At the Francis Crick Memorial Conference in Cambridge last month, a collection of internationally recognized experts on consciousness took an unusual step, as science conferences go: they issued a declaration (pdf). The subject was whether or not non-human animals could be considered “conscious.” (See discussion by Octopus Chronicles, Christof Koch, io9.) The spirit of the declaration was in the direction of saying “pretty much, yeah,” although they tried to stick to what could be scientifically discussed. Here’s the upshot of the declaration:
The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
Even the experts don’t necessarily agree on a definition of “consciousness,” so the declaration doesn’t come right out and say “animals are conscious.” But the authors basically agree that the mental supervenes on the physical, so whatever consciousness may be, it must have some neurological substrate — some parts of the brain that do the work. The point they’re making is, whatever those parts are, some animals have them too.
I don’t have a well-thought-out position on this, at least as far as the big-picture consequences are concerned. Obviously human beings are animals, so we shouldn’t be surprised that we share neurological workings. And obviously (I would argue) consciousness is not located somewhere simple and discrete in the brain (like the pineal gland) — it has grown up gradually, and makes use of various parts of the brain, so it’s not surprising to find aspects of consciousness involving pre-cortical structures. We are part of the evolution of the biosphere, not something standing outside of it.
On the other hand, whether it’s qualitative or merely quantitative, there is something different about human beings. We’re the only species that builds cars, if you want a blunt way of putting it. We’re the only species that sets up political action committees, and does contour integration. (Usually not at the same time.) The human brain seems to represent some kind of phase transition with respect to the brains of non-human animals. It might be a gradual, second-order transition, or it might be an abrupt, first-order transition. We don’t really know, and that’s why it’s important to tackle these difficult scientific questions (and not make up our minds about the answers ahead of time).
The real-world question is how our increasing understanding of the relationship between human and animal neurology should affect how we treat non-human animals. It’s not an easy one, and saying “they’re not people so we can do whatever we want” or “humans are just animals and we should treat every animal with equal dignity” both seem like simplistic cop-outs to me. I’m just glad the science is moving forward, so we can increasingly base our behaviors on reality rather than on vague guesses.
If consciousness is ’emergent behavior’ of a large number of neurons and their interconnections (as is argued by modern biologists) then there is indeed no reason not to assume other entities than humans can have consciousness. Heck, even non-biological entities could, given enough complexity.
However, that complexity also forms an upper bound on the level of consciousness – and it’s up to our arbitrary standards to put a line somewhere: this is consciousness, this is not.
The ‘car’ argument does make sense in this regard – we humans surely have a more complex brain than all (or at least the vast majority of) other animals.
17. Elizabeth Davies Says:
“It seems to me that humans are the only ones who actually think about being conscious, or wonder who else might be.”
How do you know this is so? As I observe my cats leisurely bathing in the warmth of the afternoon sun, I know they are pondering their divinity.
First, thanks to Francis Crick for taking on one of the truly difficult problems of contemporary science. Seems like the “stuff of the universe” is not as complex in some ways as the “mental stuff of which we are made”. Second, his instincts were quite right. We need to have a better understanding of what we mean by consciousness before we can even begin discussing where it may be found. A major confounder of the problem is the tendency of many to equate consciousness with the chatter our ‘conscious’ minds continuously make, which both Buddhists and neuroscientists (see “My Stroke of Insight” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor) ascribe to an overactive left-brain storyteller. If anyone has ever laughed at their own joke, surprised as others as it came out as spoken word, or suddenly found themselves “watching themselves” in conversation, amazed at the perception and quality of the ideas they themselves were spouting, they will realize that consciousness is a much deeper and complex phenomenon than previously realized. Perhaps a useful approach would be to try to understand the evolutionary advantages provided by consciousness. If there is an evolutionary advantage to humans that have allowed us to survive and produce offspring, would there not be a competitive and equally significant advantage to (some) other organisms in an increasingly complex world? How much of this could be observed in behaviour? How do we separate intelligence from consciousness? I keep thinking back to the video of the octopus clambering out of his tank and crossing the laboratory in which he/she was housed in order to make a midnight snack of fish in a separate tank, then sneaking back into his own tank. Why do this only when no-one was around? What understanding of the world does this imply? How does it all fit?
Woof. Those experts apparently have too much time on their hands. Perhaps at their next conference they can get all worked up and officially declare that all dogs go to heaven.
