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I’ve never understood these questions. “Are animals conscious?” Well, could you give me the definition of consciousness? No you can’t. So now you’re asking me

I’ve never understood these questions. “Are animals conscious?” Well, could you give me the definition of consciousness? No you can’t. So now you’re asking me both to define it and show if animals have it or not. Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes. Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes. Can animals direct attention? Yes. Can animals remember? Yes. Can animals learn? Yes. Are animals self-aware? Some of them, some only sometimes, some not. To think of consciousness as a dichotomy instead of a spectrum is baffling to me. As is thinking of consciousness as being a single, indivisible thing.

Saturdays 2y ago
I'm reading this book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and it's quite fascinating to think deeply about what is Consciousness. I think the book does a good job of defining and explaining Consciousness. Highly recommend it to think critically about the subject, but I think your point is valid, consciousness occurs for many things, and then it doesn't have to many other things. You don't need consciousness to nearly instantly detect that b comes after a sequence of {a,b,a,b,a,?}. You need consciousness to think about _why_ b comes after though. When you go for a swim and then recall the event, you most likely recall it in an objective or third person way mentally - the image or visual in your memory is that third person view.. but that's not actually how you experienced it. I wonder how much of that applies to animals, and I wonder if we can ever get that answer.
zzo38computer 2y ago
Of course that is a good question, although I would expect that with the most useful or most reasonable or best definition (which is itself not entirely clear, though), that the answer will probably be, yes, animals are conscious (although not always all the time; unconsciousness and partial consciousness can occur too). Scientific experiments can detect specific things and specific details (if tested in an appropriate way), but this would be something specific rather than just being called "consciousness", is what I should think.
tuatoru 2y ago
Do animals have friends, enemies, cliques? Yes. Do animals play practical jokes on each other? Yes. I've seen all of these in cows.
- sleepychu 2y ago
  Cow practical joke anecdotes, please! :-)
  - tuatoru 2y ago
    Real simple stuff. Luring a cow over near a bank and then pushing her down it. Pretending there's some lush grass in the gap between trees. Nudging each other into the electric fence, or into the gatepost when going through a gate.
- King-Aaron 2y ago
  Cows are just big dogs
  - naikrovek 2y ago
    big, curious dogs, sorta like cats. they want to know what you're doing when they see you and they want to smell everything you're doing and they want to play all the damn time. I did IT work on a farm for a few weeks and was there 3-5 days a week. The cows were far more active than any other animal I saw. They clearly liked each other and had friends and non-friends in the group. They would run and walk dozens and dozens of miles per day and a horse would move 1/4 mile in total over the course of an entire day.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  One my cats attempts to lure me around the back of the shed so that she can then race out the other side, down the driveway, and jump the fence to precious freedom. She has a number of variations on this theme, and with each failure she tries something slightly different. Until I catch her and bring her back inside. The reason I know this is because, before I was aware that it was happening, it succeeded at least twice. (I'm picturing people reading this saying, in Lisa Simpsons's voice, "is my brother dumber than a hamster? Hamster two, Bart zero" - because that's what my inner voice is saying right now).
b800h 2y ago
This problem is compounded by a certain class of neuroscientist, who upon hitting the hard (scientifically unresolvable) problem of consciousness, declares that consiousness is something else, like neural correlates of stimulation. This invariably causes disappointment when attending mainstream lectures with the word "consciousness" in the title.
nikkwong 2y ago
I think you're over complicating it. When people generally talk about consciousness, they're talking about the phenomenology of awareness in the present moment. It's not really hard to define. It's difficult to establish whether or not an animal is conscious in the way that it's difficult to establish whether another person is conscious. The only evidence we have for consciousness is the fact that we personally experience it ourselves. And because of that, we can't truly know if other's are conscious from a philosophical sense (i.e.—philosophical zombies) but we can posit scientifically that they must be since they share the same brain structure that we do. Now when we're trying to establish scientifically whether or not an animal is conscious or not, it's more difficult because we don't have the subjective experience of being that animal, and we can't philosophically transfer the phenomenology of the experience our brain creates onto theirs. So, while I think the question "are animals conscious?" is well-bounded, it's not one that is currently answerable due to the currently private nature of consciousness. > Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes. Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes. Can animals direct attention? Yes. Can animals remember? Yes. Can animals learn? Yes. Reacting to stimuli is all possible without consciousness—just like crabs react to noxious, painful stimuli without nociceptors. So the phenomena you're describing is not what people are talking about when they're debating consciousness
- navane 2y ago
