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> Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses was seen as a cardinal sin. The argument went that projecting human traits, feelings, and behavi

> Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses was seen as a cardinal sin. The argument went that projecting human traits, feelings, and behaviours onto animals had no scientific basis and there was no way of testing what goes on in animals’ minds. What's always been funny to me about the scientific approach to animal consciousness/emotions/empathy is that in a perfectly rational world the default assumption would be that animals and humans exist along a spectrum and there isn't a sharp cliff where humans are 100% conscious and empathetic but dogs are 0%. The claim that humans are categorically different than other animals is the extraordinary one, not the claim that we are made of mostly the same stuff. 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.

mgh2 2y ago
> 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...
- lolinder 2y ago
  The evidence: animals exhibit numerous behaviors that resemble our emotional responses in various ways. Anyone who has ever had a pet dog or a cat will have countless anecdotes. The explanation with the fewest moving parts is that our brain and hormonal systems look an awful lot like the brain and hormonal systems of a cat or a dog and therefore the simplest explanation is that cats and dogs have emotions and thought patterns that resemble ours in very meaningful ways. The actual scientific explanations that people tend to put forward (as discussed in TFA) revolve around us projecting our own thoughts and emotions onto the animals. To me that seems substantially less rational than just believing that similar neurological structures produce similar neurological results.
  - mgh2 2y ago
    Are you sure that is not just mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution? Is like saying ChatGPT has conscience because it can talk or "think" like us...are we missing something here? I am not opposing your view, just trying to understand the logic - perplexed by downvotes on a simple question...
    - captainclam 2y ago
      “Mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution” would be a much less parsimonious explanation than just having those mechanisms, i.e. Occam’s razor.
      - byproxy 2y ago
        "Occam's razor" is not some natural law so I fail to understand how invoking it goes towards proving anything.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      I'm not sure about the downvotes, I couldn't even downvote you if I wanted to because you replied to me. I'm operating on the assumption that evolution happened as Darwin described it. As another reply to you notes, darwinian evolution precludes sharp divides between species in favor of a gradual development of complexity over time. A believer in darwinian evolution should expect consciousness and emotions and other mental processes to manifest on a continuum, which means that the question of animal consciousness should be about as controversial as the question of our own consciousness (which is definitely an open topic of philosophical debate but is also impossible to solved with an experiment).
      - jemmyw 2y ago
        Not that I believe this, but there could be an intelligence cliff where you get to a certain level and suddenly consciousness and self awareness appear. That is a mechanism where gradual change could lead to stepped differences.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Ever since Darwin, the scientific view has been descent with modification. We're all branches of the same phylogenetic tree, and many of those branches are very close to us, such as other mammals. We have topologically similar digestive, immune, circulatory, respiratory, nervous, and reproductive systems. While there are important differences between, say, the foods that a cat and a human can digest, the differences in how the overall system works are small compared to the similarities. Therefore, it's a reasonable starting guess that humans and closely-related animals would have many structural similarities in their mental experience, although with some differences. It tilts the balance towards needing evidence that other animals are not conscious, rather than needing evidence that they are. And when we look for evidence, we see intelligence even in branches as far away from us as crows and octopuses, suggesting that maybe consciousness (which we guess might correlate with intelligence) has deep roots in that tree, or else emerges independently quite easily.
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    Speaking of consciousness and tress: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcs.1578 https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcs.1...
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      There's definitely more going on with trees than we once thought, but I'm at least confident that wherever human consciousness comes from, it certainly must be tied to the nervous system. If we inherited consciousness from our ancestors, then the most distant common ancestor that we could possibly have inherited it from would be at most around the point where we branched from jellyfish. So if trees or other plants are conscious in their own way, then they also must have independently evolved it in their own way; it's not a trait that they share with us based on common heritage alone.
deanCommie 2y ago
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.
Coffeewine 2y ago
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.
- cupcakecommons 2y ago
  Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediately - which can be credibly argued is part of why many humans drink alcohol.
  - timeon 2y ago
    > Easy example. As currently drunk person, I admit that my senses are impaired. But doubting my consciousness makes me doubt yours. Yes there can be scale of drunkness so is different scale of thinking. Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense.
    - cupcakecommons 2y ago
      I'm talking about being extremely drunk. I have a friend that "woke up" walking in a park after a night of drinking. If he was already walking exactly who woke up? My friend the human-animal was walking already. My friend the human-consciousness woke up. It was his consciousness coming back online as the ethanol was metabolized in the parts of his brain that afforded his consciousness.
      - p_j_w 2y ago
        Did your friend actually wake up or did they start forming memories again?
cf100clunk 2y ago
> 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/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiva
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yep, I meant that to be included, that's why the sentence ends with a reference to how people usually read the Bible. I'm a Christian myself but I definitely think that the Indian religions get animals and animal rights far more correct than we usually do.
- slibhb 2y ago
