The Oxford English Dictionary, my go-to source for definitions, has this one for “consciousness”:
But there are other definitions, including sensing “qualia” (subjective conscious experience like pleasure or pain), or “having an inner life” involving self-awareness. But it’s hard to determine under any of these definitions whether an individual of another species—indeed, even an individual of our own species—is conscious. We think that other humans are conscious because we’re all built the same way, and we’re pretty sure that other mammals are conscious because they appear to feel pain or pleasure, and are built in a mammalian ground plan. But when an earthworm reacts when you poke it, is it feeling pain and having a subjective experience, or is that an automatic, built-in response to being poked that is adaptive but isn’t mediated through conscious experience?
I’m not going to get into the thorny topic of consciousness here, but I do feel that the more an animal is conscious (whatever that means), the more we should take care of it and avoid hurting it. (This of course is a subjective decision on my part.) It’s probably okay to swat mosquitoes, but not to kill a lizard, a duck, or a cat. (I tend to err on the “assume consciousness” side, and am loath to even swat mosquitoes.)
Researchers themselves have arrived at similar conclusions, for there are increasingly stringent regulations for taking care of lab animals. If you work on primates or rats, you have to ensure your university or granting agency that your research subjects will be properly treated, but those regulations don’t apply to fruit flies. But whether members of another species are conscious in the way that we are (well, the way I am, as I can’t be sure about you!), is something very hard to determine. The “mirror test“, in which you put a mark on an animal’s forehead, put it in front of a mirror and see if it touches its own forehead, is another test used to determine self awareness. The article below describes several other ways scientists have approached the question.
At any rate, according to Nature, a group of scientists have signed short joint declaration (second link below) saying that we need more research on consciousness and that the phenomenon may be present “in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).” They add that knowing whether an animal is conscious should affect how we consider its welfare, which seems correct. The letter (or petition) doesn’t really define “consciousness”, but the Nature blurb about it does. Click the link below to read that blurb:
An excerpt:
Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does not end with vertebrates. Researchers are expanding their investigations of consciousness to a wider range of animals, including octopuses and even bees and flies.
Armed with such research, a coalition of scientists is calling for a rethink in the animal–human relationship. If there’s “a realistic possibility” of “conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal”, the researchers write in a document they call The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. Issued today during a meeting in New York City, the declaration also says that there is a “realistic possibility of conscious experience” in reptiles, fish, insects and other animals that have not always been considered to have inner lives, and “strong scientific support” for aspects of consciousness in birds and mammals.
As the evidence has accumulated, scientists are “taking the topic seriously, not dismissing it out of hand as a crazy idea in the way they might have in the past,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and Political Science and one of the authors of the declaration.
The document, which had around 40 signatories early today, doesn’t state that there are definitive answers about which species are conscious. “What it says is there is sufficient evidence out there such that there’s a realistic possibility of some kinds of conscious experiences in species even quite distinct from humans,” says Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, and one of the signatories. The authors hope that others will sign the declaration and that it will stimulate both more research into animal consciousness and more funding for the field.
And Nature says that the group has a definition of consciousness, though I can’t find it in the short declaration:
The definition of consciousness is complex, but the group focuses on an aspect of consciousness called sentience, often defined as the capacity to have subjective experiences, says Birch. For an animal, such experiences would include smelling, tasting, hearing or touching the world around itself, as well as feeling fear, pleasure or pain — in essence, what it is like to be that animal. But subjective experience does not require the capacity to think about one’s experiences.
This is as good a definition as any, I think, but determining whether another animal is even sentient is nearly impossible; all we can do is look for signs of sentience, like a dog howling if you kick it. But if a protozoan heads for a source of food, is it having a subjective experience of “here’s food”? Unlikely; protozoans don’t have brains and this is probably an inbuilt adaptive reflex. But there are tons of species intermediate in potential sentience between protozoans and mammals, and how do we decide whether, say, a fish is sentient? (I’ll tell you that scientists have ways of approaching this, but no time to go into it now. But the article has some interesting descriptions of these tests.) And of course most people think that octopuses are sentient. Some even think that fruit flies are sentient!:
Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences,” says Bruno van Swinderen, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who studies fruit flies’ behaviour and who also signed the declaration.
Some suggest that dreams are key components of being conscious, he notes. If flies and other invertebrates have active sleep, “then maybe this is as good a clue as any that they are perhaps conscious”.
