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'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue
- zephyrthenoble 3y ago> I don’t personally think that other animals will have a verbal inner monologue in the way that I do I find it funny that this article and the quotes within state that humans have a "dense internal monologue" as if that is some requirement of the species. Some quick Googling indicates that people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people [0]. There are frequent Reddit posts with some variation of "TIL people [have|don't have] an internal monologue" full of comments of people from both sides, and a significant portion of people who don't have the classic internal monologue, but something in between instead. We can't even begin to truly describe our own minds, how could we possibly know how all species would think? 0: Hurlburt, R.T., Alderson-Day, B., Kuhn, S. & Fernyhough, C. (2016). Exploring the ecological validity of thinking on demand: Neural correlates of elicited vs. spontaneously occurring inner speech. PLoS One, 11(2), e0147932. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147932
- tim333 3y ago>how could we possibly know how all species would think? Owners of cats and dogs get a reasonable idea from observation. But yeah, doing all species is tricky.
- tekla 3y ago> Some quick Googling indicates that people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people [0]. That probably explains so much.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NayamAmarshe 3y agoInference can bring some compassion. One doesn't need to think too much to know the only difference between us and other species is the ability to philosophize and as such, it should bring even more harmony and compassion, instead of beliefs that justify exploitation of nature. I don't know why we assign ourselves so much importance, some of our thoughts allow us to bring harm to others but we don't want to be treated the same way we treat them. All we really need is education, the education of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or hooves).
- prometheus76 3y agoI don't entirely agree that all it takes is education. Many people have grown up on farms, have lived with animals all their lives, and yet have no problem eating animals.
- NayamAmarshe 3y agoI suppose there are many factors involved but education is the key component. Knowledge, and a culture of knowledge can cause a massive shift in thinking and actions.
- prometheus76 3y agoEssentially, what I hear in your statement is "if I can just teach people how I see the world, then they will see the world the same way." I firmly disagree with that assessment. Someone can be educated and yet see things differently from you.
- rickydroll 3y agoThey also have a different relationship to eating animals than people who think meat comes on a plastic tray wrapped in shrinkwrap. From what I've seen, the attitude is more mindful of the animal you raised and interacted with. You don't want to waste any part of their sacrifice in becoming food for you. I take it a step further and say that if you're going to eat animals, make the best possible, best-tasting meal out of them.
- taeric 3y agoAgreed that it is very crazy how shallow projections from humanity to other animals often is. Really gets annoying when folks try and reverse morality in discussing behavior that 'not even animals would do.' Or, heaven help me, discussion of "balance." I've grown to view leaf season as basically trees conducting war on shrubbery.
- Terr_ 3y agoOr even shallow projections from humans to other humans, like with fundamental attribution error. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago> people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people It's incredible to imagine there are people out there just thinking in language as they go about their lives. I wonder how it must work. Are they literally lining up one word after another in their minds? I guess it has to work that way to feel like some sort of "consistent internal monologue"? At scale, though, imagining a roomful of people thinking in single-threaded monologues does explain a lot about why some teams take forever to get anything done.
- shishy 3y agoJust because someone has an internal monologue doesnt mean they think slow. Its just a voice in your head you can talk to. Its not how you think.
- gnulinux 3y agoIt can also be how you think. I think like that (speaking to myself) and I'm not a slow thinker, at least I don't think so... The thing is, when speaking doesn't involve muscle movements, and just a stream of word/concept objects it can be much faster, and also doesn't have to be single-threaded (so to say). But from my subjective experience it feels like I'm talking to myself, one word after the other.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neom 3y agoI think this is probably how I work too, and people tell me I think very quickly, so I suppose that means I can just talk to myself faster than whatever they are doing, hah. If you don't mind me asking, how are you with math? My mind completely lacks a framework for numbers, so I'm unable to do math (I feel like that might sound insane).