  Sure but in Hinduism and Buddhism, humans are higher than animals. In general, only humans are capable of escaping samsara.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Right, but that concept is itself very compatible with darwinian evolution. Humans are the current pinnacle of evolution when it comes to intelligence, but that doesn't mean everything else is entirely unintelligent.
    - psychoslave 2y ago
      When we are judge and party, it’s easier to come with the scoring scale that put ourself on the top of the board. If intelligence definition is not imposed on us by nature itself, then we can only conclude that we are indeed great at producing evaluation scales that will flatter our egos. I guess many other animals are also very good at that game though. If you take "survival of the fittest" (species, not individuals, should I recall?) as the criteria, then we measurably can’t bluster anymore. Many other species survived for far longer than we did, and maybe will outlast us after we finished to disturb so much the environment condition on which our lives depend.
robwwilliams 2y ago
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.
- lolinder 2y ago
  But that reason relies on a presupposition that human language is categorically different than animal language, which is also a claim that relies on presupposing a categorical distinction which must be disproven, rather than starting from the assumption that human and animal communication exists along an evolutionary spectrum. And how did we arrive at this categorical distinction becoming axiomatic? As you say, by way of Descartes, who was a devout Christian who famously tried to derive the existence of God from the fact of his own consciousness. Far from being a separate and distinct reason for downplaying animal consciousness, my sense is that animal language is downplayed precisely because it would imply consciousness, and we're working within a system that axiomatically believes animals are not conscious.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Animal language is obviously on the same level as human laughter and cries and whimpers. Animals don't teach language to each other like humans do. But I don't see what that has to do with consciousness, to me animal language is much closer to consciousness than human language. Consciousness is all about emotions, not language, and animal language that humans also has is directly tied to emotional expression. Our ML models managed to mimic human language before animal language, human language is more robotic. Sci-fi shows tend to also do this, robots talk with voices that lacks the animal components of humans and instead just do the human language. So the popular view is that animal language is the conscious parts and human language is the computational/intelligence part.
    - 2y ago
antisthenes 2y ago
> 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.
okasaki 2y ago
> 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.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Why would material conditions matter? Hunters and gatherers used animals they hunted, and began domestication. And so has almost every society since. Even if it’s to help plow their crops or to fend off wild animals and keep the vermin population in check.
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  I think this is entirely it - and while we are still reliant on animals for meat and food production, they are no longer made to toil to anywhere near the degree they once were in the developed world, and so this has allowed a shift in our sensibilities. As you say, it’s a practical issue. In much the same way as esteemed 19th century scientists argued that black people, brown people, Irish people, women, were not truly people, as this made for an easier moral justification for ill-treatment, slavery and genocide, they argued that animals were also insensate simulacra, only giving the appearance of life - for again, it is harder to beat and enslave a living, feeling, thinking being than it is a dishwasher. Much of what we take as straightforward facts of reality are actually just old, bad ideas, and only in the cold light of the morning after do we start to see the error of our ways in the dark that came before.
  - czl 2y ago
    Good to remember these observations during war time when “your side” has de-humanized the “other side”.
slibhb 2y ago
> 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.
- ben_w 2y ago
  I'd guess at the continuum, too — "going against common sense" is, unfortunately, a thing I have seen often enough of true things to reach the conclusion that "common sense" as a phrase means only "inside the Overton window of the person who just said or wrote that". But it's a guess, it has to be, especially as we're not all agreed on what the thing even is in the first place: > About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences. The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#The_problem_of_definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#The_problem_of_d...
- lolinder 2y ago
  > I reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think there probably are very simple (read: small) animals that aren't conscious. Yes, I can definitely agree with this. I'm more reacting to the idea that it's somehow an unresolved scientific question whether dogs and cats and other mammals have emotions. There isn't a sufficiently large difference in neurology between humans and other mammals for me to believe that they're entirely unconscious machines while we're not. > I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable. Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction. Yes, it's a worthy basis of distinction, but is it a qualitative one or a quantitative one? Do we possess intelligence that is orders of magnitude higher than the next smartest mammals, or do we actually possess something that other mammals have none of? It's not clear to me that landing on the moon and discovering quantum mechanics require a different kind of mental process than building a beaver dam or discovering a use for medicinal herbs. That feels more to me like the same sort of thing multiplied a thousand fold. And if it is the same sort of thing, then we're not projecting emotions onto our dogs, our dogs actually do have emotions of the same general sort that we do.
mi3law 2y ago
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.
cupcakecommons 2y ago
Humans seem pretty categorically different to me based on their behavior alone.
- makk 2y ago
  Agree. Humans, unlike other animals, film themselves mating.
  - tcmart14 2y ago
    [dead]
carlosjobim 2y ago
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.
- maxbond 2y ago
