Are animals more conscious than we are?
erikhoel.substack.com
erikhoel.substack.com
This seems to define consciousness as measurable by algorithmic determinism and limitation, which seems a complete non-sequitur. Seeing something as a biological robot need not necessarily imply anything at all about consciousness.
> Perhaps consciousness doesn’t come in degrees at all.
If I consider my altering states of awareness (awake & alert vs foggy vs dreaming) as degrees of consciousness, then yes it does. (But perhaps the question is really one of semantics.)
> Some people may be unable to articulate their inner life, but is there any doubt they feel intense, recognizable emotions? Does not water for them taste as it does to us, does not touch reassure, does not heat burn and ice freeze, do not their emotions swell and slosh within them?
I do doubt this (eta: at least in regards to animals; for humans, see comment about states of awareness above), for I see no evidence that any earthly creatures other than humans can actually reflect on their own feelings and therefore create an emotional feedback loop that serves to intensify emotions. (Granted, without the ability to communicate, or behave in a way that human intelligence can recognize as intelligent (the metrics for which are another rabbit hole), I'm not sure what such evidence would consist of.)
Anyway, without a concrete definition of consciousness, does something necessarily even need a brain to be considered conscious? What's to stop every feedback loop in existence from being conscious? Or, for that matter, every atom in the universe?
Haven’t we observed complex human-like emotions for elephants, dolphins, and various other primates (eg grieving rituals for lost family members)? Heck even dogs clearly show signs of depression and happiness although whether they reflect on these feelings (whatever that means) is obviously up in the air.
I think we observe complex behavior that we associate with our own emotional experiences (which seem appropriate given our genetic / biological / physiological similarities), I just doubt they're necessarily as intense as we experience them given our ability to reflect on them. And if you can't reflect on an emotion, can you even necessarily be conscious of it at all? It seems more likely to me that animals experience no conscious awareness of their own emotions at all, however complex they may be.
So, for a squirrel, perhaps it's like our unconscious sympathetic nervous system autoresponse, but all the time.
I think they can observe you and then adjust themselves accordingly. If you are angry they can be sad or cautious. If you look sad they can comfort. But they also seem to possess their own independent moods.
Planning and adapting to stimulus seems like consciousness to me.
I think in Humans language can actually be a big component of that feedback, you can structure your thoughts and reason with it. An internal dialogue. But I am not sure it is entirely necessary.
Lets start using the same standards of 'proof'
If Helen Keller were never to learn to communicate with us through language that we understand are we to have believed that she has no consciousness -- just external manifestation that "complex behavior that we associate with our own emotional experience ..."
I was only referring to emotions and their intensity in species that exhibit no ability to self-reflect, not consciousness in general.
The only way I can assign an internal monologue of human emotions to you is (i) pattern match your external behavior with my own behavior in an emotional state (ii) take you on your word when you describe that your feelings, (iii) assume that all humans are roughly going to be the same.
With animals (ii) is not an option. It would not have been an option for Helen Keller too before a common language was established. Regarding (iii) it depends on where we draw the line where similarity ends, one can argue that there is a lot of shared physiology among say dolphins, us, elephants, primates dogs …
So believing that animals do not have internal monologue of emotions when they clearly show similar external manifestation is sourced more from human exceptionalism and having double standards for proofs.
We don't have the technology yet to listen into the internal monologues of anybody other than our own. All we have is evidence of external behavior and some physiological telemetry. What we conclude from these stems from what we want to believe. We have been wrong about our exceptionalism many times in history, so its not a very reliable guide.
By the way when I use the word 'you' its to draw attention to epistemological problem in the line of argument. Not that I disbelieve that you do have emotions.
Aha... With animals, I think (i) is a misleading option. Our own emotions are laden with self-reflection, with an internal monologue, with thinking about why we're feeling something and how we might be able to change it. This is how we get the idea of "emotions" at all. If we take away the ability to self-reflect, to even have a conceptual understanding of "emotions", that doesn't mean the emotional behavior necessarily goes away, but the conscious experience of the emotion may be quite different, perhaps even completely non-existent. (Again, not consciousness itself, just consciousness of the emotion.)
I have as much observational evidence that you have emotions as much for a dolphin, monkey or a dog for instance. The external manifestations are in the same ball park. Same for physiological probes like FMRI.
When same class of external observation leads to different class of conclusions that's theology and blind faith, not science.
'Science' has been in this 'human exceptionalism' tar pit before in other fields of science -- astronomy for example.
I'm not talking about emotions in and of themselves, I'm talking about the conscious experience of emotions. In humans, we perhaps conflate the two, as we can have no concept of anger or joy without the ability to self-reflect on our experience, comparing our thought patterns and physiological sensations to past and possible future, and reasoning about why we're experiencing an emotion.
Now, what is it like to experience an emotion without being able to self-reflect and consciously know that we are experiencing an emotion? The external manifestations do not go away. We can still infer the presence of emotion, we just have no way to know what the conscious experience is like. It's not a question that can as yet be answered by science, so any conclusion one way or another cannot be scientific.