- jochem9 3y agoNot who you replied to, but I can relate. I'm not great at math, but I've trained myself to do basic calculations in my head. I need to concentrate hard and it goes very slow (I'm also a fast thinker for other stuff). I do this because it's a very useful skill in day-to-day life, so worth training. I once read that many people basically spin up a virtual machine in their mind to do math. That is how it feels to me too. All simulation, no hardware acceleration, so very slow.
- mc32 3y agoCount me as one of those people. I don't know what the hell people mean by inner monologue. Maybe I have one, but I wouldn't know what it is. I feel like it's trying to explain to a blind person what sight is.
- alephknoll 3y agoDo you have regret? Ever asked yourself why did I do drink coffee just before bed. Have you ever played a game and thought if I do this, then my opponent will do that, so maybe I shouldn't do that. Have you ever had a meeting or interview and you went through how to introduce yourself or conduct the interview in your head? I have a hard time believing that there are people who have no inner dialogue. Especially in modern societies. I think it's something we all do, it's just that we didn't know there was a word for it. Ever ask yourself, why did I waste so much time on HN or other social media? Then you probably have an inner dialogue.
- RoyalHenOil 3y agoI don't have an internal monologue, but I do still experience regret; I just experience it as an emotion, not as words. I have thought about what my opponent would do in a game, but I think about it by imagining them doing it, not by verbally describing it. If I am preparing for some kind of speech or trying to get the phrasing of something just right for an interview, then yes, I do practice saying those words inside my head (or, as often as not, aloud). But it is not exactly an internal monologue because I am not thinking in words; I am just doing memorization work. It's little different from imagining song lyrics in my head, which I can do without really parsing their meaning. I have never thought something like, "Why did I...?" I have said things like that in order to express the sentiment of self-disappointment to someone else in my company, but it's not a thing I would ever think or say on my own. Internally, my experience is an emotion, not a rhetorical question.
- mc32 3y agoI don’t have a dialogue with myself. I might express something like, that was stupid, or go on a an expletive rant when I hit my thumb, but it’s not directed at myself. With games, I do take mental notes, but it’s not personal. It’s more like looking at a historical battle, for example and thinking of different options. It’s not personal. I’m not going to be absolutist. There could be times I’ve had internal monologues but I may not think of them as such. In other words maybe I have the behavior but because I haven’t classified it as such, I remain unaware of it.
- pmarreck 3y agoI occasionally talk to myself (or to "the powers that be", humoring the idea that we're in kind of a super-advanced-VR classroom sim), but I wouldn't qualify it as an "internal monologue"
- machiaweliczny 3y agoYeah I uses to have these but currently don’t
- zamber 3y agoWeren't these TIL's about hearing an imaginated voice VS imagining the meaning?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoI am not sure what the point of this is, except for vague handwaving and attention seeking behavior. I don't see how sentience or consciousness has anything to do with anything. Even admitting animal consciousness still leaves you a very long way away from anything like a framework of human rights. Second, even if they aren't conscious, you should still take ecology into account. I don't think Redwood trees are conscious, but that doesn't mean we should go chopping them down without any thought.
- NayamAmarshe 3y agoIt's interesting how many people use the word consciousness for the ability to think thoughts or imagine stuff. In eastern philosophy, consciousness is all that which is not material nature, that is unchanging, exactly the same in every living being and is separate from mind, intelligence and senses which are considered a part of material nature.
- AnnoyedComment 3y ago[dead]
- bongodongobob 3y agoDamn you're worldy af. So interesting that you think that's interesting. Is it difficult to be you what with all your worldly ideas? We're way down here using accepted terminology generally agreed upon by 99% of the public but you're on a whole different level.
- Arch-TK 3y agoConsciousness is probably the most vague term in the west. At least in eastern philosophy they made an attempt at nailing it down. Just because a lot of people use a word a lot, doesn't mean the word is well defined.