Save the whales; kill your unborn children.
Save “animal consciousness” from us animals.
I’m tired of people who tell me how smart they are but demonstrate otherwise.
Consciousness may have begun with the moment a creature sensed something in it mouth and a nerve impulse triggered it to close and consume the food. It is not accident that the key organs of four of the five senses and the core neurological mass – the brain- are all located near the oral cavity. Let me know if there is species where this is not true. I cannot think of one.
Consciousness is directly related to one of the features of life – metabolism. Consciousness at its most primitive state is for finding food. It combines the sense organs to find food with the neurological apparatus to direct the organism to catch it and consume it. Evolution’s somewhat haphazard process of converting, enhancing, and modifying things serving one purpose to other purposes leads us to social behavior, language, and calculus. Rationality and science are advanced forms of consuming the world to satisfy the hunger for knowledge.
“Evolution’s somewhat haphazard process of converting, enhancing, and modifying things serving one purpose to other purposes leads us to social behavior, language, and calculus. Rationality and science are advanced forms of consuming the world to satisfy the hunger for knowledge.”–Jim Cross in comment 32
Wow Jim, that is perfectly stated!
Taking Russ Abbott’s (#2) definition of consciousness as the having of experiences, then contra Ken Miller (#19), I think there’s been progress in figuring out the neural substrates of consciousness. Studies of neural activity which contrast conscious and unconscious capacities indicate that phenomenal experience is associated with widely distributed but highly integrated neural processes involving communication between multiple functional sub-systems in the brain, each of which plays a more or less specialized role in representing features of the world and body (Kanwisher, 2001; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001; Jack & Shallice, 2001; Parvizi & Damasio, 2001, Crick & Koch, 2003). Such processes, it is hypothesized, constitute a distributed, ever-changing, but functionally integrated ‘global workspace’ (Baars, 1988; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001). These (slightly outdated) references are at http://www.naturalism.org/kto.htm#Neuroscience
It’s my impression that more recent work continues to suggest that experience is entailed by certain sorts of behaviorally adaptive informational states. There’s no consensus about nature of that entailment, but I think representationalism holds promise, http://www.naturalism.org/appearance.htm
Humans have spent hundreds of years failing to recognise that members of their own species (women, people of other colours) were as ‘conscious’ as themselves, spawning debate as to whether they had ‘souls’ or should be accorded the same rights as themselves. We’ve gotten past that now (or at least some of us have) but the fact remains that our own ‘theory of mind’ is somewhat woeful. If we can barely grant sentience to to other human beings, whom we should be able to understand fairly well, what chance is there that we will be able to understand mindscapes that are likely to be vastly different from our own? There will be some overlap between species experiences, we all eat and sleep for instance but given that we dont fly, see the same wavelengths of light, have vastly different sensitivities to smells and so on, we should start by not putting consciousness/sentience on a sliding scale and maybe see it as slightly overlapping, but separate forms of emergent phenomena – heading in different but not necessarily better or worse directions. So no, animals cant build cars or design aeroplanes; but I cant fly 12000 miles across the planet using my own muscles -who is to say which experience feels more ‘alive’?
#35:
Sean seems to be implying that a certain amount of suffering in less conscious creatures is justifiable to him if it is required for scientific progress. Sentimental notions of ‘feeling alive’ are probably no mach for our curiosity and lust for power. We are monstrous that way. We weep, and reap the benefits of our injustice… no doubt.
Who cares? Why is consciousness such a big deal?
One more reason to extend basic human rights to at least our closest relatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_personhood
5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet
how the divine pen of Michel N. crushed the international atheist movement
skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18660
youtube.com/watch?v=s3lwG4MytSI
one applicant right here…
get the POINT, Randi….
for lies on top of lies
youtube.com/watch?v=bbmXpNEFipE
do you think you can threaten my right to FREE SPEECH?
what if I told you that I am not who you think I am….
Not Dennis Markuze – but a FAN!
youtube.com/watch?v=nvatDdOWcLw&lc
you’re not the center of the universe!
youtube.com/watch?v=3yRpSNIOwA4
a dishonest liar
____
youtube.com/watch?v=ruQFh_TkPto
WHINE WHINE WHINE
______________
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHbYJfwFgOU
which WORLD-VIEW will not exist, sh*thead?
——-
BRING IT ON!
“The human brain seems to represent some kind of phase transition with respect to the brains of non-human animals.”
