resist meat. i love the taste and texture of meat, incl. liver, sheep, kidney etc., so the reason for me to be vegetarian are purely ethical reasons.
but i will try to reduce my consumption again, i know that i can do it :)
I can't remember the exact book I was reading. I think "Old Man's War" or one of the sequels.
But an advanced alien race captured some humans and was basically raising them like cattle. Inseminating women, harvesting milk, slaughtering for meat. It really affected my perception of how fucked up the whole process actually is.
Very interesting that you're mentioning this. I had this exact plot as a thought once. "maybe a shocking horror movie about aliens treating humans like cattle could show people why vegans/vegetarians think it's fucked up what we're doing. aliens forcefully impregnating young women/girls, taking their babies away from them after they've been born, genetically raising them so that they produce as much milk and muscle-mass as possible and then just kill them for consumption. if they're as dumb as us they'll even waste more energy doing all of this than they get from our meat."
doesn't surprise me that this plot already exists, as it's not that creative. i must've been inspired by this, somehow, without being aware of it :D
Does anyone remember how they felt when the original Matrix film showed the scene of humans being farmed? It still stays with me today. The wave of cold sweat that came over me.
The boss/worker relationship within our current mode of production seems to be another way we justify treating others like raw resources. Especially in lean financial times.
I'm sure that consciousness is a spectrum and that big mammals are near us on it, if there's any difference at all except for intelligence levels.
At the same time I have no issues with animal resource factories. I justify their existence by the fact that I'm a carnivore and needed meat and fats to properly operate since forever, no need for complex philosophy here. The necessity to justify that against ethics usually means you got way deeper into it than is reasonable.
If you're human, you aren't an obligate carnivore, because humans can live healthily on a fully vegan diet. Animal products (meat, dairy, eggs) certainly gave pre-industrial humans a big boost as a dense and (at times) readily available source of calories and protein, but that's a far cry from "needing" it.
Modern usage of animal products for food is purely for convenience and pleasure. A point could be made that that's sufficent, but it's objectively not necessary.
I don't feel good without meat, and good substitutes are less available.
But my main point (which I started to write above but seemingly decided to omit, to my own confusion) is that this fear-cold-hunger-devour-alive-die-young bs is how wild nature works every day for eons. I am its creature and should see no guilt except for true sadism.
I agree with regulating bad farms away, but suffering through reduction of my already small demand to zero barely helps anything.
Are you sure, you need meet?
Personally, I know I want meat and I know I despise the meat factories.
But there are alternatives, cattle raised on actual grass. Or game from the forest. More expensive, but I don't need nor want meat every day.
edit:
with meat factories I did not talk about industrial packaging of meat. That is fine. What is not fine with me, is having living animals on conveyor belts, who never see the sun or feel the earth.
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.
Animal language is obviously on the same level as human laughter and cries and whimpers. Animals don't teach language to each other like humans do.
But I don't see what that has to do with consciousness, to me animal language is much closer to consciousness than human language. Consciousness is all about emotions, not language, and animal language that humans also has is directly tied to emotional expression. Our ML models managed to mimic human language before animal language, human language is more robotic.
Sci-fi shows tend to also do this, robots talk with voices that lacks the animal components of humans and instead just do the human language. So the popular view is that animal language is the conscious parts and human language is the computational/intelligence part.
> Animals don't teach language to each other like humans do.
They do not teach language like humans because they are not humans. However studies show that some animals do teach their young language.
Many bird species, such as zebra finches and canaries, learn their songs through a process similar to human language acquisition. Juvenile birds listen to adult tutors and practice their songs, receiving feedback and adjusting their vocalizations accordingly.
Dolphins and whales use complex vocalizations for communication. Mothers and other group members have been observed teaching calves specific calls and whistles, which are essential for social interactions and identification within pods.
Meerkats exhibit teaching behaviors where older members demonstrate specific alarm calls and foraging techniques to pups. These calls convey different types of information, similar to vocabulary teaching in humans.
> Animal language is obviously on the same level as human laughter and cries and whimpers. Animals don't teach language to each other like humans do.
Obviously? There’s no reason to assume that. It is known that cetaceans acquire their language and dialects through social learning. It was very recently discovered that some whales even have names for each other. Their language may be different from ours, but it is not just emotions.
And then of course there are primates, elephants etc…
Nobody will click on or continue reading to see ad impressions if it said “biologists still think animals are conscious”. Or “biologists differ over the meaning of consciousness and which exact animals qualify.” Whenever you want to know why news sites do what they do, it’s so they can serve more ads. That’s the business model now.
Also most science reporting is not good. They’re quoting an econ professor. These articles are really written by someone with a deep understanding of a subject matter.
Notice they’re not giving you examples of noted biologists who think all animals are not conscious. There are few to none.
The only statement in here that’s interesting is that bees may be conscious. I think you’d get push back on that, depending on your definition, and the article does mention the difficulty of definition of consciousness.
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.
Yes, my definition would be more originalist ("because it has been this way") if you may.
Consciousness has been a definition of the inner human experience made by humans themselves, regardless of the lack of clear understanding of what precisely denotes consciousness. Can animals experience what we experience? Well, maybe, but that's not consciousness, as I'm reserving that term to define the human inner experience exclusively. In particular, I'm here to argue that a "scale" proposed by parent is not possible. Why? Because the concept itself was born exclusively from the human experience to summarize the undefinable complexities and interactions of the human mind. Given consciousness is undefinable by specific terms and their relationships (ie. there's no "formula"), we can't really assign partial consciousness consistently to other species. We can say "bees play" or "dogs fear" but that can't really be put in a consciousness scale, because what would "10% conscious" even mean?
> it could be just as possible that animals experience consciousness in the exact way we do
Other species may experience something analogous to consciousness as they also experience complex interactions of different traits in their minds. But it's always going to be their own interaction and I would not call it consciousness. And whatever it is it's definitely not the exact way we do.
if they are undefinable and unmeasurable i'd argue you don't understand them well enough to prove or even argue that there aren't similar complexities in other species
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.
Not even the same human possesses equal amounts of consciousness!
There are times when I am particularly conscious because I am concentrating, there are times when I am less conscious because I am in a flow state, and there are times when I am essentially not conscious because I am snoozing. I was also much more conscious when I was a child (because I was more frequently presented with novel experiences and had a focused awareness of them) and much less conscious now as an adult (because most of my experiences are familiar, so I autopilot more easily).
But I certainly would not consider these to be categorically different from each other (except possibly being in a sleep state). I am simply constantly shifting around on the consciousness scale.
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.
I've no such ability (and never claimed to), but I'll share what I can.
A few years ago I was standing on my balcony. I saw a lizard sunning itself on a rock, a story below. On impulse I made a shadow puppet of a bird, and that lizard took off running. I don't know what the emotional experience of a lizard is like, but I'm as certain as I am of anything that the lizard feared for it's life, whatever fear means to a lizard. Maybe fear isn't an emotion to a lizard, maybe it's more like a state of mind. I have no idea, that question is unanswerable.
I've had mouse problems many times. I can tell you that mice have distinct personalities. I catch them with live traps and release them. Some of them leave immediately when the box opens. Others cower and must be coaxed out. They have favored places and such. If you study then and learn their habits, you can place traps very effectively.
