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

In your sentence I would substitute ''religious'' with other more specific terms like ''Judeo-Christian'' since Jainism and Hinduism have been talking about a continuum of consciousness in all living things for almost 3,000 years: specifically described by them as the Ātman and the Jiva.

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

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

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.

Sure but in Hinduism and Buddhism, humans are higher than animals. In general, only humans are capable of escaping samsara.

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.

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.

Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains generally see intelligence as a continuum. Humans are at the top and are capable of escaping samsara but there is an idea of being able to fall down or up the continuum due to karma.

It's not a coincidence that these are the religions that have created the largest food cultures around eating vegetarian and vegan.

I can't speak for Buddhism but you got Hinduism wrong. Hinduism explicitly allows all Jivas to attain Moksha. There is an entire song on this called "Gajendra Moksha" where Gajendra (the Elephant) is caught by Makara (crocodile) and is rescued by Lord Vishnu, who grants Gajendra Moksha from Samsara. Another example would be that of Jatayu where Lord Rama gives him the status of his father (King Dasharatha) and performs his final rites, and then granting him Moksha. There are innumerable tales of animals getting Moksha in Hindu scriptures. Just provided 2 such instances.

Yes, but don't forget the law of karma and how most of the humans come from animal bodies in the past life. Everybody has a chance to burn their karma as an animal with no free-will and end up with a human-birth where you do have a free-will, and intelligence to use that free-will.

They are also considered conscious in Islam : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animals_in_Islam

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Did your friend actually wake up or did they start forming memories again?

Great question. I would guess he woke up and that this was subsequent to him forming memories again. Memory seems to be a requirement for the kind of self-referential conscious experience that appears to be basically unique to humans. An anesthetic that acts entirely on memory formation and paralyzes the body is in many ways the ideal anesthetic. It's not super unlikely this is how many anesthetics work to at least some degree. If you were administered such a perfect anesthetic it's likely that subjectively you'd experience a distrinct discontinuity in time. Even if you received surgery during that discontinuity, you wouldn't ever suffer from it - not even on some deep non-conscious level. There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.

>There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.

If there's no suffering in the now, then how can one remember that one suffered?

I don't think there's a way define suffering without invoking contextualized pain and an entity that suffers (a self). A self is a complex phenomenon that has a bunch of additional requirements not least of which is the capacity for bridging multiple moments of sensory input that happen in the now.

One can remember that one suffered because one can experience pain in the now and bridge that into a context where the self exists. Selfing is the trick of consciousness, it's not necessarily the natural state of all creatures with sensory equipment or memory - it's an additional trick that only a handful of creatures have.

You are so stunningly Dunning-Kruger wrong here. Neurotransmitters, cortisol and other stress hormones, protein expression, epigenetics, the gut microbiome, all of these and more can lastingly be affected by trauma which is not committed to long term memory.

Nevermind the fact that even if it is forgotten, an awake mind will suffer greatly in the moment - pretending that suffering did not occur because it was forgotten is some next level self-deception.

What about what I said implied anything about various other systems like stress hormones not being lastingly be affected by trauma?

I don't think most surgical patients are concerned with the kind of trauma their cells or gut microbiome sustain during surgery. In fact, if these systems recollected zero trauma it's doubtful the surgical outcome would be positive. When most people discuss suffering they are usually discussing the suffering of their selves. The self requires coordinated effort from the brain. When surgery occurs, it could be well argued you would want to use the least anesthesia necessary to avoid the kind of suffering the patient wants to avoid.

What are you actually on about? Why be purposefully insulting?

ah I see what I wrote. "not even on some deep non-conscious level" yeah that was sloppy nm.

It’s not that your friend “woke up” it’s that his BAC dropped enough for his brain to start correctly forming memories again not that his consciousness “came back online”. It never went away just that no memories were formed during that time

I was trying to explain the relayed subjective experience there. The relayed subjective experience is a discontinuity occurring that's similar to waking up. The self is the thing that relays the experience to other people. You're probably right that consciousness in some expansive sense didn't go away, but that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to what it was like to be the part of my friend that relayed the story to me.

There is an event that made me reconsider driving by night when sleep deprived.

I was driving back home after spending night at friend's place. It was around 4am, the whole family sleeping in the car. I didn't have any alcohol in my system because I always kept a 0 alcohol policy if I have to drive. I knew the trip well because I was driving it several times a months. A few km before reaching home I realized I had no recollection of having driven past a number of the usual landmarks. Yet I couldn't have possibly been completely asleep as the highway had a number of curves and I would have smashed the guardrails had I been totally unconscious.

So my theory was that I was so tired that my brain wasn't recording anything but I had been conscious enough to actually follow the road.

That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.

> That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.

Excellent move for your family and yourself, congratulation.

There are flow states that seem like this. It can be pleasant and it can also be unnerving. Something about memory and the sense of self fall away and it leaves you with a discontinuity despite some part of you obviously carrying on the show while the self was away.

"Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense."

Sure it does, you can see it all around you. It's so incredibly apparent that its actually possible to miss it. It's like a fish denying the existence of water.

Huh? You can absolutely have long in-depth discussions with a blackout drunk person about their current experiences. Are you claiming there’s some level of inebriation where you become a p-zombie?

Of course, there’s also ’incoherently drunk’ which is getting closer to that.

I think there are levels of inebriation disable your ability to contextualize sensory experience within a self. I think it basically amounts to becoming a p-zombie with some caveats.

I think I'll title my memoir: "Drunk people are p-zombies, and other facts I learned on the Internet."

Is someone under twilight anesthesia or in a deep k-hole approaching the state of being a p-zombie? I would think so. Maybe I misunderstand the definition of p-zombie?

A p-zombie is something that looks and acts indistinguishably from a person, but doesn’t have an internal consciousness, ie. it provides sensory data, remembers past events, and exhibits behaviour, but it doesn’t “feel” or “experience” anything. A heavily sedated person who’s barely conscious is just a regular ol’ zombie.

Traditional* p-zombies presumably form and act on memories, as well - another strike against the 'drunk people are p-zombies' argument.

(* - Not to be confused with the 'fast p-zombies' which were briefly popular in 90's existentialist cinema.)

Not if they're super drunk. ;) But yes.

That's fair. Being blackout drunk is more than just memory impairment though - significant parts of the brain unrelated to memory also have impaired function during drunkenness. I would also suggest that there is a level of impairment where the impaired person lacks a sense of self while still being animated and seemingly conscious. This is what makes me think a blackout drunk person seems like a p-zombie (albeit temporarily).

I would consider people that are blackout drunk to be p-zombies given this definition. The part of the blackout person other people interact with, their self, simply isn't there - but they are still animated (mostly) like other people with selves. If you are truly blackout drunk I don't think you experience the moment in a traditional sense (a moment from the perspective of a self). There might be an experience there, but it's radically different from what is normally considered subjective experience. The person can have consciousness clinically (as in they show external signs of consciousness) - but their self is not there and their subjective sense is in discontinuity.