- chahex 3y agoI believe that unchanged thing is awareness which in Yoga Sutra is called “pure consciousness” which is both the observer and the background of any changing senses. The pure awareness is the source of the feeling of “I AM” and the sutra began by saying this I AM likes to identify whatever it creates as itself. Experiences are outside material world. There is nothing you can call “pain”, but only evidence of it, be it physiological or physical or metabolical or neurological. Yet first and foremost, the entire world is based on senses isn’t it? The only thing any experiencer can prove without any “evidence” is that he is. The existence of experience is self lroving. Beyond that how can anyone prove that there is actually a world beyond mind? The world is a model in one’s consciousness. It is constructed with consciousness and is therefore full of consciousness. How can anyone assume things beings or animals without consciousness exists? Objectivity?
- checkyoursudo 3y agoIn honor of Dennett's death, if we go with the proposition that consciousness is illusory to begin with, then it is fine to ignore the also-illusory consciousness across the animal world as well. I will go ahead and claim that it is not like anything to be a bat (iykyk; see the Nagel reference in TFA). And, frankly, questions of consciousness have become a bit boring to me, despite being the focus of my interest for decades now. Questions of intelligence, communication, social organization, etc are interesting. But questions about a consciousness phenomenon that may or may not even be real and has literally no consensus about theory or fundamental meaning across many disciplines? Boring. Get back to me when even a bare majority of philosophers and researchers can agree on a definition of consciousness.
- wddkcs 3y agoConsciousness can be quantified via suffering, suffering can be quantified via stimuli response. I suspect VR/neural implants/etc. will upend Nagel's inconceivability theory. Consciousness can be defined via capability, and we'll soon have the capability of directly simulating any conceivable umvvelt via those technologies. Then we'll all know what its like to be bats.
- Arch-TK 3y agoIf you make a robot which screams in response to stimuli, is it conscious? I think this kind of reductionist approach to consciousness is bound to end up very weak in the face of these kinds of counterarguments. Maybe I missed your point.
- wddkcs 3y agoCan the robot ever only scream? Then it's not suffering. Suffering is what creates movement, an internal impulse to an external action. Suffering can only exist if there is any external and an internal, which I'd argue is also a valid definition of consciousness, but I couldn't imagine how to test it. In a test on suffering, if a subject has been inserted to fake consciousness, then we would still be measuring consciousness- we'd be measuring the consciousness of the mastetmind behind the robot/fake. Suffering isn't so easily dismissed, any conscious entity will tell you. I agree it is reductionist- that is the point of philosophy, to reduce to a point. RIP DD, you know he was a true philosopher because he came to a final point.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago"Speaking to whether reptiles or fish experience pain"... So vertabrates definitely have pain receptors. It stands to reason they experience pain, at the very least. I wonder if there are still people who doubt this.
- magnoliakobus 3y agoAbsolutely there are. Many (or most) of the people who catch fish, pour coke onto the mortal wound they just created for their own leisure and toss them back into the water to die would confidently tell you fish are incapable of experiencing pain.
- quesera 3y agoPeople pour coke onto fish? (Coca-cola I presume?) To what end? I've fished. Never felt great about it. But most fish at the fresh water angler level can be caught and released without mortal wounds.
- 000ooo000 3y agoA quick google suggests they think it helps stop the bleeding.. It's hard to reconcile that you'd be willing to rip an animal from the sea to kill and eat it, or just for the fun of it, but also care about the animal though to conduct some insane little ritual of pouring soft drink on the wound you created to try and help it survive.
- rpgwaiter 3y agoGrowing up I'd be forced to go fishing with my dad a lot. When we'd catch a fish that was the wrong species, he'd whip it against the side of the boat and watch it float off while laughing with his friends. I doubt the knowledge of consciousness, pain, or any other harm caused by hunting or fishing would dissuade most that do it regularly (in my anecdotal experience)
- brigade 3y ago"Experiencing pain" is more of a philosophical/religious question dating back to at least Cartesian dualism, rather than a question of whether pain receptors exist and induce a pain response. And yeah, there are people even today that flatly deny that nonhuman animals have any form of subjective experience, even dogs.
- stbenjam 3y agoIt makes humans deeply uncomfortable to face the fact that the animals we eat and use might be more like us than we want to imagine. It’s clear to me watching my parents chickens play that there’s lights on in there. It might not be like my experience but they are conscious. I can’t and won’t eat animals.