Well that’s stretching it a bit, but who knows? And some people weigh in with the caveat I mentioned above: acting as if you’re conscious may not mean that you’re conscious, for consciousness produces adaptive behavior, but so does natural selection, which has the ability produce adaptive reflexes not mediated by consciousness but look like consciousness.
We have a hard problem, then, and that’s reflected in the declaration itself, which is below. You can see the whole thing as well as its signers by clicking on the screenshot:
And the text of the document:
Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.
First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.
Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).
Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.
I don’t recognize many of the signers, and I’m surprised that Peter Singer, who surely agrees with the declaration, didn’t sign it. But I think more signers are being added.
At any rate, I can’t disagree with what the document says, but the interesting problems are both philosophical (on the ethical side) and scientific: what do we mean by consciousness, and, once that’s agreed on, how do we determine if a member of another species is conscious? Or, upon rethinking what I just wrote, perhaps we don’t need a definition of consciousness, but simply a set of empirical observations that we think are signs that animals are suffering. But that itself involves some philosophical input. It’s all a mess, but one thing is for sure, we should avoid causing unneeded suffering to animals, and we shouldn’t kill them just because we don’t like them. Even a lowly ant has evolved to preserve its own existence, and to what extent can our selfish desires override that consideration?
As the classic ending of many scientific papers goes, “More work needs to be done.”
h/t: Phil
Didn’t the argument used to be about whether some animals were sentient, as opposed to conscious? Or is that a separate argument?
I often think about issues in the past that society found acceptable but now most people find abhorrent. These would include slavery, women as second class citizens, racial discrimination, criminalization of homosexuality, etc.
What I think will be viewed negatively in 50 years or so will be the eating of meat. Alas I am not a vegetarian but I think I should be. Change comes slowly.
Is your life expectancy less than 50 years, Mike? If so, you’re off the hook. I can predict comfortably that eating meat will become abhorrent in 15 years. Of course nothing is stopping either of us from abjuring meat now, except that we don’t want to. Are we both just waiting for the state to take the decision out of our hands and make it for us, as with slavery, women, homosexuality, etc.
The state will not take that decision, society will. One can still disparage homosexuality now, but that position is viewed negatively (thank goodness) by most of society.
The more personal change is, the harder it is to make.
Donald Griffin published The Question of Animal Awareness back in 1976 and the issue remains just exactly as thorny now as then.
I am drawing my line somewhere this side of flies. A style of sleeping that is “perhaps similar” to that of a mammal is exceedingly weak evidence for an inner life.
On a separate, but related, note, NIH has managed to outrage animal lovers again by their last-minute decision to not relocate 26 biomedical research chimps from a New Mexico facility to Chimp Haven sanctuary in Louisiana. After many years of fights about this, and a judicial ruling that the chimps should go to the sanctuary, NIH pulled a fast one a few days ago and said the chimps now couldn’t be moved because they’re “moribund,” using an obscure footnote from years ago. It’s outrageous. Here’s the story (have to register to read it for free): https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/no-plan-in-the-works-to-relocate-alamogordo-chimpanzees-federal-agency-says/article_4e4f1c38-fc0d-11ee-b1b3-6faaed8d37e3.html
Disgraceful and I saw this recently on PETA who hopefully will take up the challenge.
I still feel bad about what I did to the intertidal snails that I studied for my doctoral dissertation.
It’ll be interesting to know if the folks involved in this can actually identify the “seam” between conscious and not-conscious. With humans, we often tie consciousness to self-awareness. In other words, most of us would accept that we are unquestionably conscious because we’re unquestionably aware of our own pain, our own pleasure, our own joy, and our own sorrow. Because we have a sense of self, we think of ourselves as conscious.
But what about the poor ants that I killed as a kid by focusing the sun on them with my magnifying glass? Were they conscious? I don’t know, but I’m not proud of what I did. If we knew that ants were *self*-aware, we’d probably consider them conscious. But is self-awareness really necessary, or is there a less restrictive conception of consciousness? And if there is a less restrictive conception, how far does it go? Is there a seam? I have my doubts. One might even go so far as to say that any creature that can respond to irritation is conscious and worthy of some level of protection.
Good luck parting nature at the seam. That would seem to be the first problem to address.
The last paragraph is a brief history of scientific psychology from Descartes in his stove-heated room to the behaviorists and their heirs in cognitive psychology who decided that questions about consciousness can’t be decided, so they just stopped asking about it and studied what we CAN see, behavior.