There was a mouse that would go behind my toaster and chew on stuff. The first time I walked over to see what the sound was, they threw themselves off the counter and tumbled down the spice rack. The second time they darted out and climbed down the spice rack. The third time, they came out at a relaxed pace, easy as can be, and gracefully climbed the power chord down to the floor. Presumably they learned I was all bark and no bite.
You probably wouldn't have been flagged if you'd said something like, "I remain skeptical. Could you demonstrate your ability to tell what lizards are thinking?" In my experience comments are usually flagged for tone rather than content.
If my comment was overly provocative, I apologize. I was trying to get a laugh out of you. It's a passage from my favorite book. Based on past interactions, I thought that book fell into your area of interest, so I thought you may have read it and get a chuckle out of the reference. But perhaps that was overly familiar on my part.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Eschew flamebait.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals...
That's why that comment was flagged. (To me personally, your comment was harsh enough to be worthy of downvoting, though I'm not sure I would have flagged it.)
Also from the guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Scientists may have made mistakes in the past, what is "emotion" and if emotion is just one part of the brain (which lizards lack). Furthermore, having emotions is not necessarily same like humans emotions, anyways. My guess is probably lizards (and insects) do have emotions, but not same like humans emotions (although, what are the similarities and the differences, is a question that remains, and you would have to know what is the proper way to measure such a thing).
I am not saying that I am necessarily correct about any of this, but you should not be so certain them the other way either.
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.
I think humans had exactly the same cognitive dissonance about slavery and racial-based discrimination (in all it's forms) for most of our history.
It wasn't so much that their HATE was so powerful that it superseded logical consistency, but rather the CONVENIENCE of this discrimination was so attractive. Classism is the same way.
We make up ipso facto justifications to continue to perpetuate inequality and exploitation that benefits us. The most recent version of this is globalization and all the arguments the west makes for how our reliance on 3rd world labour improves their livelihood. (It does; it's also more complex than that)
I'm not going to pretend that I WANT to be vegetarian or WANT to align my logical ethics with my actions. I clearly do not, I find eating meat too convenient and brings me too much joy.
> I find eating meat too convenient and brings me too much joy.
Yes but then you have the question: Is your convenience worth more than someone's life? Does your joy justify someone's throat being cut?
I'd say that this is not the same as slavery or racial-based discrimination since this is someone's aliveness at stake and the only crime that they committed was being in a different body than you. This is not about forcing them to work or saying mean things, but immense pain and extreme suffering which causes the consciousness to leave the body.
> But I do want to want to...
That shows that your intelligence agrees but the mind, being connected to the senses, wants to divert attention towards sense pleasures.
Sāṁkhya philosophy would say that a human whose intelligence is stolen by the senses is no better than an animal: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. Now, I'm not saying this to be judgemental but this metaphysical system gives you a lens to see and act in the world.
What then separates us from being a human if we're no better than a pig rolling in dirt if all we know is running after one temporary sense pleasure to the next? and what if somehow after you die, your consciousness takes the body of a similar animal? (Unless of course you believe in Creatio ex nihilo).
These are questions to ask in life. The human birth is special because while being similar to literally every other species, this birth is the only kind of birth that allows one to philosophize and ask important questions in life.
Being a vegetarian is easy in today's world, especially if you're privileged to be earning more money than 5 families in South Asia combined. All it really takes, is accepting intelligence's advice, instead of letting the mind (which controls the senses) reign.
> 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.
Are you sure that is not just mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution? Is like saying ChatGPT has conscience because it can talk or "think" like us...are we missing something here?
I am not opposing your view, just trying to understand the logic - perplexed by downvotes on a simple question...
I'm not sure about the downvotes, I couldn't even downvote you if I wanted to because you replied to me.
I'm operating on the assumption that evolution happened as Darwin described it. As another reply to you notes, darwinian evolution precludes sharp divides between species in favor of a gradual development of complexity over time. A believer in darwinian evolution should expect consciousness and emotions and other mental processes to manifest on a continuum, which means that the question of animal consciousness should be about as controversial as the question of our own consciousness (which is definitely an open topic of philosophical debate but is also impossible to solved with an experiment).
Not that I believe this, but there could be an intelligence cliff where you get to a certain level and suddenly consciousness and self awareness appear. That is a mechanism where gradual change could lead to stepped differences.
We have already enough evidence to assume that such cliff does not exist.
I can recommend the book „How language began“ by Daniel Everett, where he demonstrates convincingly that our path to language, culture and consciousness was not a single switch, but evolutionary process. Recent research of cetaceans shows that their language and culture may overlap in sophistication with our ancestors.
There could, but then you would have to explain why some permutations of matter create a new dimension of sensation which previously didn't exist, which then has the ability to reach back into the dimension of matter and exert will on it (are we opening a wormhole to an alternate reality of the soulbots or something??).
I'll reiterate that I don't believe it to be the case that animals with smaller brains are not self-aware, but wanted to counter that it HAS to be a smooth gradient of level of consciousness between simpler and more complex brains. It can be stepped.
However, if it were the case, you don't need to explain it, only observe it. For example, I think we can say from observation that there needs to be a minimal complexity. n-neurons cannot be self aware and n+1 can. I'm sure it's not just the number, but you get the point. The gradient of self-awareness need not start at the gradient of intelligence, nor need it have the same slope.
I don't believe in non-physical explanations. We don't know the mechanism though, so we do actually do need to explain why some permutations of matter, as you put it, (i.e. the permutation in brains) has this sense, and others (matter in rocks, matter in computers?) does not. Although I'd think process, rather than just arrangement.
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.
There's definitely more going on with trees than we once thought, but I'm at least confident that wherever human consciousness comes from, it certainly must be tied to the nervous system. If we inherited consciousness from our ancestors, then the most distant common ancestor that we could possibly have inherited it from would be at most around the point where we branched from jellyfish. So if trees or other plants are conscious in their own way, then they also must have independently evolved it in their own way; it's not a trait that they share with us based on common heritage alone.
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.
Real simple stuff. Luring a cow over near a bank and then pushing her down it. Pretending there's some lush grass in the gap between trees. Nudging each other into the electric fence, or into the gatepost when going through a gate.
big, curious dogs, sorta like cats. they want to know what you're doing when they see you and they want to smell everything you're doing and they want to play all the damn time.
I did IT work on a farm for a few weeks and was there 3-5 days a week. The cows were far more active than any other animal I saw. They clearly liked each other and had friends and non-friends in the group. They would run and walk dozens and dozens of miles per day and a horse would move 1/4 mile in total over the course of an entire day.
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.
That's totally true and something I don't know the answer to. But it's interesting to ponder if the experience of consciousness is the same for each individual. We believe that consciousness is possibly an emergent phenomena of cognitive processing, but since there is a wide amount of heterogeneity in the makeup of the human mind, it isn't extraordinary to claim that this 'presence in the current moment' may have different flavors for different individuals.
The claim that certain individuals lack an inner monologue is a testament to this—I can't imagine what that would be like but that is certainly nothing like my conscious experience is. To me, the lack of an inner monologue sounds very much like the 'dark universe' in which the brain is doing all of the processing and there is no conscious observer to witness the unfolding. I'm sure people without a inner monologue are still conscious.. but—it's interesting to think about how different their experience may be like.
Do you ever watch a movie/event or listen to music and notice you're not internally narrating what's happening because you're so engrossed in the action?
In one way, that sounds like more consciously present, in the other way it sounds like less. You are more here and now as you lack distracting commentary, or are you more here if you sit and ponder it?