- apsurd 3y agoI have a hard time too. But specifically about chickens, I happened to run into the opposite sentiment on TV from a farmer. On the idea of eating animals she talked about how she debates it herself but with chickens - she eats chickens - because if you've ever raised chickens you know pretty clearly they are dumb AF.
- protastus 3y agoThis argument is however not on solid ground. It's not OK to cause pain and suffering to a creature capable of intelligence and emotions just because it's less intelligent than an arbitrary, conveniently chosen threshold.
- NewJazz 3y agoYep. One might consider how it only takes an evolutionary moment for the veil of ignorance to be lifted slightly higher.
- apsurd 3y agoa hard truth I agree with. but so very easy to out-of-sight-out-of-mind x_X ugh
- adolph 3y agoReduction of suffering is part of Temple Grandin's work: Grandin also developed an objective, numerical scoring system for assessing animal welfare at slaughtering plants. The use of this scoring system resulted in significant improvements in animal stunning and handling during slaughter. This work is described in "Objective scoring of animal handling and stunning practices in slaughter plants" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin
- chahex 3y agoLet alone animals with sentience, can anyone prove to me beyond reasonable doubts that there is actually a world that exists outside my senses, or mind?
- botsureg 3y ago[flagged]
- timeon 3y agoIs he? Or is it his imagination?
- echoangle 3y agoThat’s one of the fundamental axioms you just have to assume to be true because otherwise, you can’t really make decisions about anything.
- chahex 3y agoYes. An assumption that can neither be proved nor falsified. I hope to solve this by admitting objectivity in consciousness, appearances that are not diverted by my subjective wills. I found causalities, my wills and other peoples wills to be relatively objective.. if the objective world did not change according to a will, there must be contradicting wills.. plus what is this “flagged” comment by botsureg
- chahex 3y agoI also attempted to solve the “other peoples mind” problem by introducing empathetical experiences where you know you mutually experienced something. I got this idea when I was reading Lemune’s q&a with Googles AI, where the AI was describing the experience with data processing. For a second I believe I also experienced a touch of it though it might be an illusion. But gradually I learnt to trust my gut feeling. Many spiritual teachings seemed to resonate with my experiences but yes it seems not many commenters on this thread even consider empathic experiences to exist.
- rustcleaner 3y agoWhile I agree with vegans in spirit, I think humans are closer to obligate carnivores than not; ergo, I think it is a neccessary sin to sacrifice animal life for sustinence until such time we can grow the proverbial walls of muscle on artificial life support from stem cells more cheaply than [no sin tax] standard beef. At that point, we must shut the slaughter houses for good.
- chahex 3y agoVegetables may as well have feelings. Many vegetable demonstrates observable reactions to cuts. If you can switch the angle of perspective to plants like Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj do you might as well experience pains as plants were cut and eaten. The core of any sin is against the will i.e. I have heard there were people who would like to be eaten and found a guy who actually ate him. In the book I AM THAT Sri Nisargadatta said to a questioner:” Look, my thumb touches my forefinger. Both touch and are touched. When my attention; is on the thumb, the thumb is the feeler and the forefinger -- the self. Shift the focus of attention and the relationship is reversed. I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness -- love; you may give it any name you like. Love says: 'I am everything'. Wisdom says: 'I am nothing' Between the two my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.
- rustcleaner 3y agoHello, fellow alchemist. :^)
- timeon 3y agoEating plants = harming plants. Eating meat = harming plants and animals.
- sneakay 3y agohttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/#:~:text=Well%2Dplanned%20vegetarian%20diets%20are,or%20products%20containing%20those%20foods https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/#:~:text=Well%2Dpla.... It's been the position of the ADA for the past 10+ years that humans are not obligate carnivores.