Just as we can infer emotional states in animals by their behavior, we can infer their lack of self-reflection by their lack of behavior we would deem "intelligent", at least compared to humans. And so we do not hold animals to the same intellectual standards. I am only suggesting that this lack of self-reflection and ability to reason would have profound effects on the conscious experience of emotions, even when external manifestations derived from them are similar.
(Perhaps a can-of-worms digression, but this is also related to animals having Free Will and moral culpability for their actions. We generally do not infer the presence of evil in animals, for instance, regardless of their behavior, nor discipline them beyond Pavlovian classical conditioning. It's not a scientific matter; all we can do at the moment is guess.)
BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN by Helen Keller
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that[142] I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.
It was not night—it was not day. . . . . . But vacancy absorbing space, And fixedness, without a place; There were no stars—no earth—no time— No check—no change—no good—no crime. [143]
My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.
I remember, also through touch, that I had a power of association. I felt tactual jars like the stamp of a foot, the opening of a window or its closing, the slam of a door. After repeatedly smelling rain and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me: I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From the same instinct of aping others, I folded the clothes that came from the laundry, and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual remembrance. When I wanted anything I liked,—ice-cream,[144] for instance, of which I was very fond,—I had a delicious taste on my tongue (which, by the way, I never have now), and in my hand I felt the turning of the freezer. I made the sign, and my mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I "thought" and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips. From reminiscences like these I conclude that it is the opening of the two faculties, freedom of will, or choice, and rationality, or the power of thinking from one thing to another, which makes it possible to come into being first as a child, afterwards as a man.
Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another. So I was not conscious of any change or process going on in my brain[145] when my teacher began to instruct me. I merely felt keen delight in obtaining more easily what I wanted by means of the finger motions she taught me. I thought only of objects, and only objects I wanted. It was the turning of the freezer on a larger scale. When I learned the meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties. Thought made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood,[146] and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.
[...]
If you are going to say consciousness has degrees then what about degrees of unconsciousness?
It doesn't make sense to be more or less unconscious.
When we say conscious though we don't really mean the opposite of unconscious most of the time. Usually it is the opposite of unconscious + many other things. Then we debate what those other things are.
To me this is exactly a language philosophy problem and imprecision in our language causing philosophical problems.
True. I'm thinking of it a bit like a one dimensional spectrum with "unconciousness" at one end, and "as alert as you can be" at another end (imprecisely defined as that is), and various states of alertness between (tired, under the influence, dreaming, etc). Lacking a measurable numeric metric, these are not necessarily in a specific order, just somewhere between unconscious and fully conscious.
> To me this is exactly a language philosophy problem and imprecision in our language causing philosophical problems.
Definitely; especially with trying to define "consciousness" we reach the limits of language, as we're trying to make concrete the source of language and meaning itself.
[thoughts, emotions, sensations]
.sum { |p| p.frequency * p.complexity }
Pain, for example, counts as all 3, and some would say it’s simple while others might call it complex.
Hard to tell that to those with lost limbs who suffer from ghost pain.
1. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/phantom-pain/...
So uhh, what exactly is pain? Is it the feeling? Is it the physical damage? Is it a warning about damage? Is it the fear of damage (as in broken hearts etc.)?
If it means "there is a physical set of physical matter involved in the sensation of pain, be it pain nerves or just me thinking using my physical thinking apparatus", well then given that I'm made out of physical matter, what isn't strictly physical?
It may help to look at it from a cause and effect perspective.
injury -> pain
thinking -> pain
feeling -> pain
thinking -> feeling + pain
pain -> feeling + thinking
...etc
Perhaps the question is whether qualia [1] are binary or not. This is a question that is probably impossible to answer because there is nothing else to measure it with. To paraphrase Julian Jaynes, what's more immediate that immediate awareness itself?
Meditation is one way that we train our consciousness to focus less on reason and more on sensation and emotion, in order to exert more control over both.
So I’d agree with the author if he reframed the question as I have.
But how do we know that animals, or even other humans, are conscious? The answer is in the definition: that sensation, emotion, and reason are all aspects of conscious experience. These aspects can be considered metadata that is only available to conscious beings. This metadata is most uniquely useful in social scenarios, as it is a shared dataset that enables highly coordinated and flexible social behaviors.
The author mentions one of these behaviors: play. Non-conscious entities will have a harder time distinguishing between play-fighting and real fighting, and engage in play-fighting less often (if at all).
Some ants can lift 10 to 50 times their own weight.
Are they stronger than a human?
The question makes no sense.
Is a human more conscious than an electron?
Perhaps also makes no sense.
Consciousness might be binary, so rabbits might have it?
Can you define consciousness at all?
How about “the number of bits a subsection of a system is able to encode about the rest of the system surrounding it”
If we want to talk scientifically about consciousness then we need to be able to make predictions about it and test those... then refine our ideas.
Up until that point its metaphysics or religion. Do I agree that rabbits are probably somewhat conscious? Yes. Do I know what that MEANS? No.
This was an excellent article. To me "consciousness" cannot be thought of as binary, i.e. humans have it, no other creature does. That's the classical, religious view.
Rather it's just an illusion your brain puts on for you, and rabbits get a different illusion. So it's silly to say "animals are more conscious." They have a different consciousness. Go ahead and google "what is it like to be a bat."
Maybe you're right and we're beyond all that.