  Have you, as an adult, had a relationship with an animal, like a cat or a dog? I was thinking about this once, why I believe my cat was conscious and was a person. I came to the conclusion that the relationship was a sort of epistemology, and that I knew my cat was a person, had a personality, and loved me because I understood the relationship. When my cat was passing, all they wanted to do was spend time with me. I realized this was true not just of my cat, but with every human in my life, as well. How do I know my friends are people? How do I know they care for me? Because I have a relationship with them and I understand the relationship. That's not the sort of factual knowledge I can express and transfer to you. But it's real all the same.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    People swear they have emotional relationships with their pet lizards, who totally lack the part of the brain that can feel emotions…
    - maxbond 2y ago
      Zhuangzi: See how the minnows come out and dart around as they please! That is what fish enjoy! Huizi: You're not a fish - how do you know what fish enjoy? Zhuangzi: You're not I, so how do you know that I don't know what fish enjoy?
      - bowsamic 2y ago
        Oh then demonstrate your supernatural abilities to know what a lizard is feeling to us
lebuffon 2y ago
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".
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Do you know any other author discussing this topic ?
  - lebuffon 2y ago
    Sorry, no I do not.
brotchie 2y ago
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.
- kazinator 2y ago
  > It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the more "conscious" they are. Why not? > Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain. The more complex and detailed the model, the more conscious. Why not?
  - taneq 2y ago
    Because that’s not what consciousness means! Because it never means anything, because it’s never defined in any useful way. ‘What is it like to be like a HN thread?’ This is just pushing the missing definition into ‘to be’ . (Metzinger’s transparent self-model description is the closest I’ve read to something actually useful.)
  - whodidntante 2y ago
    Dogs can hear far better than people. They can see far better. They not only smell better, but they smell differently - two independent nostrils, with the ability to hold a smell across breaths - they smell in stereo and can sense past movements of animals by smell differential. They can also sense emotions, infer intent, and are very aware of, respond to, and participate in social interactions and hierarchies across species. Their sensory world is richer, deeper, and more complex than ours, and their ability to interact within that environment is, in many ways, quicker and more efficient than we are able to do in our environment. We obviously have far greater intellectual capability. And have created an environment where these capabilities are needed/required, one where dogs rely on us to survive. So, I would say that we are more conscious in some ways, dogs are more conscious in other ways.
kazinator 2y ago
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.
- NayamAmarshe 2y ago
  and Solipsism is nothing but egocentrism at the end of the day.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
> 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.
anotherreaso 2y ago
[flagged]
maxbond 2y ago
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.
- rogerclark 2y ago
  That first sentence is one of the best-distilled insights I've ever read on HN.
  - namero999 2y ago
    I concur, was about to express the same sentiment. I will steal this, sorry-not-sorry :)
  - throwitaway222 2y ago
    I saw your comment and had to re-read it. Damn insightful yes.
- defrost 2y ago
  > I was impressed because I wouldn't have noticed those books being out of place. Orthogonal to any argument about conciousness in cats, the most probable explanation is your cat was aware of your scent freshly attached to a book that previously didn't carry it. In my experience cats are acutely aware of scents, particularly known and especially unknown scents in new places. Had you been an unknown cat the chances are extremely high your cat would have urinated on your book.
agumonkey 2y ago
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.
- ssijak 2y ago
  Who says that you have more detail. An eagle can see much farther and in more detail than you, and yeah it can fly. A bat has sonar. Some orient by Earths magnetic field which we do not detect. Etc.
  - agumonkey 2y ago
    It was just an extrapolation regarding brain size. But you're right it's just a napkin theory.
    - Thorham 2y ago
      Then compare orca brains to ours. Theirs are larger and more wrinkly.
      - agumonkey 2y ago
        Yeah but their body is immensely larger, which I assume will require more neurons for basic biological duties. (yet another napkin theory)
vasilipupkin 2y ago
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.
- stoperaticless 2y ago
  I gather that there is no simple definition of concious, and it mostly is “same as humans”.
- diffxx 2y ago
  Do you believe that all humans possess equal amounts of consciousness?
  - RoyalHenOil 2y ago
    Not even the same human possesses equal amounts of consciousness! There are times when I am particularly conscious because I am concentrating, there are times when I am less conscious because I am in a flow state, and there are times when I am essentially not conscious because I am snoozing. I was also much more conscious when I was a child (because I was more frequently presented with novel experiences and had a focused awareness of them) and much less conscious now as an adult (because most of my experiences are familiar, so I autopilot more easily). But I certainly would not consider these to be categorically different from each other (except possibly being in a sleep state). I am simply constantly shifting around on the consciousness scale.
- NayamAmarshe 2y ago
  So a human with a lesser IQ and EQ would be less conscious with that logic, hence worth much less and yet the concept of justice applies equally. Intelligence is not consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that animates otherwise dead matter.
sim7c00 2y ago
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.
- lukan 2y ago
  How else could you justify treating them as a mere raw ressource in factory?
  - 4ggr0 2y ago
    I genuienly think that this is one of the biggest factors when talking about this topic. Lots of people seem very defensive when talking about it. Because if they admit or speculate that animals have some form of consciousness, they also admit that they're responsible for killing thousands of conscious beings. As for myself, I can't believe that animals aren't concious.
    - sim7c00 2y ago