  Do all people experience your version of consciousness, awareness in the present moment? Or is this overly represented among people debating whether animals have it? Some people don't have an inner monologue.
  - nikkwong 2y ago
    That's totally true and something I don't know the answer to. But it's interesting to ponder if the experience of consciousness is the same for each individual. We believe that consciousness is possibly an emergent phenomena of cognitive processing, but since there is a wide amount of heterogeneity in the makeup of the human mind, it isn't extraordinary to claim that this 'presence in the current moment' may have different flavors for different individuals. The claim that certain individuals lack an inner monologue is a testament to this—I can't imagine what that would be like but that is certainly nothing like my conscious experience is. To me, the lack of an inner monologue sounds very much like the 'dark universe' in which the brain is doing all of the processing and there is no conscious observer to witness the unfolding. I'm sure people without a inner monologue are still conscious.. but—it's interesting to think about how different their experience may be like.
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
Again, without definition then anything measured against an invisible yardstick are just words on a page. Then again, the few months I spent living in Bakersfield CA, led me to question whether some or indeed most of the folks there were just low fidelity NPC's.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  Consciousness must be mipmapped. It only starts to present at a reasonably close distance.
  - ysofunny 2y ago
    energy most certainly is "mipmapped" but this would be a funky way to think about inverse square type of laws
King-Aaron 2y ago
I once watched a spider in a web have to rapidly run around it's web and scoop up it's little baby spiders to escape a flame that was coming close to it. The reaction did not appear to be some kind of mechanical automated reaction - it very clearly had awareness of the danger, and an awareness of it's offspring, and made a coordinated effort to rescue them and move them away to safety. To me - as someone who is not a biologist or a professional in this field - this appears to be consciousness. I couldn't imagine anyone trying to argue against that.
- Vampiero 2y ago
  Optimize a creature for "survival" over billions of years and you get behavior like this. It doesn't require consciousness however. And it's quite hard to ask a spider whether it is conscious or not.
  - adrianN 2y ago
    As the top comment in this thread pointed out, we don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to tell whether a spider has it or not. As far as I know, no observable behavior requires „consciousness“ for most layman definitions of the term.
- efilife 2y ago
  Just FYI, all the it'ses you used in this comment are the wrong ones. Should have been its
  - King-Aaron 2y ago
    Banging it out on my phone, it was automatically putting in apostrophes :(
slumberdisrupt 2y ago
If there is such a thing as consciousness, no matter its variety (like how the viscosity of water varies on a "spectrum" without become its opposites ice or steam), there is by necessity such a thing as non-consciousness. That's just how concepts go.
dandanua 2y ago
I presume many people actually mean self-consciousness when they talk about consciousness. It's the concepts of "I" and "will" that puzzle the most. Anything else can be treated as automatic actions (yet very complicated).
LawrenceKerr 2y ago
Can we deduce from your comment that you are in fact, not conscious? We all know what it's like to be conscious (I presume - my theory of mind is intact but may be flawed). It's obviously the quality of being, i.e. experiencing qualia. And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. (Living) matter that doesn't experience the world, basically. No frame of reference. Unless you believe in panpsychism; then everything is conscious and we can ask ourselves what it's like to be a rock. It's just that the hard problem of consciousness states that we haven't been able to define this "state" in its exact physical, neural correlates, but just because we haven't been able to do that yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists, because otherwise no one would be there to ask or hear the question to begin with. And sure, you can try to break it down into behavior and other properties of a living being, but that is simply side-stepping the hard problem and just ignoring the question of qualia. Then again, there's something like "aphantasia": some people do not have the capacity to mentally visualize anything, and often aren't even aware of that themselves. I can imagine there's something analogous with the quality of consciousness, i.e. literal "NPCs" who do not experience the world from a frame of reference, but are basically non-sentient, human, autonomous agents. That's just a very dangerous line of thought, so don't take that too seriously :)
- senordevnyc 2y ago
  It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists To be precise, it's the only thing I can know for sure exists. I can't know for sure if anyone else knows it.
  - moi2388 2y ago
    What is? Consciousness? Are you conscious when asleep? No? Then how do dreams work? The only thing you can be sure of is that you experience some qualia; that you are conscious is an assumption.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  > And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. I'm not following this line of reasoning. It seems be exactly opposite to panpsychism, which reasons "since I experience qualia, it stands to reason that everything experiences qualia, because I don't know of a state that does not result in qualia". I'm not a confident panpsychist, but that logic seems to make more sense. Unfortunately, it is just as unproveable as the opposite view, just like pretty much everything around qualia.