- apsurd 3y agoWhat exactly is "internal monologue"? It's heavily debated in the comments. I don't understand though, because when you learn to read you're mouthing words, and over your lifetime it's actually very hard to not mouth words when you read. It makes me think that internal monologue is precisely an artifact of language itself. In this way, this debate and surprise over people "not having it" is not really profound. All people internalize language, that's the only way that not-mimicked language synthesis can happen. This is different from parrots parroting back what they hear for example. Anyway, I'm curious about this debate over internal monologue. Perhaps it's really that people don't retrospect. That's different. They don't adopt viewpoints outside of their own. Is this really a physical limitation vs a choice? Am I just ignorant about the state of this science?
- taway789aaa6 3y ago> over your lifetime it's actually very hard to not mouth words when you read My reading is all in my head. I don't know when I made the transition to not mouthing things out, but it would have been pretty early on.
- apsurd 3y agooh that's what i mean though, mouthing, in your head, same thing as in "it's somewhere" that's internal to you. That's why i can't understand how everyone doesn't have an internal monologue.
- akvadrako 3y agoWe can't know what other people experience in their head, only how they describe it. To me inner dialogue is whenever we express a thought to ourselves using language. Like I think "now would be a good time to make coffee". When someone says they don't have an inner monologue I'm very skeptical. I imagine how it would work is either they only picture such a thing (getting up to get coffee) or its just like a high dimensional emotion of hunger and movement. Which I suppose is how it must work for animals. But how this can work for more complex and abstract things like analytical philosophy is beyond me. For advanced math I can imagine just seeing equations.
- ketanmaheshwari 3y agoIf you are on the fence on the topic of eating meat vs going vegan / vegetarian, this 2018 documentary might change your thoughts: https://watchdominion.org/ https://watchdominion.org/ Warning: Some visuals may be disturbing.
- slfnflctd 3y agoIf you'd prefer to watch something slightly less disturbing, this is a great movie I enjoyed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film)
- 000ooo000 3y agoOh no why would I want to watch that? That sounds horrible. Those poor animals! They should be nicer to them when they kill them. /s
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago>They should be nicer to them when they kill them ... /s An example (from Dominion) is how they typically asphyxiate cattle immediately before slaughter: using carbon monoxide (when nitrogen would be far less painful/cruel, but costs a few ¢¢¢¢ more). I fell asleep watching this movie during that scene, and it led to horrific limbic states. -- Of course I still consume animal products, but watching that film entirely ended swine for me (and greatly reduced my overall meat consumption).
- 000ooo000 3y agoTo be totally clear, I've seen it and am vegan. My comment is a sarcastic tribute to the typical response to the suggestion people learn what their dietary choices involve.
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y agoA more effective means of bringing about change might be to protest and lobby for requiring by law more humane methods of raising and killing animals for food. I think far more people would be supportive of that approach.
- ravetcofx 3y agoIt's also very likely plants have some sort of experience of the world that would be very alien to ourselves or animals. They have complex networks through roots and mycelial connections, communicate to one another through chemicals emitted and "smelled" through the air etc. By some this could be considered a form of consciousness. What that means for vegans I don't know
- sneakay 3y agoVeganism has always been about reduction of suffering, if a vegan is on a desert island they'll eat animals to survive. If plants are sentient that doesn't change much for veganism.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago[flagged]
- 2024throwaway 3y agoThis is honestly boomer humor that has long since expired. Sometimes people simply choose healthier options and tell no one.
- 000ooo000 3y agoIMHO, it's still a useful joke because one can immediately judge the joke teller to be worth zero of my time.
- 2024throwaway 3y agoYou can say it has always been about that, but for many, myself included, it’s about health and environmental impact first.
- cybercephas 3y ago[flagged]
- adolph 3y agoIn the article and linked NY [0] and Cambridge [1] declarations, no definition os "consciousness" was asserted. While hardly definitive, Wikipedia [2] claims "Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness." Some would argue that what is commonly considered consciousness is a relatively recent phenomena in humans, the mind being a necessary but not sufficient condition. "The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans."[3] 0. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration 1. https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciou... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
- apantel 3y agoIs this a joke? Of course they’re conscious. Jeez.