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 I say "consciousness", the concept that I mean isn't reducible to other concepts. It's a concept that can only be found through introspection. And it seems like many have noticed the same concept, so we can label it with a word. But we can't define it such that someone who hasn't already noticed the concept will understand it. We can only describe it in such a way that those who already noticed it can confirm we're talking about the same thing. I think the parent's comment has done this adequately, and I don't think it's a problem that the definition is incomplete.
> 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.
Because there’s no rigorous scientific definition of what consciousness is, and you can’t even just roughly point to it, just like most quasi-sciences it’s all up for debate.
From my perspective, the only people questioning whether or not non-humans have consciousness are coming from a religious perspective trying to reconcile their cognitive dissonance
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.
Well—there's a thought experiment of something like a 'dark universe'—a universe devoid of conscious observers, with the absence of awareness and perception while the physical processes continue unabated just as ours does with all of the people walking around, doing business, living cosmopolitan lifestyles, etc. This is theoretically possible because humans are just agents with brains that bring in stimuli, process it, and react. I.e. consciousness is not a necessary part of the equation to realize the universe is currently realized. The only reason we know consciousness is part of the equation, is because we experience it ourselves.
So I don't know if the fact that your cats are agents that are reacting to stimuli is proof that they're conscious. Again, if we were an outside observer, like an alien, we would have no way to prove humans are conscious. The only reason we believe scientifically that other humans are conscious is because we personally perceive conscious, and since other humans have the same neurological structures that we do, we can posit that they experience the same thing. Philosophically though we can't 'prove' other people are conscious, which gets us back to the philosophical zombie thought experiment.
My father had a siamese cat growing up, smart, would open drawers from behind to get food, tease dogs outside by standing just out of range of their leash. One day it slipped on a jump, his brother laughed at it. It ran away humiliated. That night while they were asleep it attacked his brother
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.
As the top comment in this thread pointed out, we don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to tell whether a spider has it or not. As far as I know, no observable behavior requires „consciousness“ for most layman definitions of the term.
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.
And compared to what manner of assessment of that genius? Animals had the Earth to themselves for millennia. Humans for a very short period. You judge!
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.
It's an interesting perspective. I understand that the language choices they made were strong and thus not for everyone, but I don't see a reason to be rude about it. If it didn't make any sense to you it's probably because you didn't find it worth your time to parse it out, or similarly that there was unfamiliar terminology you didn't judge it worth your time to look up. That's fine, but that's a choice you made, no sense blaming them for it.
When you do a math or logic problem you would intuitively use parentheses, allowing the problem to be split into scopes. Use parentheses in your mind and then regard where uncertainty is increased and where it is decreased.
In nearly every circumstance, new information will generate MORE questions. To the untrained mind this may sound like more uncertainty, however in actuality you did not know what questions to ask until some preliminary uncertainty was resolved.
For one scope, uncertainty is resolved, in doing so new domains are revealed.
Uncertainty (or information for that matter) isn't a lump sum that grows or shrinks. One question is resolved revealing more separate and further uncertainties, which are very specific and reduced from chaotic infinity by some resolve . In this case, realizing you didn't actually know that "something" to begin with.
The tendency to jumble these delicate distinctions into a single glob of unknowns obfuscates otherwise simple (however numerous) truths. And by "truth" I mean, anything consistent with existential reality.
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 can prove that I am conscious, at least to my satisfaction, because I can think the thought "I am conscious". Outward behavior of other humans also proves to my satisfaction that they're conscious. And when interacting with animals, I see many of the same qualities that lead me to believe other people are conscious, with the difference largely being a matter of degree.
Before you can prove anything about consciousness, even "to your satisfaction" or in relation to yourself, you would need to propose a clear and unambiguous definition of it.
My understanding of the history here is that scientific understanding of the nature of animals was based on folklore, attributing supernatural properties to animals and their behavior. Scientists agreed to throw all that out, and rightfully so, in preference for an evidence-based approach. And what we're seeing today, is that despite a couple centuries of assuming that animals are pure instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence that they are individuals with intelligence, memory, feelings, preferences and even language. Where "they" spans the range from bees to whales.
The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric, but a rejection of folklore as literal truth. While some are still attached to an anthropocentric worldview, that perspective seems dead among people who study animal behavior.
> scientific understanding of the nature of animals was based on folklore
Popular, pre- or proto- scientific understanding perhaps, but not scientific understanding per se.
> despite a couple centuries of assuming that animals are pure instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence that they are individuals with intelligence, memory, feelings, preferences and even language
These things are not mutually exclusive. The words "intelligence", "memory", "feelings", "preferences" and "language" can refer to purely automatic/mechanical processes, even when we're speaking in reference to humans. There's no real reason why we need non-mechanistic magic to explain the human experience. The two ideas are compatible: animals are conscious, and humans are "just" really complex machines. It's all the same stuff, viewed from different lenses.
> The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric
They were, and they still are. Folklore itself is for the most part very anthropocentric.
The human attitude towards our relationship with animals cannot be described as anything other than anthropocentric for the vast majority of people. Whether the origin of that attitude is due to the rejection of certain traditions assuming animals to be sacred or the adoption of traditions treating humans as sacred, it exists, and causes horrific mistreatment of animals on a global scale.
I suspect the attitude is the default / most primitive one, because any other attitude requires higher-order cognitive processes that can abstract one's own experiences (which is the only real input one has) with the behaviours of entities that appear to be very different from oneself. In other words, the capacity for empathy is a "positive feature", in the sense that it is absent by default.
The ability to make this kind of abstraction is a pretty sophisticated thing, and either requires time to evolve (as an instinct), and/or requires socialization/learning (as a partly or totally-intentional practice).
True. It's also sophisticated to have the ego required to believe you should inherently have dominion over the entire planet and all animals on it. I don't think it's an idea most people would have adopted themselves without being born into a society formed by religions that perpetuate such a belief and it's consequences [1].
As an aside, it's not clear to me how "having dominion" should justify such mistreatment, anyway.
> It's also sophisticated to have the ego required to believe you should inherently have dominion over the entire planet and all animals on it.
Is that really "sophisticated", or is that just what happens when an entity outcompetes all others for resource utilization by chance (ie.: in the context of ecology / evolutionary pressure)? This is basically how cancer happens, and yet I wouldn't call cancer cells more sophisticated than healthy ones. I call it dys-regulated.
Yeah, I think it's sophisticated. Our brains are hardwired for empathy, and people are able to mostly ignore their social/emotional programming through a system of beliefs that would be difficult to propagate without language.
You seem to think we're somehow "empathetic by default", but that's something I'd disagree with.
Our primal instinct is one of tribalism and auto-centrism, but over long periods of time we've developed a (fragile) capacity to empathize with 1) other people that look like us, and 2) other people that don't look like us, and 3) perhaps animals. But we didn't always have this capacity, and we see it break down all the time.
What makes you think we "didn't always have this capacity"? Or that other animals don't have it? We have it from a very young age, children like animals, want them as pets, and cry when they see them hurt or killed. We've had at the very least a desire to commune with animals for 100,000 years or we wouldn't have dogs in their current form.
In general, empathy can be either an evolved behaviour, a learned behaviour, or both.
In humans this is largely-but-probably-not-exclusively socialized behaviour. Most cases of (human and non-abused) feral children exhibit behaviour that is not particularly compatible with empathy.