The definition of blackout drunk is not remembering what happened. This /could/ simply be a failure to form lasting memories, rather than a loss of 'self-ness.' If we imagine a switch which put a person's long-term memory in read-only mode, would flipping that switch necessarily remove consciousness?

Consider also that brains have different mechanisms for short and longterm memory; functionally, I think we're typically using read-only long-term memory combined with read-write short-term memory, and then writing distillations into long-term memory as-needed. Disabling long-term memory writes in this model may be functionally indistinguishable from a normal operation, at least on shorter time scales.

(For my own part, when I was younger I occasionally got extreeeemely drunk, and would actually flip into some hyper-vigilance around whether I would remember things later; I remember a number of these 'will I remember this later?' moments, though I can't say how many I forgot!)

When my friend found himself walking around in a new place after a complete discontinuity in experience. Was this discontinuity entirely driven by the impairment of lasting memory formation? Seems possible to me. Problem is, I've never experienced this myself - only heard his story from a close friend (repeatedly) and similar stories from others. The stories could be unreliable - but they suggest that the self was offline and came back while the body was still performing complex externally awake actions. Seems p-zombie-like to me.

They're conflating episodic memory retainment with consciousness. Consciousness process may result in things to store in memory, but, not being able to store those things long term doesn't necessarily mean consciousness was missing in that moment.

After a brain injury, I had my memory truncated to around 30 seconds for a short time. I would claim I was probably less conscious because the time I could perceive and predict was truncated so incredibly small that I couldn't make sense of the past or future. I could perceive the present just fine, but it relatively meaningless/without context, so couldn't be extrapolated. I think something related to that will end up being a definition of consciousness: meaningful extrapolation of past experience. Or, maybe simply, a meaningful persistent world model, with an update loop.

I think the self can be disrupted by significant alterations in memory storage among other things. I think memory is one of many key ingredients in having a self. When your memory is adequately disrupted your self is disrupted. Without a self subjective experience is radically different than with a self. It's radically different in that it's often described by the self (who stops being blackout drunk at some point) as being a discontinuity similar to sleep. The interesting thing here is that people who are blackout drunk continue to do things that a clinically-conscious person does (eat, talk, stumble around). Your experience is really interesting too - you seemed to still have an intact self, just not extended memory beyond 30 seconds. I think maybe we are talking about different things or my view is wrong.

This is why the concept of consciousness is largely nonsense.

The person that is blacked out is not unconscious. They just are not storing memories in order to remember the experience after the fact.

Can you see it? It is right in front of you that consciousness doesn't exist. It is right in your own example. It is a 21st century superstition and English language flaw. People cling to this idea the way people use to cling to the idea of a soul and some still do.

Like the soul, if you just get rid of the idea and word, nothing changes other than clarity in the language of what we are actually talking about instead of this ill-defined nonsense.

Do animals have a soul? It is the same question.

To come at it a different way. We can't be free of superstition and nonsense in 2024. There must be things we believe are true that simply aren't true and will look silly 300 years from now. What else do people believe in so admittedly in 2024 even though there is not just zero evidence for but we can't even define what we are talking about? It is prime suspect #1 to me when it comes to this category.

I somewhat agree with you. The concept of consciousness needs rethinking. A better definition I think is to say an entity or system is conscious to the extent it’s world model is encompassing / “complete” and self-conscious when its world model includes itself and its own internal states. By this definition there are many continuous levels of consciousness and self-consciousness and these attributes are not binary all vs nothing. As for the soul a better definition for the soul of something is the information required to recreate it. If due to lossy compression or information corruption you can only recreate an approximation then some fraction of the original soul has been lost.

There is a condition called aphantasia, in which people are unable to visualise things, but are perfectly capable of doing visual tasks, such as art.

The question "is this animal conscious" is quite close to a question "does this person have aphantasia", and both seem to be perfectly valid and answerable.

I'm not fully grasping the experiment your proposing here

I think the self can come and go. I don't think a blacked out person is always unconscious, but they do seem to lack a subjective self while sometimes still being clinically awake and engaging in complex behavior. When the subjective self comes back online later, it makes understanding the self easier for them by creating contrast.

You still have to explain why you "see out of your eyes", cause if consciousness doesn't exist, then why the universe doesn't happen silently without an "observer" somehow connected to every complex enough area. Soul is just the closest, religiously crippled interpretation of this idea.

Even if you are the only object in the universe that isn't a p-zombie, you still have it at your end. Why doesn't your physical body operate without "you" being in it most of the time?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Obviously? There’s no reason to assume that. It is known that cetaceans acquire their language and dialects through social learning. It was very recently discovered that some whales even have names for each other. Their language may be different from ours, but it is not just emotions.

And then of course there are primates, elephants etc…

That is one example, I am talking about the animals humans think about when they think animal language: dogs, horses, cats etc.

Maybe some animals have language closer to humans, but it is far from the common definition for "animal language".

Say what you mean and people will understand. If you make a broad and generic claim and someone finds "one example" then there was a problem with your claim.

Have you never met a dog that knew it's own name? Or that developed specific signs to communicate it's needs with it's owner, like scratching at the door, barking at their food dish, etc? Do you think they were born knowing any of that? Is there any doubt in your mind that they're communicating in their own idiolect?

Are you saying that domestic animals don’t have language, but wild animals might?

Quite the human-centric view of the animal world you have there

> Animals don't teach language to each other like humans do.

They do not teach language like humans because they are not humans. However studies show that some animals do teach their young language.

Many bird species, such as zebra finches and canaries, learn their songs through a process similar to human language acquisition. Juvenile birds listen to adult tutors and practice their songs, receiving feedback and adjusting their vocalizations accordingly.

Dolphins and whales use complex vocalizations for communication. Mothers and other group members have been observed teaching calves specific calls and whistles, which are essential for social interactions and identification within pods.

Meerkats exhibit teaching behaviors where older members demonstrate specific alarm calls and foraging techniques to pups. These calls convey different types of information, similar to vocabulary teaching in humans.

…

I don't see how language and consciousness are equivalent in any sense. Does someone who never learns to speak not conscious?

I suppose we mean the ability to learn language.

Hellen Keller is an interesting take on your question. https://scentofdawn.blogspot.com/2011/07/before-soul-dawn-he...

>the near equivalence made between language and consciousness that goes back to Descartes

more like Aristotle

The challenge is that part of an advanced human society is creating black-and-white lines in structures to promote peace and prosperity.

For example, everything we associate with the magical age of 18 years old. "Adulthood", sexual consent, voting, drinking, smoking, conscription all begin on an arbitrary day and we take no consideration of the reality of the maturity of the person.

(Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and contextual. A harsher world (like one that most of humanity existed in for our entire history) causes earlier maturity. A gentler one (that we are obviously all trying to create) delays it.

So with animals, I see the spectrum, and I see that we are seeking to set a line...somewhere. Some set it just after humans. Humans are special, and everyone else is fair game. Vegans also have a pretty clear line.

Everything else, vegetarians included, are pretty "fuzzy". I'm an omnivore myself, but if you asked me for a concrete logical reason why my personal ethics allow me to eat pig but not dog, I don't think I could give you a ethically consistent one other than "pigs are delicious, and dogs are my friends".

Personally, I do believe that the same way that our generation asked our grandparents how they could've been ok with the racial discrimination & segregation that was ubiquitous in their youth, I think my grandchildren will ask me the same about my consumption of meat.

The reasons will likely be a mixture of climate impact (species of fish going extinct), and cost (because of the energy cost required to create pigs and cows). Society will form an ethical consensus about why it's not appropriate to eat animals to help reduce WW energy costs the same way that early people in the Levant found it helpful to create rules about not consuming pigs or shellfish (for sanitary reasons).

And there'll be "scandals" about rich people that have secret animal farms similar to what we have today about finding out about billionaires in dubai basically having secret house slaves. (AKA, outrage, but no meaningful change)

BTW from where I stand, it seems fairly reasonable to deduce that all mammals are in some way conscious/sentient, and have intelligence comparable to our own. Mammals play, mourn their dead, have a common signal that generally causes us to protect the young of all mammal species and find them cute.

I also think that there is a strong case for a very unique type of intelligence and conscience in Cephalopods. I have personally taken a stance to not eat cephalopods. Because I think they are in greater danger of going extinct vs. mammals (since their stock counts are so invisible to humanity), and I have decided (subjectively) that consuming a distinct type of intelligence from my own constitutes a form of crime. I don't know if I can defend that in court though.

I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.

> I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.

What about crows?

Good point.

> Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and contextual.

I cannot agree with this. Maturity has a very clear meaning: it is when a human (or animal) has developed enough to be able to sexually reproduce. That people use the word wrongly in everyday conversation is something else.

As for what you write about mammals, I completely agree. Just looking at them and interacting with them in real life and it's clear that they're our brothers.

You're talking about physical maturity, I'm talking about mental maturity.

Physical maturity is irrelevant when it comes to mental decisions of how to apply that physical maturity.

> I don't think I could give you a ethically consistent

That's what cognitive dissonance is. Giving one's senses (in this case the taste buds or the ego 'I' or the mind) more importance than something factual or apparent.

> I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.

If you take consciousness to mean intelligence, then sure. If you take consciousness to be separate from intelligence and senses, being the energy or force that brings forth the signs of what we call 'life', then I see no reason to believe that every single living entity has consciousness.

The only difference is in the type of body provided to that conscious living entity. Just like how some humans are born without sight, some without hearing, some without the ability to speak. It doesn't mean they're less conscious, they still are an observer observing things through their senses.

Unless and until one can come up with a clear definition of consciousness (you don't need to, just read nyāya philosophy and you'll save thousands of years of efforts), they will not be able to get over their biases based on unintelligent thoughts and cognitive dissonance.

No, I agree.

I think humans had exactly the same cognitive dissonance about slavery and racial-based discrimination (in all it's forms) for most of our history.

It wasn't so much that their HATE was so powerful that it superseded logical consistency, but rather the CONVENIENCE of this discrimination was so attractive. Classism is the same way.

We make up ipso facto justifications to continue to perpetuate inequality and exploitation that benefits us. The most recent version of this is globalization and all the arguments the west makes for how our reliance on 3rd world labour improves their livelihood. (It does; it's also more complex than that)

I'm not going to pretend that I WANT to be vegetarian or WANT to align my logical ethics with my actions. I clearly do not, I find eating meat too convenient and brings me too much joy.

But I do want to want to...

I really appreciate your insight.

> I find eating meat too convenient and brings me too much joy.

Yes but then you have the question: Is your convenience worth more than someone's life? Does your joy justify someone's throat being cut?

I'd say that this is not the same as slavery or racial-based discrimination since this is someone's aliveness at stake and the only crime that they committed was being in a different body than you. This is not about forcing them to work or saying mean things, but immense pain and extreme suffering which causes the consciousness to leave the body.

> But I do want to want to...

That shows that your intelligence agrees but the mind, being connected to the senses, wants to divert attention towards sense pleasures.

Sāṁkhya philosophy would say that a human whose intelligence is stolen by the senses is no better than an animal: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. Now, I'm not saying this to be judgemental but this metaphysical system gives you a lens to see and act in the world.

What then separates us from being a human if we're no better than a pig rolling in dirt if all we know is running after one temporary sense pleasure to the next? and what if somehow after you die, your consciousness takes the body of a similar animal? (Unless of course you believe in Creatio ex nihilo).

These are questions to ask in life. The human birth is special because while being similar to literally every other species, this birth is the only kind of birth that allows one to philosophize and ask important questions in life.

Being a vegetarian is easy in today's world, especially if you're privileged to be earning more money than 5 families in South Asia combined. All it really takes, is accepting intelligence's advice, instead of letting the mind (which controls the senses) reign.

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

Care to elaborate/expand?

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

The 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.

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...

“Mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution” would be a much less parsimonious explanation than just having those mechanisms, i.e. Occam’s razor.

"Occam's razor" is not some natural law so I fail to understand how invoking it goes towards proving anything.

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).

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.

Right, but barring evidence against the simpler model we should prefer it to a more complex one.

There could, but then you would have to explain why some permutations of matter create a new dimension of sensation which previously didn't exist, which then has the ability to reach back into the dimension of matter and exert will on it (are we opening a wormhole to an alternate reality of the soulbots or something??).

I'll reiterate that I don't believe it to be the case that animals with smaller brains are not self-aware, but wanted to counter that it HAS to be a smooth gradient of level of consciousness between simpler and more complex brains. It can be stepped.

However, if it were the case, you don't need to explain it, only observe it. For example, I think we can say from observation that there needs to be a minimal complexity. n-neurons cannot be self aware and n+1 can. I'm sure it's not just the number, but you get the point. The gradient of self-awareness need not start at the gradient of intelligence, nor need it have the same slope.

I don't believe in non-physical explanations. We don't know the mechanism though, so we do actually do need to explain why some permutations of matter, as you put it, (i.e. the permutation in brains) has this sense, and others (matter in rocks, matter in computers?) does not. Although I'd think process, rather than just arrangement.

We have already enough evidence to assume that such cliff does not exist.

I can recommend the book „How language began“ by Daniel Everett, where he demonstrates convincingly that our path to language, culture and consciousness was not a single switch, but evolutionary process. Recent research of cetaceans shows that their language and culture may overlap in sophistication with our ancestors.

