Are animals conscious? New research

> a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.

Care to elaborate/expand?

PS: Being downvoted for a simple question shows how biased (sometimes toxic) HN can become...

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 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.

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiva

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.

> 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 only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one

Fundamentally it's really "practical" issue. We want to use, abuse and kill animals and we make up justifications.

It won't change until the material conditions we live under change.

> 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.

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 seem pretty categorically different to me based on their behavior alone.

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.

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".

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think what you’re suggesting has been the prevailing view among biologists for decades. It’s uncontroversial to say they’re conscious.

Whether they’re self-aware, understand death, how intelligent they are, etc. are where the debates are and have been for a very long time.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Bible does not explain the Chinese, Japanese, etc. take on consciousness. So it must be something other than religion guiding this thought.

> humans are 100% conscious

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.

> 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.

Do animals have friends, enemies, cliques? Yes. Do animals play practical jokes on each other? Yes. I've seen all of these in cows.

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 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

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.

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.

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).

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 :)

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.

Just a heads up - for its own advantage

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)

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?)?

Now if the spider knew THAT...

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.

"Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by mimicry."

Replace bumble bees with human beigns and "pull a string" with an engineering task and you'll find we are not so different. /sarcasm, but not too much, average human being is quite dumb, tbh.

That's ok. Moving the goalposts (in good faith) is part of the proceed of understanding the question we're trying to answer. Some times you don't realize you don't understand the question until you start thinking about it.

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.

This may be the moment to evaluate our questions.

> 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.

Bees even play! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...

> 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.

> 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.

If a rigorous definition of consciousness existed, how would you be convinced that it was correct?

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).

As all the discussion about AI has shown, what we even mean by intelligence in humans is a huge and ongoing debate.

IIRC, canine emotional intelligence has been tested, and dogs have the emotional intelligence of a 14 year old human.

Just don't take my word for it as I've not been able to find an actual citation.

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.

Especially when you consider humans are animals too.

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.

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.

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.

Apparently someone in the NIH disagrees since they actually performed the sandfly experiment on beagles.

There is a philosophical definition. Our sensations which make up perception, dreams, imagination. Or subjective experience.

> 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).

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.

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.)

What if the subconscious is also conscious

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.”

I don't think the word "conscious" is generally used in a way that is the least bit scientific. So that's the first problem.

Here you combine "self-aware" with "awake" or "stream of experience" and possibly intelligence.

I think a lot of people are conflating illusion of free will with consciousness.

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.

I agree. You should check out “Becoming Animal” and “The Spell of the Sensuous”, both by David Abram

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.

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.

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"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies

Dreaming in animals is a well researched and proven phenomenon.

https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/lifestyle/what-do-dogs-dre...

> 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.

Studies have been done where they deactivate the sleep paralysis chemistry from dogs and they literally run at full speed while dreaming. Pretty wild.

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.

So maybe not so different from humans, after all!

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.

Neither do most people. Which implies ...

They said "intelligent", not "superintelligent".

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.

Now that'd be intelligence.

I heard a rumor from a guy on Twitter that GPT5 can explain it...

Solipsism.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

I agree but would word that as "...more conscious than most other 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.

don't worry, some people already do

or at least that is my read of academics that say the universe is deterministic

> enter a similar state

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.

In what way would be possible assume that animals are not conscious? It's such a bizarre question

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.

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?

Meaning is something you create for yourself.

Sometimes... believing is all we have.

Why is killing conscious stuff bad?

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.

All conscioussness eventually die off.

Would you prefer those animals never existed?

Blackout drunks are barely emotional - it is just level of how much they are sedated.

Just for reference:

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial

> Animals lack the "moral consciousness" and dignity that is unique to humans

Your opinion is noted .. although appears to have been eronously made as if a statement of fact which is debated, as discussed in the article.

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....)