I shared my rationale for why we "haven't always had this capacity" a few comments up this thread, and you seemed to agree with it before immediately making the contradicting statement.
If you think I'm contradicting myself, then I didn't know what "abstraction" was referring to in "sophisticated abstraction". (FWIW, it's pretty difficult to review the conversation and formulate good responses on mobile, since all I can see easily without switching back and forth is the comment I am replying to). I think it's "sophisticated" to have the language and philosophy required to follow a moral system that you prioritize over your own instincts—in this case, the prioritization of members of your species. I don't think it's "sophisticated" to not attempt to maximally exploit everything around me for even the most modest benefit to the deteriment of all else. Maybe I have too high an opinion of people. Maybe it's just a consequence of scale.
I see empathy alone as being much more basic, requiring only a very low-level "theory of mind", likely arising from the type of evolutionary pressure that leads to social species. I would be surprised to learn that was a recent adaptation in our evolutionary line. Maybe most species have it "off by default", if you consider the "default" to be a constant state of duress and resource scarcity.
It was very recently evolution wise that humans started to keep animals as pets, before then we just hunted and ate animals. We would empathize as much with those animals as cats did with mice.
Another grave site in Germany from 14,000 years ago had a dog buried with a man and a woman, treating it as a family member.
We literally have had fur babies since before we had civilization.
Once you get there, there's far more evidence: ancient Greeks burying pets and writing inscriptions about how they loved them, dogs and baboons were kept as pets in ancient Egypt, and given names, which was a big deal in Egyptian religion, and wasn't done for utility animals at all.
I'm not backtracking, you're simply not operating within the proper context boundary, or perhaps getting hung up on the least important[0] semantic imprecision in the thread[1]; regardless of whether we're talking about "human" or "primate" evolution (of the kind that is relevant to this discussion), it simply does not happen at these time scales. We're talking about evolution of highly conserved behavioural traits, not about "the History of homo sapiens sapiens" stricto sensu.
[0] It's the least important imprecision because in general, when we talk about the evolution of a species, we typically also consider common ancestors that don't necessarily have the same label as the modern species. When we speak of "human evolution", we're referring to proto-humans and human-primate common ancestors as well. Anyone would gloss over this in context.
[1] Note also that the imprecision was someone else's, not mine.
Eh, plants too. Many plants react to the environments, recognize kin, seem to communicate with each other, etc
People don’t like it, just like many people don’t like animals being aware.
I had a fascinating theological discussion with a guy once. He was a farmer and he believed strongly that animals lack souls. I, on the other hand, believe that even amoeba have souls. I feel it’s just a condition of being a living thing while he felt that this was unique to humankind. Obviously, he has an interest emotionally in viewing animals as soulless. Easier to slaughter them that way.
> 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").
Exactly. All of that is reasonable and the behavior described are obviously present as anyone who's ever had a dog would tell. So I don't understand why "are animals conscious" is being debated at this point.
I’m not saying that this is the case, but all the mentioned behaviors are only indicators and could also be reflexive actions which the dog is genetically programmed to do because they work. If a beetle is flipped, it also has a “program” to get upright again, but that doesn’t mean it’s aware of its situation and is actively deciding something. I’m pretty sure dogs are conscious, but you can’t really tell from the outside. LLMs also appear to reason and make arguments but I wouldn’t call them conscious.
You’re right, you also can’t tell for other people. You can make an assumption because they are very similar to you and you yourself appear to be conscious to yourself. But you can’t really disprove solipsism as far as I know.
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.
> so everyone else but you can be un-conscious and you would have no way of telling
Indeed, though* all of us should be confident that there is at least a second conscious being besides ourselves, the one who coined the term.
* ignoring A J Ayer for a moment, even though "there is a thought now" would be the only form of consciousness that a current LLM could possibly have if it had any at all
Here's one of the most simple practical examples that proves to me cats are conscious. When my cat sleeps in my bed occasionally I accidetanlly kick or bump into her in the dark. Instead of fleeing, hissing or attacking me she lets out a very unique earnest meow that clearly means 'hey I'm here' and she goes back to sleep like nothing happened. She clearly understands my motivation wasn't to harm her. She clearly understands we share a common motivation of sleeping in the comfy bed. She clearly understands a concept of the future where she lets me know her position and expects me not to accidentally bother her again. If I continue to bother he she will simply get up and move just far enough away to avoid further trouble.
Cats are definitely conscious in my mind, but when I kick my cat at night she gets up and looks at me like I just beat her on purpose, then usually attacks my foot. I guess my cat is an asshole at night! Thankfully she’s cuddly and nice when I’m not disturbing her cat naps.
> An early effort came in the 17th century, by the French philosopher René Descartes who said: "I think therefore I am."
He added that "language is the only certain sign of thought hidden in a body".
That line of reasoning is exactly how some people can consider LLMs conscious, yet seriously doubt whether any animals are.
I sometimes think that animistic belief - objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence - is more respectful of the ecosystem than some of the modern ones. Lots of ancient cultures, across the globe, tried to live in harmony with their natural environments. I wish that we can go back to that stage.
I also often think about this. "Animism" was a super efficient way to program a culture for respect towards nature. From that perspective it's a shame that it's gone.
I'm hopeful that with all this research, we're sort of traversing a longer cultural arc that terminates at the same "symptoms" of animism (respect for nature, good stewardship of natural resources, following the precautionary principle). Those symptoms would now be supported by different load-bearing pillars, called "Environmental Science" and "Biology".
I don't think we can go "back", but I think we can go "forwards" and still end up in a good (albeit, ironically, more or less the same) spot, where capital-S Science basically endorses most native land management practices. We've already made pretty good progress in the last generation or two.
To what extent did they really, or was it more low impact for smaller tribal groups? There’s plenty of examples of civilization with roads, waterways and larger buildings in the Americas prior to the Europeans. Same for most of the rest of the world. Humans cleared areas with fire, they damned rivers, and built cities.
This doesn't add up to me. The majority of scientists really thought that animals didn't feel or experience things? That can't be true for scientists that actually observed animals.
I can see how there might some type of conflict with a dualist or religious view of the soul though. But not a scientific conflict.
Decartes, for example, did actually believe that animals don't feel or experience things, that they're purely mechanism-like entities, with simplistic (I'd even say, "behaviouralistic" but that'd be a bit anachronic) stimulus-response built-in reactions — they were not able to geniunely experience pain or distress, they could merely exhibit outwards signs of it, that's all.
Fortunately, with computer-based AIs we know for sure that the analogical beliefs are actually true, and there are no future developments that could possibly change that.
Yes.
It is considered normal to make a statement that all animals don't have self-awareness.
Because, well, you can't ask them and prove they do, right?
Scientist are even afraid to make those statements as they would be ostracized by the scientific community. (I've read an actual elephant-studying scientist's book which told exactly that).
>The majority of scientists really thought that animals didn't feel or experience things?
I can buy it.
"As recently as 1999, it was widely believed by medical professionals that babies could not feel pain until they were a year old, but today it is believed newborns and likely even fetuses beyond a certain age can experience pain"
Was it widely believed? That statement seems bizarre to me, as pretty much all pediatricians have poked infants with needles and witnessed them start to cry, ever since needles were invented. Same goes for other medical procedures since long before needles, and for parents since forever.
Wouldn't be the wildest thing people, or medical professionals, believe. Even clearly displayed aversion to assumed-painful stimuli doesn't mean that people will believe that it's pain that the organism is feeling. Where this comes up pretty often is how crabs are often cooked, when cooks just chuck them alive into hot water.