It is still possible that it is just mimicry. But same for Homo sapiens.

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.

Speaking of consciousness and tress:

https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcs.1...

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.

> And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to that perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.

That's not a reason to distrust scientists, or science in general (although it does display that a fraction of "scientists" had very poor observation skills).

It IS a reason to look for religious dogma, oust it whenever possible, and dismantle it systematically until it no longer exists.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Good to remember these observations during war time when “your side” has de-humanized the “other side”.

> 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.

> 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.

Dogs definitely have Theory of Mind. There was a study done that placed a treat in a room where the dog was instructed not to eat it. A handler was in the room with the dog. When the lights were turned out, the dogs would eat the treat, because they knew that the human couldn't see in the dark.

Wouldn't another explanation be that the dog thought the human literally didn't exist?

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

No, because the dog could smell and hear the human, just like they could smell the treat.

Haha, fair enough.

It's possible the human ceases to exist once the treat is present. The same thing happens to me when there's dessert next to the salad.

Frankly, as a parent of three I'm not at all convinced that human infants lack object permanence, much less adult dogs. I've never observed anything in my infants that would indicate they lost track of something's existence, and I've seen plenty of things that suggest the opposite.

See also the section of that article entitled "Contradicting evidence".

As a parent also, I think it simply varies from child to child. There is a point in time between vision developing and object permanence being learned where peek-a-boo is absolutely magic.

Peek-a-boo is a ton of fun with infants but I don't buy the explanation that it has to do with object permanence. At the same stage where peek-a-boo is hilarious my kids have also each been perfectly capable of watching me hide something and then going looking for it.

OT but maybe peekaboo works on the emotional tension and release of potential threats being revealed as friendly faces.

Or maybe it's just a fun game.

Or they tried the strategy in the past, and they had learned behavior that by eating things at night, they can get away with it. If you read the methods of this study, they used dogs that lived as pets [1].

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...

And how do you think humans acquire a theory of mind other than learning behaviors and figuring out what works and what doesn’t?

The question is one of what has been learned. It seems possible that an animal could learn, from experience, that outcomes can be different depending on whether it is light or dark, without developing any intuition as to why that might be so.

I'm all for the 'consciousness as a spectrum' view, but as TFA says, anyone looking for a eureka moment [in this matter] will be disappointed.

But sadly they dont have theory of rope.

Hilarious comment. Without fail, my neighbor's dog wraps himself around the tree within 30 minutes of being outside. It's been 2 years now, and he just can't get the hang of it.

Cats do the same thing if you take them outside on a leash. My cat is dumb enough to get tangled, but smart enough to know that I will guide her in reverse every time.

> just can't get the hang

pun intended?

Oddly, I’ve found that pit bulls won’t wrap themselves around a tree. We’ve had several in our house that are/were walked daily, and we volunteer at a dog shelter where my wife and I walk other pit bulls on a regular basis. There are exceptions, but my experience is that the vast majority will not let anything (like a tree) between themselves and their handler if on leash. Just when I think “ah, ha! You’re going to do it…”, they will course correct and go around to avoid trouble. It’s the oddest thing. I have never come up with a plausible theory, but it sure is nice.

(And it is not our dog handling, as our control groups are happy to wrap circles around a tree.)

I am not an pet owner. Are you saying that other breeds do this, but pit bulls are exceptional in this manner? If yes, do you have any thoughts why?

Yup, other breeds won’t pay attention, and get a signpost between themselves and their handler, and now the leash is stuck. And then they can’t figure out how to undo it. Pit bulls don’t do that. Why? I have no idea. I mean, I suppose you can breed for anything, but seems like a slightly odd feature to breed for.

I mean, I'm pretty sure rats also have a theory of mind. My data point is exactly one of the little buggers who used to be my pet. Whenever he was running around my room, he'd peek around to see if I was looking at him before jumping on the couch. If he couldn't see me, he'd jump. If he could, he wouldn't.

But most humans would have a more complex theory of the mind - they’d realise who would get the blame when the lights were turned back on.

> 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.

To the contrary, I do think landing on the moon and QM requires a different kind of mental process than a beaver.

However, the problem is that this implies that consciousness is a function of intelligence, and if only exceptional intelligence is sufficient evidence of consciousness, then would less intelligent people be considered having no consciousness, just like animals?

If one entertains the additional argument in the form of "all humans are the same, and some are shown to be smart (spaceships, QM, etc), thus all humans are conscious", then the question becomes why don't we apply the logic to all animals/mammals/apes, since it's clear the biologically we are constructed with the same parts?

My cat can’t comprehend code written on my screen and the world that is internet. Maybe other being exists and our notion of intelligence would collapse the same way a cat can’t possibly understand what internet is. Compared to them, would we be conscious beings ? Would they consider us conscious beings ?

>My cat can’t comprehend code written on my screen and the world that is internet.

My grandma is the same.

Your grandma can comprehend but maybe don’t want to. We know humans are equipped with what’s needed to comprehend. Or maybe some humans might never comprehend some things and it raises the question : « does all humans have the same consciousness ? ».

My take is organic breathing = consciousness. There may be different levels of it. Otherwise it’s like trying to say all colors can be trimmed down to two values, black and white. There is a variety of consciousness and the definition we try to make of it orient the whole debate. It will never be the same between humans and animals but it doesn’t mean because it’s not human it doesn’t exists.

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_d...

I reject panpsychism on the grounds of the Standard Model.

There are no possible fields at the energy levels we've explored that could have an effect such as panpsychism claims (and fields at any other energy levels couldn't have such an effect). Sean Carroll published a paper on this, and it's worth a read, as is his draft response to Phillip Goff. [1], [2]

[1] The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884

[2] Consciousness and the Laws of Physics: https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33

Haven’t read the first paper but the second is a fairly naive straw man argument. If anything, it’s arguing against free will, which many panpsychists reject anyway. Free will or “outside forces” is not at all a prerequisite for panpsychism.

Actually his paper is a (decent) argument for panpsychism: we know that we ourselves (as individuals) are conscious, and we know that there’s nothing special at the physical level about our brain-stuff as compared to tree-stuff or rock-stuff or anything else. Particles in a brain are not somehow specially imbued with consciousness "energy", yet they obviously have it. Ergo the reasonable prediction would be that other things have it too and it’s much more a question of configuration that yields more or less of the emergent property of consciousness (much like different configurations and states of atoms can yield more or less magnetic force, conductivity, energy, temperature, etc) - all of which are only possible in certain configurations of energy/matter because all energy/matter itself has the properties required to yield those effects. That is the panpsychist argument, and it has nothing to do with free will.

> Animals didn't land on the moon

Isn't this conspiracy theory? One species of mammals actually did.

