> 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.
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.