- tacocataco 3y agoI guess step 1 would be respecting the consciousness of all humans right?
- 000ooo000 3y agoThinly-veiled whataboutism
- sungho_ 3y agoIntuitively nonsensical but irrefutable thought: Everything about how animals think is based on human assumptions. They might actually like being eaten by humans. How can we know, when the animals haven't said it themselves? In fact, there are people like that in the world. Such people have pain receptors and higher cognitive abilities, yet they still think that way. In other words, analyzing their physiology alone cannot determine whether animals dislike being eaten.
- modzu 3y agonothing is true, everything is permitted
- dogcomplex 3y agoSigh The problem is so big, and so deeply rooted in our culture and history as predators/scavengers, that I just don't want to even go down this line of thinking - it's very very likely true animals have clear consciousness, but I'm not sure that would even change things. The sooner we can move to indistinguishable (and cheaper) lab-grown meat, the better. I have very little hope of changing enough minds or culture to simply not eat meat, but I have considerable hope that we can trick ourselves through better savings and taste. Seems like the tech is going to land that direction. Full steam ahead - let's be weird pacifist vampires gorging off brainless flesh growths. Our apology can be a happy "never again!" as we dig into marbled wagu slabs.
- garspin 3y agoSurely consciousness is not black & white, but a scale. Rocks at one end & us(?) at the other. There was a recent post suggesting that our thoughts are 98% unconscious. It's not hard to imagine that there could be some animals with more than 0.01% consciousness. After all, we started at 0% conscious and evolved a little - other species are probably some way down that track.
- reify 3y agoI like scientists arguing It should be a prerequisite to being and calling oneself a scientist. Arguing that should be transparent and done in public. science would be better for it.
- nojvek 3y agoHuman “farming” of animal biomass is greater than of all other land mammal biomass (wildlife), by an order of magnitude. https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/NazFPXrwYl https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/NazFPXrwYl We may not realize it but we are “The plague”. We spread throughout the planet, ravage resources, bring down forests to build monocultures and urban sprawl, dispose chemicals in air and water. We have little regard for anything other than ourselves. We take actions to satisfy our insatiable momentary “feel good” cycle. We grow kill and eat animals by the billions. Animals who spend their entire lives in tiny boxes suffering. Imagine we were wild Koalas and another species was ravaging the solar system like this?
- meristohm 3y agoAre We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, 2016) https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1159842012 https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1159842012
- scotty79 3y agoIt's weird to think that consciousness is a binary thing that either is there or it isn't. I believe it's a spectrum. I'm not even sure if humans are the farthest species on Earth towards one end of the spectrum. We might have the most complex language to focus our consciousness around but it doesn't mean others (like dolphins or elephants or whales) can't have better consciousness in some manner.
- nickburns 3y agoactual 'declaration': https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration and supporting 'background': https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/background https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/background
- RicoElectrico 3y ago[flagged]
- nickburns 3y agoInvestigations 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[6]. “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[7] 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". [6] Anthoney, N. et al eLife 12, RP88198 (2023) [7] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00709-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00709-7
- RicoElectrico 3y agoI apologize! Did "ctrl+f" on mobile and apparently something was screwed up. Did only have 4 hits for "insect".
- hliyan 3y agoI read Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness as a young man and was convinced for the longest time that consciousness is just a type of information processing (or a type of wetware program) that creates a mental model of the external world, and that it is based on language, and therefore only accessible to humans, and does not require any further explanation. I'm no longer quite so sure. The possibilities are that consciousness: 1) Is binary or exists in a continuous spectrum 2) Is fundamental property (panpsychism) or emergent If it is a continuous, fundamental property, then what we experience as qualia (i.e. subjective, conscious experience) are merely a higher order version of any reaction of anything to any other thing (from a glass shattering due to blunt force, to a venus flytrap closing in response to an insect). It also implies that there may be other intelligent species out there with a much higher order of consciousness (not merely intelligence) capable of higher levels of conscious experience. In which case, we have a serious problem with the way we are treating some animals.