      I never really thought about it that way. killing loads of conscious beings. Until for Eid in Morocco I got the honour of helping to kill a sheep so the family could eat it. (100+ people tribe) I am still not a vegetarian, but do have a much more realistic view on what's really on our plates now. - I don't think eating meat is bad though. I _do_ eat a lot less meat now. (smaller portions and less frequent). Predators eat prey, but they don't mass produce their prey. For some random context: the sheep killing there - it was an old sheep, lived a blessed life loved by the community, to be eaten at an old age at Eid someday. Everyday the women in the village and maybe their kids will take the sheep to graze etc. and give them love like any farmer loves his animals. He was only scared moments before the deed was done as then they are moved to a little separate pen and likely realize it's the end for them. The families usually own only a few sheep, different ages. Occasionally when one ages out it's slaughtered. - Cows and other larger animals such as Camels are for extremely special occasions and actually rarely eaten. (once a year, or at a marriage or something special like that.) I wish it was feasible in my country for example to do similar things, which are much more friendly to the animals involved, but it's litteraly ILLEGAL. funny how that works...
dsego 2y ago
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.
User23 2y ago
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.
- RoyalHenOil 2y ago
  The Great Oxidation Event was caused by cyanobacteria — which are an extremely far cry from the intelligent, multicellular animals that are under discussion here. Saying that chimpanzee cognition is categorically different from human cognition because cyanobacteria lack a sense of morality is like saying that you and I have categorically different reproductive functions because mushrooms produce spores.
mattmaroon 2y ago
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.
- tejohnso 2y ago
  > I think what you’re suggesting has been the prevailing view among biologists for decades. It’s uncontroversial to say they’re conscious. Then why do we have a subhead the likes of "A series of experiments have led a number of scientists to say animals may be conscious." Makes it seems as though some major discovery is afoot.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Nobody will click on or continue reading to see ad impressions if it said “biologists still think animals are conscious”. Or “biologists differ over the meaning of consciousness and which exact animals qualify.” Whenever you want to know why news sites do what they do, it’s so they can serve more ads. That’s the business model now. Also most science reporting is not good. They’re quoting an econ professor. These articles are really written by someone with a deep understanding of a subject matter. Notice they’re not giving you examples of noted biologists who think all animals are not conscious. There are few to none. The only statement in here that’s interesting is that bees may be conscious. I think you’d get push back on that, depending on your definition, and the article does mention the difficulty of definition of consciousness.
jprete 2y ago
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.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Maybe "Biblical Support" as in a strict reading of the bible . But definitely Christians have 'interpreted' the Bible in ways to minimize animals as sub-human, without souls, no spirit, etc... These discussions are ancient times stand-ins for what today we might label 'consciousness'. To say the bible didn't strictly discuss 'consciousness' or 'automata' is ignoring that Christians think 'self' resides in the 'soul' so if animals don't' have them, then what are they? automata seems logical, but they didn't have the word for it. What is something that moves around but doesn't have a soul to move it?
  - RoyalHenOil 2y ago
    Historically, Christians believed that animals had souls. The soul was a necessary requirement for animate life. This was the idea behind spontaneous generation, for example: souls find their way into rotting meat and maggots are born.
  - jprete 2y ago
    I expect that most ancient people believed that animals were conscious. It's impossible to spend a lot of time with any mammal and think of it as not being aware of anything. For what it's worth, my Googling suggested that the Bible leans in the direction of animals having souls and going to the afterlife, as well.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      Of course there are a million opinions on the Bible. I would have said on my quick search it is opposite, animals aren't conscious. But these are rough searches. My experience with American Christians, Catholic, Southern Baptist, is that animals don't have souls, and are not conscious. But, there is some cute story about some cute kid asking the Pope if dogs go to heaven, and he said 'good dogs'. So that might have accidentally opened the doors.
throwitaway222 2y ago
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.
ojosilva 2y ago
> 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.
- RoyalHenOil 2y ago
  This is not a definition I have ever heard anyone use before, and I suspect that's because the definition is so constrained that it's not useful for scientific or philosophical discussion. If you reserve "consciousness" as a word to be exclusively for humans, what word do you suggest instead when discussing consciousness as experienced by both humans and non-humans? And once you have come up with such a word, how do you plan to convince everyone to give up the common word they have been using for generations and replace it with this new word? I would suggest, instead, that you co-opt a different, less common word for your unusual use case so as to minimally inconvenience everyone else. "Sapient" seems like a much better option to me, since it is derived from "Homo sapiens" and suggestive of something more unique to humans. Or, better yet, coin a new word and stop trying to change the definitions of existing words.
- bangaroo 2y ago
  how did you arrive at that conclusion? i feel like there's still just an element of "it's this way because it is this way" to this argument. the entire point of the article and the discussion is the fact that we perhaps assume our experience to be unique when it's not. it could be just as possible that animals experience consciousness in the exact way we do but simply have different innate motivations and interests that lead us to believe they're making decisions with less awareness than we do. it's making the assumption that the human approach to living and existing is the correct approach and then everything around us is "below it." reading the article you see that there isn't even a clear understanding of what denotes consciousness, so it seems weird to just say "well whatever it is, it isn't that" based on the arbitrary desire to set our species apart from others.
bane 2y ago
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.
arielweisberg 2y ago
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.
gorgoiler 2y ago
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.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> 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.
mc32 2y ago
The Bible does not explain the Chinese, Japanese, etc. take on consciousness. So it must be something other than religion guiding this thought.
MaxBarraclough 2y ago
> 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.
nomel 2y ago
> 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.