The other thing that people have to do is drawing lines, life's issues are otherwise overwhelming. Now, where they draw the lines differ widely. It's common to take external markers and make the separation according to that - a safer bet, given that others can see those markers as well, and so, maybe more readily validate the discrimination. Skin color, gender, age, signs of sickness, mental conditions are easy targets for this. In most cases, they are coupled with vulnerability as well, so the history of their abuses is as old as humanity itself - hence I don't think it's that wild that people think such a thing. Unfortunately they think the wildest things, myself included. It's actually quite scary to me.
You are rationalizing some assumptions and making overly broad generalizations about “people” and what they believe. Some people ignoring evidence doesn’t mean everyone does. The temporary misguided academic debate over pain in babies was specifically about the displayed aversion to painful stimuli.
I do not buy that a significant number of people nor practicing pediatricians ever thought babies can’t feel pain. This claim that it was “widely believed” babies didn’t feel pain is a narrative that prioritizes the opinions of a few academics, who were wrong, above the opinions of parents globally.
The same is true of the abstract idea of drawing lines. If you say that people drew lines and it lead to abuse, and therefore it’s wild what “people” believe, you are talking about the abusers
who were wrong. The people on the other side of those lines didn’t have such wild beliefs, but the framing of your story is implicitly ignoring them. You’re choosing to focus on the “wild” beliefs of one group and make that the conclusion of your argument on human behavior. There’s another story you’re not telling where “people” did not have “wild” beliefs, and turned out to be right.
It’s not clear what “widely believed” means; what evidence there is for that claim, or who its referring to, or how many people it’s talking about. They don’t mention that it was widely believed by many others that babies do feel pain, nor how many of those people there were in comparison. Just because a few academics argued about it at conferences doesn’t mean it was actually believed by a significant number of real practicing doctors. Some academics have a very bad habit of thinking nothing exists outside of other recent academic papers they can reference in their own language.
BTW why does the Wikipedia link cite 1999? The paper arguing babies feel pain is from 1987. Digging further, the academic idea the babies didn’t feel pain seems to have originated in the 1940s with some academic papers that had methodology problems. So what about before that? If the assumption was babies did feel pain until then, summarizing this as being a belief that changed in 1999 is totally misleading. What about other countries? Was this temporarily incorrect belief about babies shared by doctors in Asia, Africa, and India?
I'll consider this. I do tend to focus on the negative, and hurtful behavior.
I agree that the given evidence is weak, but I can still see that medical professionals believed that it's not pain that babies have. Maybe because it's not "proper" pain somehow, maybe because, circling back to the original argument, their consciousness is not there yet, so there might be pain but there's no suffering, maybe because they won't remember, therefore their experience is invalid.
Desensitization is also an issue that happens over time - the mind has to cope somehow.
These are not facts and I respect that there's no hard evidence regarding these things, pro or contra. This is just how the world comes across to me.
The year 1999 comes from the second source in the sentence.
> but I can still see that medical professionals believed that it's not pain that babies have
I dont want to beat a dead horse, but I have to insist on a qualifier. Some medical professionals believed something silly, not all of them. Leaving the qualifier out changes the claim… and makes it wrong!
Once I had a dog and I watched him as he slept. One minute, he suddenly started moving the tips of his paws as if he were running somewhere. A moment later, he began to move his jaw as if he started to eat something. Right after that, a bit more paw movement, and he began to smack his tongue as if he were drinking something. Then again, he started moving his paws as if he ran off somewhere. So: he ran to the bowl of food, ate, went over to the bowl of water, drank some water, and ran off again. A little while later, he woke up. That’s when I invited him to eat. Since that time, I have never doubted either that animals have some kind of consciousness or that animals can dream.
> One of the most famous of these dream experiments involved lab rats. Rats in the experiment spent all day running in a maze. Scientists monitored the brain activity of the rats in the maze and compared it to the brain activity of the rats during REM sleep. What they discovered was that the same areas of the rats’ brains lit up during REM sleep as when they were running the maze, suggesting that the rats were likely to be dreaming of the maze. By comparing the data, the researchers could figure out where exactly in the maze the rats were dreaming about.
There's more in that article on dogs specifically, including studies where they chemically disabled the pons, which is the part of the brain stem in vertebrate mammals (humans included) that stops us from acting out our dreams while asleep (and which is involved with disorders such as sleep walking and night terrors).
Just like you deduced, the dogs are just literally dreaming about all the stuff they usually do while awake.
I think few people could deny that animals can dream, or feel pain, or fear, or happiness, or change behavior in response to reward/punishment, or figure out how to use simple tools, or how to work together to hunt or find food, as all these things are trivially observable.
I don't think that animals have a higher-order awareness of these things in other creatures. A bird will eat an insect, or a cat will hunt and kill a bird without troubling itself over whether its prey is conscious. They just see it as food.
When my late female pug was young she would regularly 'sleepwalk'. She'd stand up and start digging into the mattress for about 30 seconds, then collapse back to the bed and resume snoring. Almost every night for awhile, waking us up in the process.
Once I coo'ed to her while doing this and she snapped awake, jumped backwards a few inches with this freaked out look on her face.
Regardless of whether you agree with the proposition, this seems to be the conclusion society is trending toward.
Personally, I fear that instead of treating animals and machines more like humans, we will end up treating humans more like we currently treat animals and machines.
Modern science is so clueless that it's now trying to answer metaphysical questions with physical processes. What's next? Using empiricism to negate the concept of justice since none of us are the same in any shape or form?
Does this mean self-awareness? I feel like this topic is sometimes mincing words, why would an animal not be conscious?
My computer knows exactly how much free memory it has, which is more than I know about my own capacity… why is it not considered conscious? Isn’t this ultimately all just inputs, outputs, and the ability to keep record of things changing over time?
Research also suggests that we only domesticated ourselves 40-50k years ago. Language and culture are fairly recent additions in our evolution and so when people start comparing how we understand the world, to that of other mammals, I struggle to find it fair.
I do try hard not to anthropomorphize my dog, but the little dude is very clever, and I just can't help but consider him conscious on some level. Him and I definitely have a way of communicating with each other without using sentences, so I know he's self-aware far more than I would have given dogs credit before he came into my life.
the article illustrates the low level of achievement in cognitive science (particularly in the light of the investment being poured into so called AGI / FSD right now) … we clearly need a scientific definition of consciousness that can capture what (birds(cats(dogs(humans)))) have in common and the incremental distinctions … literacy, spoken language, non verbal modelling, predictive ability, causation/reasoning, dimensions (physical, emotional), pain, emotions, empathy, initiation and so on. with a research framework that can hypothesize and test the neuronal services and mapping.
Speaking about this topic is already hard. It's not like the words needed can be learned in observing the world. There is a lot of reflection going on to sharpen their meaning to the nuance that's needed for serious discussion.
Conscious, self-aware, sentient, thinking, to name just a few, mean quite different things - not only in themselves, but also per philosophical school of thinking their connections and subdivisions are different.
Plenty of room for misunderstanding...
I think it was Augustinus who said about time "when no one asks me I know what it means". And then went on a journey to try to understand what it is that he knows.
> Prof Chittka’s experiments showed that bees ... seemed to be able to play, rolling small wooden balls, which he says they appeared to enjoy as an activity.