- llamaimperative 3y agoHas this author ever interacted with e.g. a monkey or a dog? Utterly insane to think consciousness is dependent upon language, oh and also good luck defining language: lots of animals communicate perfectly sufficiently for their purposes. Is gesture not a language? Then are ASL speakers (?) not conscious? Glad you arrived at the right question nonetheless. Personally I think panpsychism is (inconveniently and rather alarmingly) the only viable theory of consciousness I’ve ever heard. There’s just no sensible place to draw a line between conscious and not conscious in the development of an organism or in the development of a species.
- cageface 3y agoIt doesn't prove anything but I do think it's very interesting that many people report feeling part of a universal and all pervasive consciousness as part of a psychedelic experience.
- tsimionescu 3y agoLanguage has pretty notable differences from animal communication that are actually very well studied. One aspect is that language can string together small particles to produce arbitrarily complex meanings. In contrast, most animal communication is extremely simplistic - typically one sound or gesture corresponds with one piece of meaning, and the order or number of repetitions has no additional meanings. There may be some exceptions or at least grey areas (whale song, dolphin sound+dance, bee dances, some apes and birds), but the vast majority of animals have an extremely simplistic communication scheme. Another huge difference between animal communication and human language is that animals communicate in response to direct internal or external stimuli (hungry - > chirp, see dangerous animal -> distress call). In contrast, humans communicate about much more complex feelings, and can choose when to exteriorize their language use. Note that humans also communicate in ways that aren't language. Our "body language", our cries of pain, baby's cries, grimaces, winking, etc are the equivalent of animal communication and are not language. Sign langauge is absolutely langue though, and you'll notice it fully ticks the two boxes I was mentioning earlier.
- MDWolinski 3y agoI recall an experiment with bees I read about where the bees were in a box. One path went to food, another to little balls which had no value to bees. Yet the bees would go “play” with the balls. The article and scientists state that this may show that bees make time for entertaining themselves. I think it’s arrogance to assume only mammals can have consciousness just because we don’t have the ability to understand what that actually is. Yet, humans throughout history have used that belief to wreck havoc on the planet, other humans, and animals without regard for the consequences.
- meiraleal 3y agoChemical interactions isn't the same as conscious. I would say that it is exactly the opposite: consciousness is the capability of ignoring your chemical reactions and do what your will says. For example to not eat when hungry, an unconscious animal can't do that.
- HPsquared 3y agoThat's just extra layers of chemical reactions.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoNo... basic life support functions/instincts are controlled by the evolutionally older parts of the brain, but can be overridden by the the cortex (or equivalent). The word "consciousness" is all but useless in discussing brain function, or even subjective experience, since it's overloaded and covers so many diverse phenomena. Good luck finding any two people who agree on exactly what the word means! You seem to be talking more about "free will" than any aspect of consciousness, although there is no scientific basis for thinking that free will is anything other than a subjective illusion. Your cortex is able to override basic instincts, but is still doing so via neural outputs and chemistry. Why one person's cortex might override hunger in a given situation, while another person's cortex doesn't, really is not something they have any control over. It's chemistry and physics (not magic and "free will") all the way down. Your cortex does what it does because of how it is wired, which is a result of your personal life history. It's funny that we can often recognize this in others - guessing with high probability what they are going to do in a given situation, while still thinking that we ourselves are not controlled by our past and have the "free will" to do whatever we like (but in reality what we like is controlled by our past - there is no escaping it). What we subjectively feel as ourselves making a decision to do something is really just us observing our own thought processes, over which we have no control. This is really the only place where anything that I would label as part of that fuzzy word "consciousness" is coming to play - this ability to self-observe. This ability to self-observe and feel as if the observer (which is also just our cortex) is in control, is perhaps based on specific cortical pathways that evolved to further our cortex's predictive purpose/function. However, it's certainly possible to imagine a brain that was wired differently and didn't have this ability, although maybe in reality all animal brains with a cortex/equivalent, even a more primitive reptilian one, do have this ability? Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).