mgh2 2y ago

> 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...

lolinder 2y ago
The evidence: animals exhibit numerous behaviors that resemble our emotional responses in various ways. Anyone who has ever had a pet dog or a cat will have countless anecdotes. The explanation with the fewest moving parts is that our brain and hormonal systems look an awful lot like the brain and hormonal systems of a cat or a dog and therefore the simplest explanation is that cats and dogs have emotions and thought patterns that resemble ours in very meaningful ways. The actual scientific explanations that people tend to put forward (as discussed in TFA) revolve around us projecting our own thoughts and emotions onto the animals. To me that seems substantially less rational than just believing that similar neurological structures produce similar neurological results.
- mgh2 2y ago
  Are you sure that is not just mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution? Is like saying ChatGPT has conscience because it can talk or "think" like us...are we missing something here? I am not opposing your view, just trying to understand the logic - perplexed by downvotes on a simple question...
  - captainclam 2y ago
    “Mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution” would be a much less parsimonious explanation than just having those mechanisms, i.e. Occam’s razor.
    - byproxy 2y ago
      "Occam's razor" is not some natural law so I fail to understand how invoking it goes towards proving anything.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    I'm not sure about the downvotes, I couldn't even downvote you if I wanted to because you replied to me. I'm operating on the assumption that evolution happened as Darwin described it. As another reply to you notes, darwinian evolution precludes sharp divides between species in favor of a gradual development of complexity over time. A believer in darwinian evolution should expect consciousness and emotions and other mental processes to manifest on a continuum, which means that the question of animal consciousness should be about as controversial as the question of our own consciousness (which is definitely an open topic of philosophical debate but is also impossible to solved with an experiment).
    - jemmyw 2y ago
      Not that I believe this, but there could be an intelligence cliff where you get to a certain level and suddenly consciousness and self awareness appear. That is a mechanism where gradual change could lead to stepped differences.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
Ever since Darwin, the scientific view has been descent with modification. We're all branches of the same phylogenetic tree, and many of those branches are very close to us, such as other mammals. We have topologically similar digestive, immune, circulatory, respiratory, nervous, and reproductive systems. While there are important differences between, say, the foods that a cat and a human can digest, the differences in how the overall system works are small compared to the similarities. Therefore, it's a reasonable starting guess that humans and closely-related animals would have many structural similarities in their mental experience, although with some differences. It tilts the balance towards needing evidence that other animals are not conscious, rather than needing evidence that they are. And when we look for evidence, we see intelligence even in branches as far away from us as crows and octopuses, suggesting that maybe consciousness (which we guess might correlate with intelligence) has deep roots in that tree, or else emerges independently quite easily.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  Speaking of consciousness and tress: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcs.1578 https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcs.1...
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    There's definitely more going on with trees than we once thought, but I'm at least confident that wherever human consciousness comes from, it certainly must be tied to the nervous system. If we inherited consciousness from our ancestors, then the most distant common ancestor that we could possibly have inherited it from would be at most around the point where we branched from jellyfish. So if trees or other plants are conscious in their own way, then they also must have independently evolved it in their own way; it's not a trait that they share with us based on common heritage alone.

deanCommie 2y ago

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.

Coffeewine 2y ago

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.

cupcakecommons 2y ago
Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediately - which can be credibly argued is part of why many humans drink alcohol.
- timeon 2y ago
  > Easy example. As currently drunk person, I admit that my senses are impaired. But doubting my consciousness makes me doubt yours. Yes there can be scale of drunkness so is different scale of thinking. Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense.
  - cupcakecommons 2y ago
    I'm talking about being extremely drunk. I have a friend that "woke up" walking in a park after a night of drinking. If he was already walking exactly who woke up? My friend the human-animal was walking already. My friend the human-consciousness woke up. It was his consciousness coming back online as the ethanol was metabolized in the parts of his brain that afforded his consciousness.
    - p_j_w 2y ago
      Did your friend actually wake up or did they start forming memories again?

cf100clunk 2y ago

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

lolinder 2y ago
Yep, I meant that to be included, that's why the sentence ends with a reference to how people usually read the Bible. I'm a Christian myself but I definitely think that the Indian religions get animals and animal rights far more correct than we usually do.
slibhb 2y ago
Sure but in Hinduism and Buddhism, humans are higher than animals. In general, only humans are capable of escaping samsara.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Right, but that concept is itself very compatible with darwinian evolution. Humans are the current pinnacle of evolution when it comes to intelligence, but that doesn't mean everything else is entirely unintelligent.
  - psychoslave 2y ago
    When we are judge and party, it’s easier to come with the scoring scale that put ourself on the top of the board. If intelligence definition is not imposed on us by nature itself, then we can only conclude that we are indeed great at producing evaluation scales that will flatter our egos. I guess many other animals are also very good at that game though. If you take "survival of the fittest" (species, not individuals, should I recall?) as the criteria, then we measurably can’t bluster anymore. Many other species survived for far longer than we did, and maybe will outlast us after we finished to disturb so much the environment condition on which our lives depend.