But animals(dogs) were first to go into orbit!

The first animal in orbit was Laika, a Soviet space dog. She was launched aboard Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. The first animals in space were fruit flies, launched by the United States aboard a V-2 rocket on February 20, 1947.

I wonder whether some large asteroid hit the earth and blasted some poor animal into space some millions of years ago...

If an animal were imparted enough energy to be thrown into space, it would not get there intact.

Tiny spiders can float high enough in the air that it might be possible for some to be carried beyond the Karman line.

I may consider it largely specious that

> a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable

but for someone who considers otherwise, such as the commenter to whom you're replying and whom I quoted, "animals didn't land on the moon" qualifies as both a sound and a valid statement.

You just did it! You made the Tu Crowque fallacy.

Animals are definitely fully conscious in Buddhism

Also in Islam :

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

> Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.

Probably due to walking upright and eating meat

> Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics

For most of the history, neither did humans.

> There's also no reason to assume that animals don't think the same way.

Indeed. I wonder do they see us as special at all? It'd be pretty funny if they didn't

> Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics

Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years before they did either of these things

> 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.

except Hinduism.

I _think_ it's also the case for buddhism and taoism, so the shift may have happened somewhere in-between proto religions and abrahamic ones

And Jainism, and while I don't know much about the religions I'd imagine there's a ton of new world ones that don't treat animals as conscious

> 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.

Not every human knows how to land on the moon or understands quantum mechanics, so how do you make the 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.

Probably worth mentioning Kristof Koch's book, "Consciousness" – who happens to be a Christian. He puts it as a gradual thing correlated to complexity, which makes it more likely that it "feels like something" to be a mycelium network or the internet than an mussel.

> 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.

Is this not a very self-serving assertion, though? Pointing at things that we humans have accomplished and are proud of, and saying that sets us apart, or are in a sense categorically higher than other animals?

Other animals may well look at this and look down at us for having to do all these things in order to feel accomplished. Octopuses may draw a qualitative distinction between them and us because we lack the means to alter our appearance--surely they're more physically manifest than other animals due to their color shifting abilities! Plants must belittle us for our inability to passively absorb energy from the sun.

We could definitely say that our ability to get to the moon sets us apart. But in doing so, we also have to acknowledge each and every other trait that would set an animal species apart from the rest, and there's no shortage of those unique elements.

"Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons."

- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

I’m at a lost as to why I should care? Everything comes down to force. Those animals can opine all they want, but humans have the means, motive and opportunity to make them into tasty food. Their conscious or lack there of has no impact.

I'm not sure what this is responding to. Can you explain how this relates to the parent and grandparent messages?

> I’m at a lost as to why I should care?

Then I'm at a loss as to why you read the article and are participating in this conversation.

> Those animals can opine all they want, but humans have the means, motive and opportunity to make them into tasty food. Their conscious or lack there of has no impact.

So might makes right, all the time? One can quite reasonable hear some like King Leopold II of Belgium uttering this as he committed atrocities throughout the Congo. Many European settlers and American slaveowners held the exact same view of African humans.

Does having gone to the moon or formalized quantum mechanics make us better than other animals?

What harm has our manner of animal had on the rest of life on earth thus far?

> And are all animals conscious? Amoebas? Virions? Bacteria?

Single celled organisms, and multicellular organisms that lack nervous systems seem to be severely limited in intelligence. I think that anyone who argues against intelligence being closely correlated with the complexity of the organisms neural network is arguing against mountains of evidence to the contrary.

What you explain here also explains the current problems in AGI research. sigh Humans keep thinking that reality, like the sun once did, revolves around them.

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

Agree. Humans, unlike other animals, film themselves mating.

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.

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.

People swear they have emotional relationships with their pet lizards, who totally lack the part of the brain that can feel emotions…

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?

Oh then demonstrate your supernatural abilities to know what a lizard is feeling to us

I've no such ability (and never claimed to), but I'll share what I can.

A few years ago I was standing on my balcony. I saw a lizard sunning itself on a rock, a story below. On impulse I made a shadow puppet of a bird, and that lizard took off running. I don't know what the emotional experience of a lizard is like, but I'm as certain as I am of anything that the lizard feared for it's life, whatever fear means to a lizard. Maybe fear isn't an emotion to a lizard, maybe it's more like a state of mind. I have no idea, that question is unanswerable.

I've had mouse problems many times. I can tell you that mice have distinct personalities. I catch them with live traps and release them. Some of them leave immediately when the box opens. Others cower and must be coaxed out. They have favored places and such. If you study then and learn their habits, you can place traps very effectively.

There was a mouse that would go behind my toaster and chew on stuff. The first time I walked over to see what the sound was, they threw themselves off the counter and tumbled down the spice rack. The second time they darted out and climbed down the spice rack. The third time, they came out at a relaxed pace, easy as can be, and gracefully climbed the power chord down to the floor. Presumably they learned I was all bark and no bite.

Why am I being flagged for comments that should not be flagged at all?

You probably wouldn't have been flagged if you'd said something like, "I remain skeptical. Could you demonstrate your ability to tell what lizards are thinking?" In my experience comments are usually flagged for tone rather than content.

If my comment was overly provocative, I apologize. I was trying to get a laugh out of you. It's a passage from my favorite book. Based on past interactions, I thought that book fell into your area of interest, so I thought you may have read it and get a chuckle out of the reference. But perhaps that was overly familiar on my part.

From the site guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Eschew flamebait.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals...

That's why that comment was flagged. (To me personally, your comment was harsh enough to be worthy of downvoting, though I'm not sure I would have flagged it.)

Also from the guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

My response was completely fair and sincere and civil. You must have projected tone into it

Scientists may have made mistakes in the past, what is "emotion" and if emotion is just one part of the brain (which lizards lack). Furthermore, having emotions is not necessarily same like humans emotions, anyways. My guess is probably lizards (and insects) do have emotions, but not same like humans emotions (although, what are the similarities and the differences, is a question that remains, and you would have to know what is the proper way to measure such a thing).

I am not saying that I am necessarily correct about any of this, but you should not be so certain them the other way either.

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".

Do you know any other author discussing this topic ?

Sorry, no I do not.

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.

I do think that in a kind of way intelligence and “interiority” are related. I might have the same “amount” of consciousness as a worm but my ability to investigate my experience is (I think) undoubtedly greater.

“A dog can miss his master, but he can’t expect him to return on Wednesday”

> “A dog can miss his master, but he can’t expect him to return on Wednesday”

Wednesday might be pushing it, but I've seen dogs who expected their masters to return at specific times of the day.

Yep, have had cats and dogs that would wait at the door at specific times of day for my returning spouse.

> 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?

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.

Consciousness is your mental model of your environment. Dogs have theirs and we have ours. That does leave the question on the scope of consciousness. More processing power equals more, expanded consciousness it would stand to reason.