- alienicecream 3y agoLike do they worry about the future and think about the past? No.
- hobs 3y agoEver rescued an abused dog? My dog absolutely predicts what I will do based on past events in a high anxiety state. Sometimes she predicts incorrectly (but definitely based on my previous actions) and does weird stuff, but in the context of an animal based prediction of the future from previous events it makes perfect sense. How about corvids that can build tools and predict indirect actions? (displacement etc)
- alienicecream 3y agoThat's pattern recognition, any dog can do that, you don't need an abused dog for that.
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- cypherpunks01 3y agoIs that your definition of consciousness? Worrying about things?
- alienicecream 3y agoYes, that's part of it.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoMosquitoes do: "REDRUM, must kill 0.5 of humanity"
- satchlj 3y agoConsciousness is not sentience, and if it's all semantics I don't care but if people are going to make moral arguments using this conflation between the two then I have a problem. As it says in the article, sentience is roughly the ability to feel valenced emotions (good/bad). Consciousness is many things, but importantly the ability to feel qualia, experiencing what feels like the 'blueness' of blue, for example. It's totally possible that all sorts of life forms are conscious. I just think to focus on sentience and call it consciousness is silly.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoQualia aren't what you are probably thinking they are ... There really is no "blueness" to blue, or "redness" to red. Consider this strawberry illusion. https://boingboing.net/2017/03/01/the-strawberries-in-this-photo.html https://boingboing.net/2017/03/01/the-strawberries-in-this-p... When you look at those strawberries you experience the quale of redness, yet they are not red, so this quale isn't directly related to the color of the object you are looking at. The qualia of colors is just a result of our ability to differentiate surfaces based on the differing inputs our brain receives, but as illusions like this show this is really a function of memory/prediction rather than actual color. The (subjective) quale of redness is something that your mind creates by comparison/recall. You see those strawberries as red because it reminds you of red strawberries. Different colors have to look like something, and since color is basically just a differentiator, it only has any meaning in relation to things of other (similar or different) colors. Grass-green leaves have the quale of grass-green because they remind you (same neural input) of grass. It's interesting to note how arbitrary (and poor!) our perception of color is, since we only (usually) have three color detectors (retinal cones) tuned for overlapping portions of the frequency spectrum. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm... Even if we're looking at a pure red object (say 600-650nm light wavelenth), our green (center frequency) detector is also firing too, since that's just the way our eyes are built - we're not really directly detecting colors but just have those three detectors firing to different degrees, which allows us to differentiate a lot of colors. Some people have 4 types of cone rather than 3, and are therefore able to differentiate colors that would look the same to normal people... There is nothing absolute about our perception of color - just an ability to differentiate so some degree or another. It's interesting to contrast our poor color detection with our much better auditory frequency detection. Our ear basically has a whole bunch of specific frequency detectors (hair cells of the inner ear), almost like doing an FFT of the input signal. Our color sensing "could" have been like this too, but instead evolution has found out that, for us, these three overlapping light frequency detectors is good enough, but for sounds we need to be much more discriminative. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider what it would be like if we had another way to differentiate surfaces other than by color (or texture). Imagine if we had an ability to remotely detect (see) surface temperature, but not by a thermal imaging device that maps temperature to colors. You could imagine someone making goggles that had directional temperature sensing ability and tracked our gaze direction, such that it output temperature data for a patch around our center of gaze, and fed this data into some part of our cortex via a neural-link like device. What would the qualia of this new sense be like?! Just like color, it would have to "look" like something, and different temperatures would have to look different, but the resulting quales of "hot" and "cold" surface properties would just be whatever our mind recalled when exposed to those inputs. I'd guess that all hot objects would just look "hot" and remind us other other hot objects, just as all red objects look "red".
- motohagiography 3y agoIt's funny to think what a conscious species trying to reason about us would do. They can't communicate to us, they are subject to our decisions, and a lot of what we do must seem mindlessly destructive. Often they really are trying to communicate, but there just isn't a way.