“And Nature says that the group has a definition of consciousness, though I can’t find it in the short declaration…” – J. Coyne
You can find it here: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/background
“What is consciousness? The term has a variety of meanings. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness focuses on one important meaning, sometimes called “phenomenal consciousness” or “sentience.” The question here is which animals can have subjective experiences. This can include sensory experiences (say, the experience of a particular touch, taste, sight, or smell) as well as experiences that feel good or bad (say, the experience of pleasure, pain, hope, or fear). This sense of the term “consciousness” is what Thomas Nagel had in mind when he famously asked “What is it like to be a bat?”.
Subjective experience requires more than the mere ability to detect stimuli. However, it does not require sophisticated capacities such as human-like language or reason. Phenomenal consciousness is raw feeling—immediate felt experience, be it sensory or emotional—and this is something that may well be shared between humans and many other animals. Of course, human-like linguistic and rational capabilities may allow some humans to have forms of experience that other animals lack (e.g. a linguistic “inner monologue”). Likewise, many other animals may have forms of experience that we lack.
Which animals are conscious in this sense?”
Lots, I’d say. And given the facts of biological evolution, that is exactly what we should expect, it seems to me.
In these sorts of discussions in the past a typical argument I’d get would be, “You can’t prove that cats (for example) have subjective experiences. You’d have to be able to read their minds to prove that .” I’d usually respond with something like, “Prove? Proving is for mathematicians and bakers.” And I’d point out things like the relatedness of all life and how old nearly all of our cognitive features are and how many of our fellow creatures share them.
Over time I’ve only become more convinced that consciousness is not unique to humans.
Recommended reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/
(Colin Allen, the coauthor of this SEP text, is one of the signatories of the NY Declaration.)
Is consciousness sufficient to produce religion?
Is a thought that occurs to me.
The late Dan Dennett had much to say on this topic.
Yes. Dan spent a career considering consciousness. A relevant take away is that consciousness is not an either/or but a matter of degree. He said, robots could be considered mildly conscious and someday could be very much so. But trying to decide which species are conscious and which are not, as if there was a doorway from one realm to the next, is the wrong approach. I guess the practical question is, which species do we think is conscious enough, and what special treatment do they deserve.
My personal belief (and I personally feel that current scientific limitations preclude our going any deeper into the matter than a mere personal bent), is that a Theory of Mind is the best diagnostic for consciousness, that is, the awareness by an organism that other organisms (at least those of the same species) have their own perceptions. I’m not convinced that any species other than our own has evolved this trait. Even the documented existence of deceptive signalling by non-humans might be an evolved probabalistic response to circumstance, not an indication that an organism is conscious of its own deceptive behavior. Again, just my feeling.
I wouldn’t be so restrictive as asking for having a theory of mind as a requisite for being conscious, but anyway, isn’t there some evidence that chimps have a theory of mind too?
I don’t see how we could attribute that to something less than consciousness to them with arguments that don’t apply to our fellow humans too (as Jerry says, any one of us can be certain only of being conscious himself).
Finally, I would almost say that consciousness is EXACTLY an evolved probabalistic response to circumstance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’d go for a slightly different definition of consciousness. Not only aware of stimuli, and reacting to stimuli, but also modifying reactions because of the effects of
previous stimuli and reactions.
An automaton can be ‘aware’ of stimuli and react but can only react in one way.
How is the science of consciousness in animals different from the science of animal behavior and cognitive function, which has been going on for centuries? The “consciousness” sought by researchers is never any specific behavior or internal functioning, since “determining whether another animal is even sentient is nearly impossible; all we can do is look for signs of sentience” — JAC. Behavior is not consciousness itself; it is evidence of consciousness, which can never be directly observed.
Dogs are conscious… not sure about cats.
(just kidding)
My own views on whether fish are conscious or not started to evolve once I got a koi pond and gave them names.
Which of course is the danger, for I anthropomorphize pets like crazy. I like to think I can distinguish between when I’m doing it and when I’m not, but it’s unlikely that I’m reliable.
Other thoughts:
Consciousness implies unconsciousness as well as altered consciousness.
That sounds silly but NASA supposedly gave spiders LSD and the spiders made very different webs.
Not sure if that’s true.
I try to not kill, injure or eat any living or dead thing. I am not a Buddhist or any other believer in the supernatural. I am vegetarian and try to be vegan where possible.