robwwilliams 2y ago

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.

lolinder 2y ago
But that reason relies on a presupposition that human language is categorically different than animal language, which is also a claim that relies on presupposing a categorical distinction which must be disproven, rather than starting from the assumption that human and animal communication exists along an evolutionary spectrum. And how did we arrive at this categorical distinction becoming axiomatic? As you say, by way of Descartes, who was a devout Christian who famously tried to derive the existence of God from the fact of his own consciousness. Far from being a separate and distinct reason for downplaying animal consciousness, my sense is that animal language is downplayed precisely because it would imply consciousness, and we're working within a system that axiomatically believes animals are not conscious.
- Jensson 2y ago
  Animal language is obviously on the same level as human laughter and cries and whimpers. Animals don't teach language to each other like humans do. But I don't see what that has to do with consciousness, to me animal language is much closer to consciousness than human language. Consciousness is all about emotions, not language, and animal language that humans also has is directly tied to emotional expression. Our ML models managed to mimic human language before animal language, human language is more robotic. Sci-fi shows tend to also do this, robots talk with voices that lacks the animal components of humans and instead just do the human language. So the popular view is that animal language is the conscious parts and human language is the computational/intelligence part.
  - 2y ago

antisthenes 2y ago

> 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.

okasaki 2y ago

> 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.

goatlover 2y ago
Why would material conditions matter? Hunters and gatherers used animals they hunted, and began domestication. And so has almost every society since. Even if it’s to help plow their crops or to fend off wild animals and keep the vermin population in check.
madaxe_again 2y ago
I think this is entirely it - and while we are still reliant on animals for meat and food production, they are no longer made to toil to anywhere near the degree they once were in the developed world, and so this has allowed a shift in our sensibilities. As you say, it’s a practical issue. In much the same way as esteemed 19th century scientists argued that black people, brown people, Irish people, women, were not truly people, as this made for an easier moral justification for ill-treatment, slavery and genocide, they argued that animals were also insensate simulacra, only giving the appearance of life - for again, it is harder to beat and enslave a living, feeling, thinking being than it is a dishwasher. Much of what we take as straightforward facts of reality are actually just old, bad ideas, and only in the cold light of the morning after do we start to see the error of our ways in the dark that came before.
- czl 2y ago
  Good to remember these observations during war time when “your side” has de-humanized the “other side”.

slibhb 2y ago

> 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.

ben_w 2y ago
I'd guess at the continuum, too — "going against common sense" is, unfortunately, a thing I have seen often enough of true things to reach the conclusion that "common sense" as a phrase means only "inside the Overton window of the person who just said or wrote that". But it's a guess, it has to be, especially as we're not all agreed on what the thing even is in the first place: > About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences. The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#The_problem_of_definition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#The_problem_of_d...
lolinder 2y ago
> I reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think there probably are very simple (read: small) animals that aren't conscious. Yes, I can definitely agree with this. I'm more reacting to the idea that it's somehow an unresolved scientific question whether dogs and cats and other mammals have emotions. There isn't a sufficiently large difference in neurology between humans and other mammals for me to believe that they're entirely unconscious machines while we're not. > I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable. Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction. Yes, it's a worthy basis of distinction, but is it a qualitative one or a quantitative one? Do we possess intelligence that is orders of magnitude higher than the next smartest mammals, or do we actually possess something that other mammals have none of? It's not clear to me that landing on the moon and discovering quantum mechanics require a different kind of mental process than building a beaver dam or discovering a use for medicinal herbs. That feels more to me like the same sort of thing multiplied a thousand fold. And if it is the same sort of thing, then we're not projecting emotions onto our dogs, our dogs actually do have emotions of the same general sort that we do.

mi3law 2y ago

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.

cupcakecommons 2y ago

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

makk 2y ago
Agree. Humans, unlike other animals, film themselves mating.
- tcmart14 2y ago
  [dead]

carlosjobim 2y ago

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.

maxbond 2y ago
Have you, as an adult, had a relationship with an animal, like a cat or a dog? I was thinking about this once, why I believe my cat was conscious and was a person. I came to the conclusion that the relationship was a sort of epistemology, and that I knew my cat was a person, had a personality, and loved me because I understood the relationship. When my cat was passing, all they wanted to do was spend time with me. I realized this was true not just of my cat, but with every human in my life, as well. How do I know my friends are people? How do I know they care for me? Because I have a relationship with them and I understand the relationship. That's not the sort of factual knowledge I can express and transfer to you. But it's real all the same.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  People swear they have emotional relationships with their pet lizards, who totally lack the part of the brain that can feel emotions…
  - maxbond 2y ago
    Zhuangzi: See how the minnows come out and dart around as they please! That is what fish enjoy! Huizi: You're not a fish - how do you know what fish enjoy? Zhuangzi: You're not I, so how do you know that I don't know what fish enjoy?
    - bowsamic 2y ago
      Oh then demonstrate your supernatural abilities to know what a lizard is feeling to us

lebuffon 2y ago

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".