Call me when they not only understand the offside rule and the reasons for its introduction, but can provide a comprehensive summary of the ways it has contributed to the perception of soccer as a slow paced & uninteresting sport, and go on to advocate for its removal in favor of a more tactical distribution of players on the court and higher points per game, along with the various benefits those entail.
Funny that we struggle determining if animals are conscious - when I think a deeper question is in front of us: is anyone BUT YOU conscious? Science isn’t usually settled simply by taking people’s word for something. And yet the ONLY creature on this planet I can ever truly know is conscious is ME.
You might tell me you are and I might sort of assume you are since you’re the “same model” - but really, I have no way of knowing you’re experiencing subjectivity the same way I am. Let’s start with our fellow humans before we got onto sperm whales.
Memory and intelligence are not the same as consciousness. Yes, we're different in the way that we use our intelligence but it doesn't prove that other beings are without consciousness.
All of this is very much dependent on the types of senses. The Sāṁkhya metaphysics system gives a breakdown of everything that exists on top of the conscious entity:
1. Intellect
2. Ego
3. Mind
5. Sensory capacities
6. Action capacities
Humor would be a part of the Mind and Sensory capacities which reflects back the changes in Action capacities.
So 'consciousness' is actually none of these things. It's the irreducible entity, or in simple terms energy or force that animates what would otherwise be dead matter.
In Indian culture, various species were regarded as being on a certain place in a spectrum of consciousness. Vedic literatures regarded even plants as beings who can have feelings. From zero (a rock) to almost 100% (a human) differentiation of species was primarily based on level of consciousness (bodily features as another factor, ofcourse) and interestingly, according to philosophy, selection of a specific species depended on a living entities 'karma', one gets a body with a certain level of consciousness according to the 'good' or 'bad' deeds one does in ones life.
I've always had trouble with people's definition of consciousness. What is amazing to me is that I've lived my whole life, from the perspective of this one seemingly random guy. I can't prove anyone or anything else is consciousness, but I know "I'm in here" so to speak. As amazing and complex as the configuration of atoms in the human brain is, it doesn't even begin to explain to me how "I" ended up perceiving reality from this one object in particular. Or even explain what "I" am.
Isn't the real question how to rank this level? Is an elephant smarter than a dog? Does that mean it feels more emotions?! Is a cat smarter than an octopus? Does that mean it knows how to better manage time?
I am shocked there is debate on this topic. I feel like you can’t have spent much time with animals if you don’t think that at least some animals have consciousness
It’s very convenient to think animals aren’t conscious. Think about the ramifications: eating meat is eating a being, not just food; treating animals the way we do becomes unethical; we’re not at the top anymore; etc etc. Reassessing all these values and behaviors is hard, and we’d rather not, ergo animals aren’t conscious and are inferior to us.
Are humans conscious? I have learned to note when they are not, when they are talking and unaware of their surroundings, and stand next to them and say to others "They're not conscious right now, they can't hear what I'm saying". You would think this would be incredibly rare, but it's more common than I ever expected. Awareness of surroundings does not equal consciousness, but "consciousness" measures can can assume things that are not always true.
I can't say this is backed by anything, i don't know, but my gut feel is humans are somewhat different in that they have developed language both spoken and written to such an extent, that now there is a constant journaller as part of most people's minds documented everything we do, feel, think. This journaller basically happens autonomously, without direction. This journalling mechanism, i think, is what most people consider consciousness.
I suspect we fool ourselves into thinking this journaller has any control over our situation and so we give it more value than it has. I don't see how it would give us free will, for instance. But it is a powerful illusion, none the less.
I've had lots of dogs, horses, cats, and think they all are on the consciousness spectrum, but i'm guessing (couldn't possibly know) that they lack this constant overarching journaller in their brains. For species that have a richer communication, i still don't think they would have this... I think the need to write down language, and make it available to others asynchronously plays a part in it.
Interestingly, some people report that they have no such journaller, or sometimes called inner voice that talks to them. I have no way to know what it's like to be them, or if my understanding of what they are saying is indeed what they are saying, but if true, i wonder if these folks are more like what other animals feel in their heads. I have no clue. Frankly, i can't imagine that someone wouldn't have a journaller in their heads, and so it's even hard for me to imagine. I assume i just don't understand.
I definitely don't have an inner voice. I certainly can "enable it", for things such as composing this reply. But in general I'd describe it as a stream of thought, not bound to any language. Then when I need to actually communicate I "pipe" it through whatever language I need (I grew up in a home with multiple languages, don't know if that influences it).
One way I notice this is how thoughts are generally unpacked and stored without a language association, meaning I can't remember how people phrased something, only how I interpreted it. I feel like this is a decent memory optimization, but it drives my wife nuts and can be very unhelpful during arguments...
>> I'd describe it as a stream of thought, not bound to any language.
as it's your head i accept that at face value. However i couldn't possibly understand how that could possibly work. How do you think not in a language not in words? What are the "atoms" of stream of thought for you, is it picture based, or???
My head talks to me all day long, unprovoked, uncontrolled by myself and in english. i can certainly interrupt and quiet it if i like, but i just am doing something ordinary and notice that i'm mentally talking to myself.
As a corrolary... when you read a book, what is that experience like? do you have a reader reading the book to you? Do you 'hear' words as they are read. I don't mean audibly, but is a story told to you as you read? To me this journaller is very similar to what i sense when i read a book, altho obviously it's not surprising in the book reading sense.
I'm the same but I tend to remember very precisely what people say. My partner is the opposite and yeah it's frustrating as hell especially when I'm being misquoted from mere minutes ago.
For those of you who think we have crappy definitions for things like Intelligence, Consciousness, Sentience, or even just Existence, I invite you to ponder Joscha Bach's thoughts on these subjects: https://youtu.be/cs9Ls0m5QVE?si=E2TKfnuV8tXo4J_3
Should we stop eating chicken, fish, and other small animals, in favour of bigger ones like cow? That would reduce farm animal suffering by more than 80%
What about the meat alternative insects? Are they conscious? If so there are people investing millions. to kill gazillion lives a year
Or are they definitely "inferior"?
Do we even know what suffering and consciousness is?
Why did nature evolved for animals to eat each other?
> Should we stop eating chicken, fish, and other small animals, in favour of bigger ones like cow? That would reduce farm animal suffering by more than 80%
We should stop eating all animals.
> Why did nature evolve for animals to eat each other?
Because evolution “cares” only about gene propagation. The nourishment obtained from eating animals allows that.
> Why did nature evolved for animals to eat each other?
Animals are inherently different than Humans when it comes to food choices. They do not have a choice, we do and yet, being an 'intelligent' animal does not equal to being 'wise'. Humans will kill and eat anything and everything that their senses like and that only happens when you trade sense pleasure for intelligence.
Humans have been thinking for millenia about animal consciousness and how to ethically treat other beings. To wit, the Jain principle describing animal consciousness:
I agree but would word that as "...more conscious than mostother animals."
Humans are animals, and we don't have an agreed upon definition of consciousness that would allow us to quantify it so precisely that we can be sure of the way you worded it. Many of the smarter animals may have just as much (but somewhat different) consciousness as humans, and you we can definitely come up with a reasonable definition of consciousness under which some animals may have more of it. For example, if one of the major measurable dimensions of consciousness involves spacial awareness (and it might, as it helps delimiting self from other) then cetaceans could easily have more of it.