This is not always easy when confronted by or in the company of some who will happily kill anything that swims, ambulates, slithers or flies, whether to eat or otherwise dispose of. I was informed once on a business visit to the PRC that the Chinese will eat anything that swims, walks, slithers runs or flies unless it is a Jumbo Jet. From my dining experiences there I can attest to that.
I think all living things are remarkable including all the vegetation some of which I do enjoy eating especially our own home grown asparagus which is coming on very nicely.
Plants are certainly alive, and in fast motion they even look conscious. I wouldn’t want to say that they are conscious, but I think it’s hard to say why they are not.
I can expect there are different degrees of consciousness, including only the barest glimmer of moment by moment awareness. We know that invertebrates learn from experience, and shouldn’t that be a sign that there is some degree of awareness in there? Like probably most, I admit to different actions when I deal with animals. I eat meat (no doubt grown on industrial meat farms). But I carefully catch spiders and let them go outside. I just flushed down two dog ticks that I found on me yesterday, but I did release outside a carpenter ant after photographing it (and giving it a large sugar meal to get it to hold still). Clearly, my ethics are capriciously applied, and they are more about what I feel than what the animal may be experiencing.
“Clearly, my ethics are capriciously applied…”
I’m going to unrepentantly steal this, Mark. Lovely piece of self awareness.
I think many of us can identify with this sentiment even us vegetarians and vegans.
It is inevitable.
There is nothing wrong with looking more closely into such matters. But we should guard against projecting our own morally relevant characteristics of self-conscious persons onto forms of life that do not actually hold them. This is why I wrote this recent essay against the Montreal Declaration, which, incidentally, Peter Singer did sign. This is also at least one conspicuous domain of criticism – against animal rights dogma – that you won’t see published in his Journal of Controversial Studies…
https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol27/iss1/7/
What are those “childbearing persons they gestate within” ?
Um, women?
Why not call them that ?
Because the relevant distinguishing aspect of the argument is personhood. Sex is already logically implicit.
A Wm & Mary alum, Steve Wise, 1972, founded Nonhuman Rights Project back in the 1990s, and advocated in courts for elephants and other caged/trapped animals. His work continues (he recently died; see obits in NYT and WaPo).
As seen on X :
[ begin quote]
PETA (@peta) :
A fish’s life is just as valuable to them as yours is to you.
greg @greg16676935420
How come fish can eat other fish but we can’t eat fish
@peta blocked you
You are blocked from following @peta
[ end quote]
Love this!
Exactly! There is absolutely nothing wrong with killing animals to consume them to survive or even thrive (with the provisos that factory farming is out, treat animals well and minimize their suffering, kill them humanely, consume modest amounts, smaller is generally better, only plentiful ones, dumber is better too).
Everything comes at a cost to something in Nature and I see nothing immoral about eating
the diet we’ve evolved to, just like every other animal does. But being loathe to kill a mosquito as PCC suggests? I don’t understand this way of thinking. Is that more moral or humane? Isn’t the act of driving a car killing thousands of them against the windshield worse? I understand one’s intent can make a difference but not to the mosquito, right? We seem to wish to knowingly cause no harm to other creatures but if it’s unwitting, there’s no problem nor guilt.
I don’t understand the idea that it’s ok to kill something if you eat it. You have choices. The animal is just as dead whether you eat it or not. Is it ok to kill the last Atelopus coynei if you eat it aftwerwards?
I think consciousness is also not a definitive criterion for when killing is wrong. Relatively speaking, I think the killing of an individual presents one level of ethical problems, but there is a higher level of ethical concern, the extinction of whole species. This concern applies whether or not the species is conscious. And I do not believe that hunger excuses it.
Maybe there are too many of us eating fish, same applies with “ meat” even human meat eaters can fall prey to other carnivores. Rare admittedly but the great white shark is not averse to a “bite” of human and can get severely punished for it.
“I’m not going to get into the thorny topic of consciousness here, but I do feel that the more an animal is conscious (whatever that means), the more we should take care of it and avoid hurting it.”
Self preservation would be better (and easier to define) criteria.
Every organism, including plants, have evolved to “preserve themselves” (or rather, to preserve their genes, which is a correlated criterion). Do you then think that ALL organisms are conscious, including bacteria?
Fair point.