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.)

> Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain.

A better definition I think is to say an entity or system is conscious to the extent it’s world model is encompassing / “complete” and self-conscious when its world model includes itself and its own internal states. By this definition there are many continuous levels of consciousness and self-consciousness and these are not binary all vs nothing.

Yeah, I do agree with this.

There must be some strong correlation there: where a better world-model allows you to be more intelligent. Especially if that world-model contains yourself (e.g. self-consciousness).

I do, however, fundamentally believe that our interior conscious experience IS our world model: e.g. There's some property of the information system we live in* such that any tightly integrated and time-coherent partition of information has an interior experience.

A good question: is it possible to build a system that has a highly sophisticated world model, but minimal intelligence, and vice versa?

I think that highly sophisticated world model / low intelligence is possible (and it would have an amazing interior experience).

A non-existent world model / high intelligence seems impossible, since you likely need a good world model to be able to generally reason.

* Our universe / some exterior reality that's running our universe simulation / something weirder we can't even conceive.

Intelligence can be defined as the ability to accurately predict the future consequences of one's actions. And the only way to make such predictions is by having an internal model of how the world works.

Moreover, for social species that live and evolve in groups, like humans, this world-model must crucially include a model of oneself and other minds. We need to be able to predict how others will think and react to our own behaviors. This is what gives rise to self-consciousness and "theory of mind" - a world-model that is recursive and includes representations of itself.

That said, while our conscious experience seems deeply linked to our world-model, the world-model likely encompasses much more than just conscious awareness. It runs in the background, guiding our reflexes, breathing, balance, and myriad other functions below the level of consciousness. It takes in raw sensory data and interprets it, and uses feelings and emotions as a communication channel to influence conscious thought.

There are known critical developmental windows during which an animal's world-model is shaped by early sensory experiences and social interactions. If key stimuli are missing during these windows, the world-model may remain stunted in certain ways even if the missing stimuli are later provided. The animal may compensate through other means, but its overall intelligence - its ability to model and predict - will be constrained by the limitations of its world-model.

So in that sense, a highly sophisticated but narrowly specialized world-model, as in a mathematical or musical savant, may produce an individual who is brilliant in one domain but quite limited in general intelligence.

Whereas a broad but shallower world-model, as in many animals, can enable robust if limited intelligence that is well-adapted to the animal's ecological niche.

Evolution tends to select for world-models and intelligence that are "just enough" for an animal's lifestyle and no more. The metabolic cost of excess intelligence makes it maladaptive. So we see each species with a world-model and associated intelligence that is tailored to its particular environment and survival needs.

> Intelligence can be defined as the ability to accurately predict the future consequences of one's actions.

That's not what is most essential to intelligence. What is most characteristic of intelligence is intentionality. From there, we can talk about inference, analysis, and so on, which presuppose intentionality. Whereas most animals maintain only a concrete image of the world they encounter, human beings can abstract from the concrete into the general and the universal, so the paradigmatic example of intelligence, as opposed to what may be considered analogues, is human intelligence.

Predictability is effectively a question of practicality. Intelligence is not the ability to predict, but rather, intelligence entails that ability as a consequence of intentionality and reasoning (by sufficiently comprehending the nature of a thing, you can make predictions about how it will behave under certain conditions, something that goes beyond mere cargo cult statistics and enters the realm of reason, which is to say concern for causality).

>What is most characteristic of intelligence is intentionality.

Intentionality refers to the quality of being directed toward an objective or purpose. It involves conscious decision-making and goal-directed behavior. Given that insect have intentionally do you consider insects intelligent?

While intentionality might motivate and guide our actions, the ability to foresee the results of these actions is what defines intelligent decision-making. Prediction requires a deep understanding of cause and effect, which is a hallmark of intelligence. When we predict, we infer potential outcomes based on our knowledge and reasoning. This process involves not just abstract thinking but also practical application. Accurate prediction involves the synthesis of various cognitive functions, including inference, analysis, and reasoning.

If you enjoy fiction I urge you to read Blindsight by Peter Watts. One of the central concepts in the plot is "what if consciousness were unnecessary for intelligence"? Along the way it explores all sorts of angles on consciousness and cognition.

Still ranks as one of the best SF works I've read this century.

> what if consciousness were unnecessary for intelligence

Kind of interesting given we are currently in the midst of a revolution in artificial intelligence. From my playing with it, it seems something like ChatGPT is intelligent in the GP sense of "can abstract stuff and respond to new stimulus" but isn't conscious in the sense of having an interior.

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.

and Solipsism is nothing but egocentrism at the end of the day.

> The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial historically is a religious one—the Bible has typically been read as placing humanity in a category of its own.

Did you just make this up? Because it's obviously not true. And you conflate two concerns, namely, "having consciousness" and "placing humanity in a category of its own".

First, you don't see denial of consciousness in other animals in the ancient or medieval world. If anything, it is much more natural to conclude other animals are conscious based on observation than it is to deny consciousness. Even today, I don't know anyone who denies animals are conscious. Everyone treats their pets, for instance, as conscious beings, because they are. Now, people also anthropomorphize animals, sure, but there's a difference between the two degrees of attribution. Attributing consciousness is far more conservative than attributing human qualities in an equivocal way.

Take Aristotle's De Anima, for example, in which he analyzes the varieties of life according to the kind of "soul" each possesses, and such that each higher soul entails the powers of all the lower souls. The three kinds he identifies, ordered from lowest to highest, are the nutritive soul, characteristic of plants; the sensitive soul, characteristic of animals; and the rational soul, particular to human beings. Even here, we can see both a certain uniqueness to human beings alongside what you might call the consciousness of animals by virtue of the sensitive soul. What differentiates human beings from all the animals is not that they are conscious, but that they are rational.

Second, where the Bible is concerned, I have no idea where you get the idea that it claims other animals lack consciousness. Consider just these two passages from the Old Testament:

Genesis 9:2-3: "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea [...]"

Do you see any mention of rocks in this verse? Do things lacking consciousness live in fear?

Proverbs 12:10: "The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel."

I suppose you could be kind to an unconscious living thing in the sense that can act for its objective good, but it seem a little strange to speak of animals in this way, but not plants, if animals are as unconscious as plants.

Now, yes, human beings are recognized as different from the other animals as early as Genesis, having been created in the image of God, which has to do with a relation of analogous similarity with God, where human beings are understood as personal creatures possessing rational intellect and free will ("analogous" cannot be stressed enough; the infinite God is very much unlike any created being, and so any similarity can only be analogical; see the analogia entis). However, it does not follow that the other animals lack consciousness. The ancients and medievals would find this claim ridiculous.