agumonkey 2y ago
Do you know any other author discussing this topic ?
- lebuffon 2y ago
  Sorry, no I do not.

brotchie 2y ago

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.

kazinator 2y ago
> It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the more "conscious" they are. Why not? > Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain. The more complex and detailed the model, the more conscious. Why not?
- taneq 2y ago
  Because that’s not what consciousness means! Because it never means anything, because it’s never defined in any useful way. ‘What is it like to be like a HN thread?’ This is just pushing the missing definition into ‘to be’ . (Metzinger’s transparent self-model description is the closest I’ve read to something actually useful.)
- whodidntante 2y ago
  Dogs can hear far better than people. They can see far better. They not only smell better, but they smell differently - two independent nostrils, with the ability to hold a smell across breaths - they smell in stereo and can sense past movements of animals by smell differential. They can also sense emotions, infer intent, and are very aware of, respond to, and participate in social interactions and hierarchies across species. Their sensory world is richer, deeper, and more complex than ours, and their ability to interact within that environment is, in many ways, quicker and more efficient than we are able to do in our environment. We obviously have far greater intellectual capability. And have created an environment where these capabilities are needed/required, one where dogs rely on us to survive. So, I would say that we are more conscious in some ways, dogs are more conscious in other ways.

kazinator 2y ago

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.

NayamAmarshe 2y ago
and Solipsism is nothing but egocentrism at the end of the day.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

> 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.

anotherreaso 2y ago

[flagged]

maxbond 2y ago

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.

rogerclark 2y ago
That first sentence is one of the best-distilled insights I've ever read on HN.
- namero999 2y ago
  I concur, was about to express the same sentiment. I will steal this, sorry-not-sorry :)
- throwitaway222 2y ago
  I saw your comment and had to re-read it. Damn insightful yes.
defrost 2y ago
> I was impressed because I wouldn't have noticed those books being out of place. Orthogonal to any argument about conciousness in cats, the most probable explanation is your cat was aware of your scent freshly attached to a book that previously didn't carry it. In my experience cats are acutely aware of scents, particularly known and especially unknown scents in new places. Had you been an unknown cat the chances are extremely high your cat would have urinated on your book.

agumonkey 2y ago

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.

ssijak 2y ago
Who says that you have more detail. An eagle can see much farther and in more detail than you, and yeah it can fly. A bat has sonar. Some orient by Earths magnetic field which we do not detect. Etc.
- agumonkey 2y ago
  It was just an extrapolation regarding brain size. But you're right it's just a napkin theory.
  - Thorham 2y ago
    Then compare orca brains to ours. Theirs are larger and more wrinkly.
    - agumonkey 2y ago
      Yeah but their body is immensely larger, which I assume will require more neurons for basic biological duties. (yet another napkin theory)

vasilipupkin 2y ago

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.

stoperaticless 2y ago
I gather that there is no simple definition of concious, and it mostly is “same as humans”.
diffxx 2y ago
Do you believe that all humans possess equal amounts of consciousness?
- RoyalHenOil 2y ago
  Not even the same human possesses equal amounts of consciousness! There are times when I am particularly conscious because I am concentrating, there are times when I am less conscious because I am in a flow state, and there are times when I am essentially not conscious because I am snoozing. I was also much more conscious when I was a child (because I was more frequently presented with novel experiences and had a focused awareness of them) and much less conscious now as an adult (because most of my experiences are familiar, so I autopilot more easily). But I certainly would not consider these to be categorically different from each other (except possibly being in a sleep state). I am simply constantly shifting around on the consciousness scale.
NayamAmarshe 2y ago
So a human with a lesser IQ and EQ would be less conscious with that logic, hence worth much less and yet the concept of justice applies equally. Intelligence is not consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that animates otherwise dead matter.

sim7c00 2y ago

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.

lukan 2y ago
How else could you justify treating them as a mere raw ressource in factory?
- 4ggr0 2y ago
  I genuienly think that this is one of the biggest factors when talking about this topic. Lots of people seem very defensive when talking about it. Because if they admit or speculate that animals have some form of consciousness, they also admit that they're responsible for killing thousands of conscious beings. As for myself, I can't believe that animals aren't concious.
  - sim7c00 2y ago
    I never really thought about it that way. killing loads of conscious beings. Until for Eid in Morocco I got the honour of helping to kill a sheep so the family could eat it. (100+ people tribe) I am still not a vegetarian, but do have a much more realistic view on what's really on our plates now. - I don't think eating meat is bad though. I _do_ eat a lot less meat now. (smaller portions and less frequent). Predators eat prey, but they don't mass produce their prey. For some random context: the sheep killing there - it was an old sheep, lived a blessed life loved by the community, to be eaten at an old age at Eid someday. Everyday the women in the village and maybe their kids will take the sheep to graze etc. and give them love like any farmer loves his animals. He was only scared moments before the deed was done as then they are moved to a little separate pen and likely realize it's the end for them. The families usually own only a few sheep, different ages. Occasionally when one ages out it's slaughtered. - Cows and other larger animals such as Camels are for extremely special occasions and actually rarely eaten. (once a year, or at a marriage or something special like that.) I wish it was feasible in my country for example to do similar things, which are much more friendly to the animals involved, but it's litteraly ILLEGAL. funny how that works...

dsego 2y ago

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.