Some animals have better senses than humans (as you pointed out) but that doesn't make them more conscious than us. Maybe 2 aspects to measure degree of consciousness is intelligence and metacognition.
What Ghosh chose to include and not include in this leaves some really weird gaps. He mentions Descartes, and the "cogito", but quotes Seth in attributing to Descartes an "unholy trinity, of language, intelligence and consciousness", and then links that "trinity" to behaviorism.
This would make one think that until "recently", most scientists were in the same boat as Descartes, but I think this is really misleading. Descartes believed that mental stuff and physical stuff were categorically different ("cartesian dualism"), whereas almost all scientists would subscribe to some form of monism / physicalism. But the reason for the cogito, which has persisted until at least "recently" is that subjective phenomena are intrinsically not accessible for objective observation. At best, we can capture the "correlates" of consciousness, whether those be behaviors, fMRI BOLD signals, EEG readings, etc, none of which directly shows that there's an inner subjective experience. There's still maybe the possibility of a philosophical zombie, who has the right objectively available signals but doesn't have any internal experience.
But scientists have all the while been working under the operational assumption that animals have something like our experiences. When we study aggression or stress or motivation or whatever else in animal models, and draw parallels between the brains of mice or monkeys and humans, we're assuming that their emotional states feel at least somewhat like ours do. A classic protocol for rodents, relevant in testing anti-depressants (where the whole point is to change some aspect of our subjective experience) is the "forced swim", where you drop a mouse in water in a vessel with smooth vertical sides, and time how long it takes for them to stop struggling. This is taken to be a measure of "despair". If scientists decades ago didn't believe animals experienced anything, they wouldn't do this research.
Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was the minimal statement he could make with absolute certainty -- but we all operate with at least a smidge less solipsism if we assume that other humans are conscious. And it's of course only a small extension to guess that other primates, who have rich social relations and brains similar to ours have a lot of overlapping experiences. And that other mammals, like rodents, who have a bunch of stuff in their brains like ours, have overlapping experiences. And then suddenly you're open to this landscape of different kinds of creates with different kinds of mental experiences.
given that we don't remember what happened before our lives, and most likely when we die we enter a similar state... so that life starts whenever a physical life begins (later a mental life starts and exists until the time that physical life dies)... Then the idea that all creatures are conscious is a pretty bad idea. It means that being a conscious being such as a human is ridiculously improbable, given the very high ratio of all conscious creatures count vs human count.
Sāṁkhya philosophy covers this. This state is called 'tamas', the state of ignorance.
> It means that being a conscious being such as a human is ridiculously improbable
Yes it is. Human birth and animal birth is similar if you notice: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. What's different then? Human birth is the only birth where it's possible to philosophize and ask questions about existence and ask about teleology, objective purposes in life. This is why human birth is rare and Sāṁkhya philosophy would say that every animal's consciousness will at one point experience the human body as consciousness keeps leveling up after each death, say from a tree to an insect to a fish to a bird to an animal to a human.
Animals are bound by their senses and instincts. They follow whatever their senses want them to so there's not much free will, it's compulsion by the senses.
Human beings have free will due to intelligence. One has 2 minds: the higher mind which is intelligence and capable of controlling the lower mind and, the lower mind which basically is connected to the senses (so mind would be like a hardware interface device controller).
The higher mind, intelligence would be like an OS scheduling tasks. When the HID Controller takes control, it allows anything and everything at once but add intelligence or OS to that equation and you have everything running in a systematic manner.
The senses would be like the hardware devices: Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers, Camera. All providing data and the HID controller trying to just take it all in, as much data as it possibly can get.
> so that life starts whenever a physical life begins
Consciousness is still consciousness. It's what enables this 'physical life' and it's what powers the 'mental life'. If you take them to be 2 different things, then that would ensue that the arrangement of subatomic particles in a particular mechanical configuration is capable of producing this 'physical life' but that is not the case.
Consciousness is the irreducible entity, separate from matter, that animates matter.
Suppose a dog is unconscious. For what purpose does it sleep and what is the difference between its sleeping and waking state? And between those and human sleeping and waking states?
As soon as we ate the forbidden fruit we became self aware, aware we were naked, aware we were vulnerable and mortal. We learned about the future and that we could sacrifice things now to perhaps make it better. So we work, we pass on more than instinct with language to our children. Read of the transformation that Helen Keller went through once she learned language, many similarities to this biblical narrative.
https://scentofdawn.blogspot.com/2011/07/before-soul-dawn-he...
I think animals do have consciousness, and I had thought that many times in the past. However, it is also necessary to define "consciousness". (Even this article admits that, though.)
About placing humanity (or something else) in a category of its own, that depends on how the categorization is made, and it could be done in any way, so such a categorization of humanity does not really help, and can be deceptive to think it is the only one or the best one.
I also think that "intelligence" would not be simply defined by higher vs lower; it is more complicated because of different kind of intelligence and more subclassifications of those too, and then there is the difference of e.g. speed vs knowledge vs etc. There is a sense to identify the intelligence of kind of animals (and of the same kind of animals, e.g. human), but if you merely say it is higher or lower then it is imprecise.
This article also mentions colours, such as red colours. (And other things that you can also feel.) But, not all kind of animal can see all of the colours; some can see some colours that humans does not see but also does not see some that humans does see. Humans can see three colours, but some animals might see four colours. (And, some people also are partially or fully colour blind.)
I had also read in a book once, they said, they are sure that insects have feelings but is not sure about emotions. Well, my guess is probably they do; but, it would be a mistake to think that having emotion would necessarily mean that it is like humans emotions; it can be difference.
Nevertheless, many things that people have said are only for humans and are not what other kind of animals are. In many cases, I think they are wrong (and may even apply for some kind of plants, etc); "conscious" is not the only thing. However, there are also differences (including differences in the details of the things that actually are similar in many ways); and probably some of the differences have been missed as much as many of the similarities have been missed. (There are also differences between individuals, but that is a different thing.)
> And this is important because we need to set rules to protect them either in the lab or in the wild.
You do not need to know exactly how those animals will feel to justify avoiding treating animals badly.
Differences of different kind of animals does not justify to treat them badly.
But, it is good that scientists are actually finally figuring out this stuff scientifically, now. Although I and others had said such things before, that is not the same as doing it scientifically; so now that it can be done scientifically, it will be understood better scientifically, too.
The philosophical zombie idea needs to be put to bed. Instead we should be thinking on the balance of probabilities instead. This is far more pragmatic.
We can't know anything for certain, and the zombie idea is a convenient stonewall that allows us to ignore the behavioural evidence and continue to abuse animals as a society (mainly by killing them).
The study of consciousness (or sentience or whatever the appropriate term is) is definitely a valid field of research and one of science and philosophies all-time greatest mysteries. What exactly is the underlying mechanism and theory of consciousness? For example, A sound scientific theory of consciousness should be able to definitively answer the questions (and defend that answer):
- Is an ant sentient? Why ? Why not? What is it aware of?
- What about an amoeba? a bacteria? a virus? a cell? At what level does it stop?
- What about the plant kingdom?
- A rock? An atom? Why? Why not?
- An LLM? A program? A computer?..
- Will an AGI be sentient ?