Saturdays 2y ago

I'm reading this book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and it's quite fascinating to think deeply about what is Consciousness. I think the book does a good job of defining and explaining Consciousness. Highly recommend it to think critically about the subject, but I think your point is valid, consciousness occurs for many things, and then it doesn't have to many other things. You don't need consciousness to nearly instantly detect that b comes after a sequence of {a,b,a,b,a,?}. You need consciousness to think about _why_ b comes after though. When you go for a swim and then recall the event, you most likely recall it in an objective or third person way mentally - the image or visual in your memory is that third person view.. but that's not actually how you experienced it. I wonder how much of that applies to animals, and I wonder if we can ever get that answer.

zzo38computer 2y ago

Of course that is a good question, although I would expect that with the most useful or most reasonable or best definition (which is itself not entirely clear, though), that the answer will probably be, yes, animals are conscious (although not always all the time; unconsciousness and partial consciousness can occur too). Scientific experiments can detect specific things and specific details (if tested in an appropriate way), but this would be something specific rather than just being called "consciousness", is what I should think.

tuatoru 2y ago

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

sleepychu 2y ago
Cow practical joke anecdotes, please! :-)
- tuatoru 2y ago
  Real simple stuff. Luring a cow over near a bank and then pushing her down it. Pretending there's some lush grass in the gap between trees. Nudging each other into the electric fence, or into the gatepost when going through a gate.
King-Aaron 2y ago
Cows are just big dogs
- naikrovek 2y ago
  big, curious dogs, sorta like cats. they want to know what you're doing when they see you and they want to smell everything you're doing and they want to play all the damn time. I did IT work on a farm for a few weeks and was there 3-5 days a week. The cows were far more active than any other animal I saw. They clearly liked each other and had friends and non-friends in the group. They would run and walk dozens and dozens of miles per day and a horse would move 1/4 mile in total over the course of an entire day.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
One my cats attempts to lure me around the back of the shed so that she can then race out the other side, down the driveway, and jump the fence to precious freedom. She has a number of variations on this theme, and with each failure she tries something slightly different. Until I catch her and bring her back inside. The reason I know this is because, before I was aware that it was happening, it succeeded at least twice. (I'm picturing people reading this saying, in Lisa Simpsons's voice, "is my brother dumber than a hamster? Hamster two, Bart zero" - because that's what my inner voice is saying right now).

b800h 2y ago

This problem is compounded by a certain class of neuroscientist, who upon hitting the hard (scientifically unresolvable) problem of consciousness, declares that consiousness is something else, like neural correlates of stimulation. This invariably causes disappointment when attending mainstream lectures with the word "consciousness" in the title.

nikkwong 2y ago

I think you're over complicating it. When people generally talk about consciousness, they're talking about the phenomenology of awareness in the present moment. It's not really hard to define. It's difficult to establish whether or not an animal is conscious in the way that it's difficult to establish whether another person is conscious. The only evidence we have for consciousness is the fact that we personally experience it ourselves. And because of that, we can't truly know if other's are conscious from a philosophical sense (i.e.—philosophical zombies) but we can posit scientifically that they must be since they share the same brain structure that we do. Now when we're trying to establish scientifically whether or not an animal is conscious or not, it's more difficult because we don't have the subjective experience of being that animal, and we can't philosophically transfer the phenomenology of the experience our brain creates onto theirs. So, while I think the question "are animals conscious?" is well-bounded, it's not one that is currently answerable due to the currently private nature of consciousness. > Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes. Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes. Can animals direct attention? Yes. Can animals remember? Yes. Can animals learn? Yes. Reacting to stimuli is all possible without consciousness—just like crabs react to noxious, painful stimuli without nociceptors. So the phenomena you're describing is not what people are talking about when they're debating consciousness

navane 2y ago
Do all people experience your version of consciousness, awareness in the present moment? Or is this overly represented among people debating whether animals have it? Some people don't have an inner monologue.
- nikkwong 2y ago
  That's totally true and something I don't know the answer to. But it's interesting to ponder if the experience of consciousness is the same for each individual. We believe that consciousness is possibly an emergent phenomena of cognitive processing, but since there is a wide amount of heterogeneity in the makeup of the human mind, it isn't extraordinary to claim that this 'presence in the current moment' may have different flavors for different individuals. The claim that certain individuals lack an inner monologue is a testament to this—I can't imagine what that would be like but that is certainly nothing like my conscious experience is. To me, the lack of an inner monologue sounds very much like the 'dark universe' in which the brain is doing all of the processing and there is no conscious observer to witness the unfolding. I'm sure people without a inner monologue are still conscious.. but—it's interesting to think about how different their experience may be like.