User23 2y ago

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.

RoyalHenOil 2y ago
The Great Oxidation Event was caused by cyanobacteria — which are an extremely far cry from the intelligent, multicellular animals that are under discussion here. Saying that chimpanzee cognition is categorically different from human cognition because cyanobacteria lack a sense of morality is like saying that you and I have categorically different reproductive functions because mushrooms produce spores.

mattmaroon 2y ago

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.

tejohnso 2y ago
> I think what you’re suggesting has been the prevailing view among biologists for decades. It’s uncontroversial to say they’re conscious. Then why do we have a subhead the likes of "A series of experiments have led a number of scientists to say animals may be conscious." Makes it seems as though some major discovery is afoot.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Nobody will click on or continue reading to see ad impressions if it said “biologists still think animals are conscious”. Or “biologists differ over the meaning of consciousness and which exact animals qualify.” Whenever you want to know why news sites do what they do, it’s so they can serve more ads. That’s the business model now. Also most science reporting is not good. They’re quoting an econ professor. These articles are really written by someone with a deep understanding of a subject matter. Notice they’re not giving you examples of noted biologists who think all animals are not conscious. There are few to none. The only statement in here that’s interesting is that bees may be conscious. I think you’d get push back on that, depending on your definition, and the article does mention the difficulty of definition of consciousness.

jprete 2y ago

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.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Maybe "Biblical Support" as in a strict reading of the bible . But definitely Christians have 'interpreted' the Bible in ways to minimize animals as sub-human, without souls, no spirit, etc... These discussions are ancient times stand-ins for what today we might label 'consciousness'. To say the bible didn't strictly discuss 'consciousness' or 'automata' is ignoring that Christians think 'self' resides in the 'soul' so if animals don't' have them, then what are they? automata seems logical, but they didn't have the word for it. What is something that moves around but doesn't have a soul to move it?
- RoyalHenOil 2y ago
  Historically, Christians believed that animals had souls. The soul was a necessary requirement for animate life. This was the idea behind spontaneous generation, for example: souls find their way into rotting meat and maggots are born.
- jprete 2y ago
  I expect that most ancient people believed that animals were conscious. It's impossible to spend a lot of time with any mammal and think of it as not being aware of anything. For what it's worth, my Googling suggested that the Bible leans in the direction of animals having souls and going to the afterlife, as well.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    Of course there are a million opinions on the Bible. I would have said on my quick search it is opposite, animals aren't conscious. But these are rough searches. My experience with American Christians, Catholic, Southern Baptist, is that animals don't have souls, and are not conscious. But, there is some cute story about some cute kid asking the Pope if dogs go to heaven, and he said 'good dogs'. So that might have accidentally opened the doors.

throwitaway222 2y ago

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.

ojosilva 2y ago

> 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.

RoyalHenOil 2y ago
This is not a definition I have ever heard anyone use before, and I suspect that's because the definition is so constrained that it's not useful for scientific or philosophical discussion. If you reserve "consciousness" as a word to be exclusively for humans, what word do you suggest instead when discussing consciousness as experienced by both humans and non-humans? And once you have come up with such a word, how do you plan to convince everyone to give up the common word they have been using for generations and replace it with this new word? I would suggest, instead, that you co-opt a different, less common word for your unusual use case so as to minimally inconvenience everyone else. "Sapient" seems like a much better option to me, since it is derived from "Homo sapiens" and suggestive of something more unique to humans. Or, better yet, coin a new word and stop trying to change the definitions of existing words.
bangaroo 2y ago
how did you arrive at that conclusion? i feel like there's still just an element of "it's this way because it is this way" to this argument. the entire point of the article and the discussion is the fact that we perhaps assume our experience to be unique when it's not. it could be just as possible that animals experience consciousness in the exact way we do but simply have different innate motivations and interests that lead us to believe they're making decisions with less awareness than we do. it's making the assumption that the human approach to living and existing is the correct approach and then everything around us is "below it." reading the article you see that there isn't even a clear understanding of what denotes consciousness, so it seems weird to just say "well whatever it is, it isn't that" based on the arbitrary desire to set our species apart from others.

bane 2y ago

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.

arielweisberg 2y ago

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.

gorgoiler 2y ago

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.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

> 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.

mc32 2y ago

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

MaxBarraclough 2y ago

> 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.

nomel 2y ago

> 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.