The premise of the article itself is strange - maybe it was intended to stir up debate and controversy. Its one thing to say that study of consciousness lacks sound foundations. But implying the very notion that "animals are conscious" is somehow controversial? If animals aren't conscious whats the point of animal cruelty or animal welfare laws? I can take a power drill to my roomba but can i do the same to a cat or a dog? Most people would automatically say no. Its something most people intuitively understand (but maybe its learned behaviour - kids can be cruel until they learn empathy).
edit : Also the illy-dallying around the question of crustaceans seems shifty. Maybe the authors don't want to confront the moral question of boiling lobsters alive?
I agree that it's an interesting question worth exploring.
However I'm wondering why we are still at that stage of the game. Animals seem like a "duh, of course" answer to me. They have a brain, a nervous system, they're so close to us that the answer should be obvious.
Now an amoeba yes, that's (to me, at least) an open discussion. LLMs and AGIs too, they're too new and unknown.
But animals? Come on, we had thousands of years to figure that out.
I'm a neuroscientist who used to work with animals, and while I didn't focus on consciousness, I don't think it's a reasonable scientific perspective to start from the assumption that animals don't and require proof that they do. Clearly there's a spectrum of intelligence across species, but plenty of animals appear to have theory of mind, complex emotions, object permanence, tool use, long term memory, spatial navigation, some idea of the self, etc. Humans are better at language, and math, and destroying the planet, but that doesn't explain why our feeling of consciousness wouldn't be substantially similar to a great ape or an Australian shepherd.
I did. Obviously. Why would I retell what another philosopher said? That would be rather silly. If they want something to be known, they can let you know themselves.
> Which others disagree?
Whichever ones disagree. Again, they can speak for themselves.
> Some claim that Mathematics is the Queen of Sciences
In other words, not science?
> yet without which science is and has nothing
I am not sure you have made a convincing case that science is more than nothing. If that is what you are trying to convince us of, you are not making providing a compelling argument.
> So it's an opinion from your philosophy and not a universal absolute as you presented.
Wait. If it were a universal absolute, for what reason would I present it? A universal absolute offers no remaining opportunity for me to learn, and why would I enter into a discussion that provides no learning opportunity? That would be a pointless waste of time. Whichever philosopher gave you the idea that I would waste my time like that did not think things through and has severely misguided you.
> I guess we must conclude that science is nothing. Or maybe assume there's something to it <shrug>.
Either way. As feeble humans (or LLM bots), we are not science. We can make assumptions that may or may not have any basis in reality.
Everything is a research, until it's proven beyond belief. Obvious doesn't cut it from a scientific standpoint. Noticing something, and proving something are two different things. And mutually agreeing upon the findings is also something else. Consciousness is a central concept for people, and so, there are many ideas surrounding it - human and non-human consciousness alike.
Anyone who's met my stupid stupid chickens would appreciate that the stupid stupid chickens can totally manipulate us by making pathetic sounds when we know we are near, so they can get treats. Pre-chicken it was obvious to me that dogs, dolphins, higher primates, etc. were conscious. But stupid stupid chickens? Yes, stupid stupid chickens, it turns out. I love them despite the fact that they are ruthlessly committed to training me.
All which is to say that objectively and scientifically speaking they are obviously conscious although stupid.
"But his ideas that animals are conscious in the same way humans are have long been shunned."
...except by every single dog or cat owner ever.
Seriously, I've never understood how anyone could interact with or observe animals for any length of time and not perceive obvious signs of conciousness.
I see absolutely no reason for that. And if you do, that won’t be normative, because you’re a fallible person just like me and there’s no reason for why I should live my life according to your reasoning instead of mine.
With conscious stuff I’m assuming you mean conscious beings.
It is against the law to murder another human. In many countries it is also against the law to kill or torture your pet. Are you not living your life according to those agreed upon ‘reasoning’?
As humanity evolves, the circle of compassion and common sense will expand to also include those conscious beings that we currently don’t deem worthy of compassion, since having a factory farmed burger on our plate is currently more important than reducing our carbon footprint, pollution, habitat destruction, deforestation or simply not inflicting pain and suffering on sentient beings.
It's important to notice that you are not providing any counter-argument here at all.
One can live his life one way due to practicality and believe in another. In fact, if this is any news, almost everyone disagree with their country's laws in at least some matters. This doesn't mean anything.
I believe that killing some conscious stuff is OK and others bad, but not because me or others feel bad or good about it or because the ones I agree to kill taste good. Because believe in a complete moral system that isn't based on another human's fallible reasoning or worse, feelings.
Other animals don't raise billions of other animals to cram them into factory farms, deprive them of natural surroundings, pump them full of hormones and antibiotics and then send them off to slaughterhouses to turn them into burgers and other meat products.
Animals live with nature. We don't. We created our own world on top of the natural world, which we are slowly destroying.
We have the brains, skills and resources to maintain and improve our living standards without destroying the natural world. But we choose not to vote with our wallet.
We in the Western world don't need to kill and eat animals anymore to survive. It's purely out of taste pleasure, habit and because 'we have always done it'.
EDIT: watch this video to see the reality of industrial animal farming:
Please realize that you are not, in fact, providing a counter argument.
I agree that the modern livestock raising and slaughter practices are not good. But not because it just doesn't look wholesome. Neither surgical operations nor the sewage system look very wholesome.
Humans that are blackout drunk are emotional but non-conscious. They can carry on full conversations without a sense of being. Basically every animal exists in this state continuously. It's why human behavior is vastly different from animal behavior. Self-referential consciousness is as much of a curse as it is a blessing. It's spoken about in this way by basically every human religion for a reason. This article is misses the mark entirely. This kind of sloppy thinking about consciousness exists in part because it's incentivized by fiat economics that require replacing economization-resistant traditional human food staples (like meat) - with less expensive alternatives to hide economic mismanagement.
I think this ultimately becomes a religious discussion; even the article (wrongly in our view) calls Darwin "god-like" and suggests that belief in animals having consciousness is "heresy" (this perhaps borders on theological error, rather than heresy?)
It is a long-standing religious belief that animals do not possess a rational immortal soul and neither do they possess the ability to choose good or evil but are instead governed by instinct, which is why we don't put animals on trial for crimes as it is presumed they have no consciousness of what is right and wrong like humans do
It might be worth reviewing many of the characteristics unique to humans to by way of contrast appreciate how different humans are from other creatures
Animals lack the "moral consciousness" and dignity that is unique to humans which is why most people are comfortable even killing animals and eating them as food, while "cannibalism" is thought to be a barbaric immoral practice contrary to unique human dignity
Articles like these in our view are being pushed possibly to degrade humans to the level of animals so as to justify animal-like immoral behavior
> the article (wrongly in our view) calls Darwin "god-like"
It does not. The exact quote is:
Charles Darwin enjoys a near god-like status among scientists for his theory of evolution.
It's an idiom that does NOT claim Darwin is like an actual god, it's also a statement that I disagree with as not all scientists consider Darwin to hold that status, a good number credit Wallace with the theory, with holding it first, for having better evidence, and Darwin holding the home court advantage being in England and able to present in person to the Royal Society.
> which is why we don't put animals on trial for crimes
You may not but many animals have been put on trial for crimes throughout history.
> Animals lack the "moral consciousness" and dignity that is unique to humans
This is a ridiculous statement! Step on a dog and apologize and it will understand, step on a dog and don't apologize and it will be angry. Animals definitely have a moral code.
If there is a holy temple of science, Darwin (along with quite a few others) would be worshipped.
(if you walk into an old physics building where experiments of import have been done, there is often a vestibule filled with the old hardware. In some ways it feels like a holy temple of science containing relics....)
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.