Stick to Physics, Sean.
Philip
Philip Low,
I might agree with Sean on this one. I think there have been several phase transitions in evolution of the human brain. The next to most recent probably occurred 50-100,000 years ago with the development of more sophisticated cultural artifacts, such as art, and presumably with that came additional symbol manipulation capabilities. I think a recent transition has occurred sometime in the last 10,000 years which has made possible mathematics and higher rationality. I think there will be more transitions in the future.
The Interactive Schrodinger’s Cat… http://www.phobe.com/s_cat/s_cat.html
One thing that always struck me about consciousness is how seemingly useless it is from the evolutionary point of view. I’m not in one boat with creationists or suchlike, but I tend to agree with Roger Penrose in that this phenomenon of self-consciousness (“I think, therefore I am”) doesn’t yet have a satisfying scientific explanation. If living organism is nothing but machine for self-replication and survival, why does it need to observe it’s own existence? For me it seems that if brain was just a risk-calculating computer, not knowing doubts and not aware of the fact it’s living, it would perform evolutionary tasks just as well, if not better.
#43
Self-awareness is one aspect of consciousness that is associated with species with relatively complex social systems. Apes, dolphins, orcas, elephants, and humans pass the mirror test and they all have some degree of language capability and complex social structures. They all also have brain sizes above the Dubois line so self-awareness and complex social systems require larger brains, probably to figure out what others in our group are thinking or may be planning to do.
I write in more details about this here:
http://broadspeculations.com/2011/06/26/into-the-hive/
As a long-time dog owner, there’s no question in my mind that animals can experience consciousness and emotions. But I agree with Sean that there is a discontinuity on the scale with humans on one side and all animals on the other.
To me, an example of that difference is that humans have complex languages they use to invent and tell complex stories. I don’t believe there are any Sagans or Shakespeares in the animal kingdom.
And while it’s cute to ponder what cats think, I also believe humans are the only ones who truly wonder, “Why?” And then try so very hard to answer that question.
As for the evolutionary value, perhaps our consciousness is a sign of something more than evolution, but more to the point, it may be what helps us escape this planet and explore the galaxy, thus spreading our DNA after our sun dies.
As Mark (post 4) mentioned : dog owners will notice consciousness in their pet no matter what science defines as consciousness. Now I saw some studies that showed that adult dogs have the IQ of about a 2 year old with some smarter dogs comparing to a three year old almost. They found that dogs can understand the meaning of about 200 words, not just recognize. They have a concept of numbers too, up to around five objects. When they lowered one snack behind a screen, then another and then added one more behind the screen the dogs acted surprised when they saw three snacks eventually. Socially dogs were more advanced than babies due to complex social structures in their lives.
Now the problem is how one defines consciousness in the end and I think that it will always be a partially arbitrary decision from our perspective.
There are for example studies out there that would even give trees some form of consciousness in their own way. Because of the fact that some secrete particular chemicals in the air when for example a tiger claws at them. Researchers then noticed that nearby trees picked this up and changed something internally so they would get less damaged in case the same happened to them.
I wouldn’t call this consciousness as they did since it’s basically just a reaction to an external impulse. But then again, what we do is also reactions to external factors. I once saw a lecture about the problem of defining these things. This kind of ties in with #35. One of the things they spoke about was also how we aren’t really able to judge how other beings experience life. While we excel at intelligence they excel in areas as vision, hearing, etc.
I think part of the problem in these discussions is a matter of definition.
Consciousness to some means self-awareness. To others consciousness is awareness or sensual perception perhaps with some ability to act on the perceptions. To others consciousness is closely aligned with intelligence and would include self-awareness and higher thinking abilities.
I think we need to think of these things on a scale from awareness with ability to act, self-awareness, and then higher capabilities.
It is helpful to remember than even we perform much of the routine activities of our daily lives at lower end of the scale and perhaps rarely or occasionally are on the upper end. When I drive to work in the mornings, most of the act of driving is on automatic pilot. If I see a traffic jam ahead from an accident, I might quickly start weighing options to take side roads. After I arrive at work, I might reflect on how lucky I was to not be involved in the accident that caused the traffic jam.
In one drive I went from amoeba to dog to human.
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@David: Surely the MOST enlightened point in this discussion (BTW, I loved it!)
” Can we eat people incapable of performing contour integrals?”
thanks that