If you want to know where the denial of consciousness in other animals began, you can thank modern thinkers like Descartes, who posited that the universe is composed of two kinds of things, res extensa and res cogitans. Res extensa is merely extension in space, while res cogitans is the seat of thought, sensation and thus consciousness. According to this anthropology, of the animals, only human beings are a composite of both, and so only human beings are capable of consciousness. The angels are res cogitans, while the other animals are mere res extensa. In other words, according to Descartes's mechanistic worldview, animals are effectively insensate machines.

And so this is a recently development in history, very much occurring within the ferment of modernity. Materialism also finds its roots in Descartes, not because he was a materialist himself, as he admitted the existence of res cogitans that is not reducible to res extensa, but because he framed things in those terms. Materialists, operating within those parameters, reject the existence of res cogitans, instead claiming that all that has been attributed to res cogitans is reducible to res extensa. Of course, it isn't (e.g., the problem of qualia, or the problem of intentionality), which is why materialism was stillborn, but now transmuting into preposterous things like eliminativism among a stubborn remnant of believers.

I think there is also a misguided razor that people who self identify as rationalists often apply, which goes, "the most cynical or disenchanted answer is likely the correct one." An overcorrection to superstition, perhaps.

I personally did this, and one of the symptoms was being overly skeptical of animal consciousness. People would tell me this dog was smart or that it was feeling a certain way, and I dismissed it, thinking them fanciful. One moment that showed me I was misguided was when I took a cookbook out from a low shelf, and replaced it. I didn't put it exactly where I'd retrieved it from. Several hours later, the cat walked by the shelf, stopped, and started examining the cookbooks.

I was impressed because I wouldn't have noticed those books being out of place. I realized that my cat knew things that I did not. That put a crack of doubt in my facade of cynicism. Eventually I realized that cynicism was hollow and obscured the truth, rather than revealing it.

That first sentence is one of the best-distilled insights I've ever read on HN.

I concur, was about to express the same sentiment. I will steal this, sorry-not-sorry :)

I saw your comment and had to re-read it. Damn insightful yes.

> 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.

My thoughts didn't go to scent but to environment change; things moving can signify the presence of another animal, one that is trying to hide itself. Could be an ambush predator.

this could also be the reason humans notice changes

Any time we move a piece of furniture, especially cat furniture that has been ignored for months, it becomes a new fascinating object.

Most non-feral cats don't just go around pissing on everything.

I had a dog growing up who'd try to move furniture back to its original location anytime we rearranged the room.

This reminds me of Feynman’s famous essay about the rat mazes and how the rats used all kinds of unexpected cues to navigate like the sound of their feet in the floor and the position of the room lights.

Funny you should mention that Feynman story. Because probably more apropos is the story he talks about being able to identify which book on a shelf was recently manhandled - SOLELY BY THE SCENT. I kid you not it if you’re not familiar with that one but I distinctly recall that story from one of his books.

I do not agree that the most probable explanation is scent, given the description provided by the comment you are responding to

It's an easy trap to fall into for those who've never spent significant time around animals. After owning a few dogs you realize that they have their own unique experience of the world, and it's probably somewhere along the same continuum that we are. They know family, they go through a rebellious adolescent phase, they throw tantrums, get bored, excited, happy, horny, etc.

I'll never know what it's like to experience the world through my nose the way my dog does, and he'll never know what it's like to read a book, but it doesn't mean that we don't love each other dearly. And I don't need to read his mind to know that, because it's plainly obvious in his actions and body language.

the cat probably discovered a new smell (did you take the book to the kitchen? put it on the dinner table? on your lap?).

Since you seem to be one of those who denied(?) consciousness of a cat, how do you conceptualize it?

Something like “a cat is just a large finite automaton and I am not”? How do you draw the line? Through “soul”? Through “neocortex thickness”? Why a cat would not experience its life like you do when e.g. drugged or seriously drunk? I mean, cats aren’t drunk, but isn’t it easy to experience or at least imagine the “animal mode” in yourself? At times when you were startled or in rage or had sex like an animal, so that your intellectual parts didn’t work properly, did that pause your consciousness? Have you thought about it and if yes, what’s the answer?

Also why is it so surprising to you that a cat noticed a change and… how exactly does this connect to yes/no consciousness?

(These are all curiosity questions, I’m not an animal rights fighter or something like that.)

Ability to reflect non-heuristically on stimuli and not fall back into stress-reflex behaviour like schizophrenia. A animal that things god/the government/everyone is after them like a mice, is less concious then somebody able test that hypothesis and leave that fear filled fever dream. Its a scale though, and in my opinion, with considerable overlap, depending on situation and adaption.

Afaict, you are describing intelligence, not consciousness.

I agree.

I also agree with the article that "consciousness" is an overloaded term. I believe you and I would agree to it as something more akin to "sentience" but that is not the case for everyone.

I feel this topic always seems to unknowingly devolve into disagreements on first principals.

Yes, that's common. But in everyone's defense, when I researched it myself, it gets as messy as itt in mainstream pholosophy. You can never be sure what a person really talks about and for five minutes it sounds reasonable, but then you meet a claim that yanks a carrying wall from your comprehension.

We sure there’s a strong actual difference between the things? If consciousness is a spectrum, it seems likely connected to intelligence at a sort of fundamental level. The more intelligent, the more obvious it is that consciousness is there, at least.

The most cynical and disenchanted answer (and most likely to be true) is that animals are just as conscious as humans and that we just made all this nonsense up to justify our actions.

People identifying as rationalists are also often misguided. It’s a common trope among programmers who think they’re smart and think their intelligence leads to them being logical and unbiased.

I hate to break it to you but if you think you’re smart most likely you are more biased than normal.

If a person were actually smart, what would you expect their opinion of their own intelligence to be?

One of our cats was very old (18+) and sick. We made the choice to have her euthanized to end her suffering and the vet came to our house to do it. One of our other (male) cats loved her and always tried to cuddle her. My wife took the old kitty out of the room where they were cuddling, and after it was done she thought she would let him say goodbye. He got very upset at my wife and hissed at her for days. He's normally very sweet with my wife, but he was clearly distraught at losing his friend and seeing her dead. He didn't just think she was sleeping, and he blamed my wife.

I've always known our cats have emotions and understand a lot about the world they're in, but after that experience, I have no doubt that they are conscious.

A friend of mine had two kittens -- siblings, who were very close to each other. One of them was hit by a car and killed. I had adored this kitten, so in memory of her I did a chalk drawing portrait of the kitten, and brought it over to my friend as gift, about a week after the kitten had died. The surviving sibling had, during that time, seemed somewhat morose and unresponsive, but also kind of cryptic in the way that cats can be. Hard to read.