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

Again, without definition then anything measured against an invisible yardstick are just words on a page. Then again, the few months I spent living in Bakersfield CA, led me to question whether some or indeed most of the folks there were just low fidelity NPC's.

BLKNSLVR 2y ago
Consciousness must be mipmapped. It only starts to present at a reasonably close distance.
- ysofunny 2y ago
  energy most certainly is "mipmapped" but this would be a funky way to think about inverse square type of laws

King-Aaron 2y ago

I once watched a spider in a web have to rapidly run around it's web and scoop up it's little baby spiders to escape a flame that was coming close to it. The reaction did not appear to be some kind of mechanical automated reaction - it very clearly had awareness of the danger, and an awareness of it's offspring, and made a coordinated effort to rescue them and move them away to safety. To me - as someone who is not a biologist or a professional in this field - this appears to be consciousness. I couldn't imagine anyone trying to argue against that.

Vampiero 2y ago
Optimize a creature for "survival" over billions of years and you get behavior like this. It doesn't require consciousness however. And it's quite hard to ask a spider whether it is conscious or not.
- adrianN 2y ago
  As the top comment in this thread pointed out, we don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to tell whether a spider has it or not. As far as I know, no observable behavior requires „consciousness“ for most layman definitions of the term.
efilife 2y ago
Just FYI, all the it'ses you used in this comment are the wrong ones. Should have been its
- King-Aaron 2y ago
  Banging it out on my phone, it was automatically putting in apostrophes :(

slumberdisrupt 2y ago

If there is such a thing as consciousness, no matter its variety (like how the viscosity of water varies on a "spectrum" without become its opposites ice or steam), there is by necessity such a thing as non-consciousness. That's just how concepts go.

dandanua 2y ago

I presume many people actually mean self-consciousness when they talk about consciousness. It's the concepts of "I" and "will" that puzzle the most. Anything else can be treated as automatic actions (yet very complicated).

LawrenceKerr 2y ago

Can we deduce from your comment that you are in fact, not conscious? We all know what it's like to be conscious (I presume - my theory of mind is intact but may be flawed). It's obviously the quality of being, i.e. experiencing qualia. And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. (Living) matter that doesn't experience the world, basically. No frame of reference. Unless you believe in panpsychism; then everything is conscious and we can ask ourselves what it's like to be a rock. It's just that the hard problem of consciousness states that we haven't been able to define this "state" in its exact physical, neural correlates, but just because we haven't been able to do that yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists, because otherwise no one would be there to ask or hear the question to begin with. And sure, you can try to break it down into behavior and other properties of a living being, but that is simply side-stepping the hard problem and just ignoring the question of qualia. Then again, there's something like "aphantasia": some people do not have the capacity to mentally visualize anything, and often aren't even aware of that themselves. I can imagine there's something analogous with the quality of consciousness, i.e. literal "NPCs" who do not experience the world from a frame of reference, but are basically non-sentient, human, autonomous agents. That's just a very dangerous line of thought, so don't take that too seriously :)

senordevnyc 2y ago
It quite literally is the only thing we can know for sure exists To be precise, it's the only thing I can know for sure exists. I can't know for sure if anyone else knows it.
- moi2388 2y ago
  What is? Consciousness? Are you conscious when asleep? No? Then how do dreams work? The only thing you can be sure of is that you experience some qualia; that you are conscious is an assumption.
Vegenoid 2y ago
> And since we as human beings are conscious, it stands to reason that there are probably other living beings (or matter in general) who are not. I'm not following this line of reasoning. It seems be exactly opposite to panpsychism, which reasons "since I experience qualia, it stands to reason that everything experiences qualia, because I don't know of a state that does not result in qualia". I'm not a confident panpsychist, but that logic seems to make more sense. Unfortunately, it is just as unproveable as the opposite view, just like pretty much everything around qualia.