Do humans take evolution seriously enough? It seems to me that we have never fully relinquished the human/animal distinction. If we evolved then we are animals and there should be no separate category for “human” except for the distinction between this species of animal and other species of animals. As Frans de Waal suggested, humans suffer from anthropo-denial: the failure to accept our true place as being fully a part of nature, so let’s keep this context in mind when we address the question of animal consciousness.
Jane Goodall reported that a young chimp called Flint, seemed to be so grief-stricken after he lost his mother, that he appeared to lose the will to live, and died shortly afterwards. Did Flint die of a broken heart?
It wouldn’t make evolutionary sense to think that humans were the only animal to have the capacity for love. It is true that chimpanzees don’t pair bond like other primate species, such as humans, gibbons and titi monkeys, and therefore don’t seem to experience romantic love, they do show clear evidence of maternal, fraternal and filial love. (The question of whether they know paternal love is more ambiguous: Chimpanzee females are promiscuous, so it might be expected that the offspring won’t know who their male parent is. However, some studies have shown that the young have stronger affinities with their real fathers than they have with other adult males.)
The evolutionary paradigm suggests that it would be more appropriate to think of the great apes as fully conscious, non-human people, even if they are people in a different way to the way we are people. Other scientists, like Carl Safina, have suggested similar levels of emotional interconnectedness in whales, dolphins, elephants and wolves.
It might sound as if I’m giving too much weight to emotion, and going off topic, missing the point of animal consciousness. This would be false. What I’m trying to do is to establish what it is that matters to other sentient beings. For me, the question of whether they have the capacity to experience for example, theory of mind or self-awareness can be left to the arcane speculations of philosophers. What matters is what animals feel, because in what seems to be an otherwise mechanistic universe, it is feeling that confers meaning. The conscious capacities of advanced feeling creatures like great apes and humans are immensely multi-faceted and complex, that is why consciousness is so difficult to define, and why we should instead focus on what matters to them. According to scientists studying the origins of consciousness, such as Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsberg, what they call minimal animal consciousness appeared very early in evolutionary history, perhaps as far back as the Cambrian, or according to Peter Godfrey-Smith, perhaps even earlier, more than half a billion years ago. This suggests that very simple creatures may have the capacity for subjective experience. What we need to do is to understand that the capacity for distress is probably widespread in all animal species, at least, according to Jablonka and Ginsberg, in any animal sufficiently cognitively advanced to have a brain. although the capacity for experiencing distress in simple animals is likely to be much more limited than for those more advanced. Consciousness evolved gradually; it is not an on/off switch. If advanced animals like vertebrates, and, according to experimental evidence, many other creatures understand feelings of good and bad, and we must think of their feelings as being, at least proportionally, equivalent to those of the human animal, we must give them the respect they deserve.
I have been wondering if determinism, and epiphenomenalism if it were true, would affect the thinking on these matters, but can’t reach a useful conclusion.
Best to err on the side of reduced suffering, individually and as a society, as we understand it.
I think I might agree. The question for me is, Does consciousness do anything
and if so how much?
Personal introspection makes me suspicious of my confabulation.
“When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect….”
(Chalmers, David J. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. p. 4)
The best metaphor for this “internal aspect”, i.e. phenomenal consciousness (subjective appearance/experience/sentience), is that of an inner illumination or inner light.
“If, instead of attempting to conceive consciousness as a distinct mental faculty, or in any way an agent putting forth specific exercises, we will consider it under the analogy of an inner illumination, we may both avoid many difficulties and gain some great advantages.”
“The conception is not of a faculty, but of a light; not of an action, but of an illumination; not of a maker of phenomena, but of a revealer of them as already made by the appropriate intellectual operation; and as thus constructed in the illuminated mental sphere, they at once appear to the mind, and the fact of perception is consummated.”
(Hickok, Laurens P. Empirical Psychology. New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor, & Co., 1854. pp. 89+90)
“But when an earthworm reacts when you poke it, is it feeling pain and having a subjective experience, or is that an automatic, built-in response to being poked that is adaptive but isn’t mediated through conscious experience?”
Isn’t having a subjective experience automatic either?
The cut worm forgives the plough.
–William Blake.
I’m hoping we don’t find plants are conscious or something, I’m not adapted to eating mold or plankton.
Also, I don’t wanna starve to death!
Is it ethical – absent eradication of them – to kill a mosquito that is carrying malaria, or viruses that potentially cause specifically human suffering?
“Potentially” because it is not trivial to know, so there are mass efforts to reduce risk.