But when the surviving kitten saw my drawing, he began crying so piteously, reaching out and clawing towards the drawing -- and this went on for most of an hour -- that there was absolutely no mistaking the emotion behind it, and soon everybody else in the room was bawling as well. (Also, I was impressed that he responded to a drawing; it was a decent drawing, but quite abstract relative to (say) a photographic representation. Cats usually seem oblivious to photos in any case, and this is one of the things which confounds animal consciousness research: it's very hard to tell the difference between something that an animal can't do, and something an animal doesn't want to do. I suspect that most of the time, cats simply can't be arsed to process static 2d imagery, because what's really the point of doing so -- but in this case, an overwhelming emotional imperative overrode that natural disinclination, proving that both the cognitive and the emotional capacity is there.)

Anyhow, ever since witnessing that display of emotion, anybody who tells me that animals aren't conscious or don't have real feelings immediately gets ranked -- per my personal hierarchy of the spectrum of consciousness -- as being far below the level of that kitten.

Cats seem far more likely to react to hearing a cat on TV than seeing it.

Hypothesis: Cat eyes have a higher frame rate than human eyes. Higher frame rate TVs may work better.

According to this video, cats’ frame rate is 50 hz, a bit slower than humans’ 60 hz, but with much sharper vision. So perhaps it’s the pixel size and not the frame rate that matters most. Dogs do have a higher frame rate, so your hypothesis could fit their behavior if dogs don’t watch TV.

https://youtu.be/Gvg242U2YfQ?si=Tsfan1-W2DdrDkVi

We turn the tv on muted with birds vids flying around for our cats. 2 are obsessed. 2 don’t respond at all.

That's sweet and sad. I've had cats and rabbits that mourn, and it is impossible to mistake. Some cats don't care, but others become very close. And bonded rabbits mourn for months.

Recognizing the chalk drawing isn't as surprising as you might think. Cat vision emphasizes movement, edges, and contrast. Photos are very flat, but sharp lines catch the eye. An image doesn't have to be perfect to summon a strong memory.

That story hit me in the heart, thank you for sharing

This reminds me of a story of my friend who had two cats who were brother and sister.

One time when my friend went on a trip and left his roommate in charge of catsitting, the male cat was tragically killed by a car. The roommate found the body and, not wanting to leave it on the street, put it in a duffel bag and brought it home.

Of course the sister cat smelled the bag and knew exactly what was in there. She came to her own conclusions and carried a grudge against the roommate for years (hissing, glaring, etc) until they finally moved out. It was especially peculiar because she is one of the most friendly, cuddly cats with everyone else.

> 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.

This approach wouldn't be inconsistent if you were cynically skeptical of human consciousness as well.

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.

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.

It was just an extrapolation regarding brain size. But you're right it's just a napkin theory.

Then compare orca brains to ours. Theirs are larger and more wrinkly.

Yeah but their body is immensely larger, which I assume will require more neurons for basic biological duties. (yet another napkin theory)

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.

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.

By that logic plants are conscious ? What about fungus ?

Do you believe that all humans possess equal amounts of consciousness?

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.

I gather that there is no simple definition of concious, and it mostly is “same as humans”.

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.

Not only that, but my dog has enough theory of mind to ignore a toy/food resource until another dog turns up, at which point she will grab it and parade in front of the other dog to show they can't have it. She knows she can demonstrate dominance by holding the resource that she thinks the other dog wants, even though she doesn't want it herself.

Haha love it. we had one which would just shake her head at certain foods. 'nope, not gonna eat it' and just sit nexto the bowl sad :D (we really really tried.. but had to shift foods :D)

How else could you justify treating them as a mere raw ressource in factory?

There are a lot of things that I was taught growing up that I used to sort of just accept but from the outside don't really make any sense (as an example: where I grew up was pretty homophobic but once I was old enough I realized that the homophobia just literally made no sense and it was stupid to care what other people did). The current state of animal agriculture is one of those thing, growing up I ate meat and I had all these justifications but once I stopped I realized it was all bullshit and the treatment of animals just wasn't okay. It's pretty crazy the way we'll just accept things that are "normal" even if they are absolutely horrifying.

The saddest thing to me is the people that say they "love animals" but eat them pretty uncritically (though obviously I used to be one of these people).

> it was stupid to care what other people did

Just put like this, it’s a bit of an opposite extreme. I mean, the rest of your message also give context that mitigate the statement, but alone it sounds a bit drastic: if some people plot a genocide against some other people, the latter would be wiser to care about it.

Yes indeed. A person who does not care about others at all, is called a sociopath.

But what to do, if the society itself is sick?

Well, either find a balance of blocking out the bad parts and accepting only the good, or find a better society ...

(To become a immigrant somewhere else)

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.

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...

> I don't think eating meat is bad though

Yeah I guess just the moment of eating it is not the bad aspect, but what comes before this moment. forcefully impregnating animals, taking their kids away from them, letting them live in concrete buildings without much access to fresh air or grass, transporting them in inhumane conditions etc.

> the sheep killing there - it was an old sheep

i frequently wonder if it would be possible to switch to a model where animals at least get to live a full life, before being slaughtered at an old age. probably not profitable at all...

to be fair, as romantic as your moroccan story sounds, i'm not a fan at all of the practice of just slitting an animals throat and letting it bleed out. Sounds like a very traumatic, painful experience if you're a conscious being. and the more i think about it, i'm not sure if giving an animal a good life is enough of an excuse to then slaughter it.

don't get me wrong, i do eat meat (would love to stop), but for me there's no valid, ethical argument towards meat consumption. if people want to eat meat, then they should, as long as they're honest about what exactly it is they're doing.

    > i do eat meat (would love to stop)

I want to be encouraging here. Even reducing has a big impact on harm to animals and the environment. I'm down about 95-99% from childhood. I was a strict vegan for a while, but it was just too difficult socially. I realised that reducing my harm and environmental footprint by 95+% was enough. I don't worry too much about the rest. Please don't read this response that you need to reduce by 95%! Even reducing 50% is a huge win. Or you could try to switch to more ethical meat sources -- raised on nice farms with plenty of space. Again: This has a real impact.

> Even reducing has a big impact on harm to animals and the environment

yeah, agree 100%! Almost a year ago i was living vegetarian, but then a couple of months ago some minor depressive moods were enough to destroy my willpower to resist meat. i love the taste and texture of meat, incl. liver, sheep, kidney etc., so the reason for me to be vegetarian are purely ethical reasons.

but i will try to reduce my consumption again, i know that i can do it :)

I can't remember the exact book I was reading. I think "Old Man's War" or one of the sequels.

But an advanced alien race captured some humans and was basically raising them like cattle. Inseminating women, harvesting milk, slaughtering for meat. It really affected my perception of how fucked up the whole process actually is.

Very interesting that you're mentioning this. I had this exact plot as a thought once. "maybe a shocking horror movie about aliens treating humans like cattle could show people why vegans/vegetarians think it's fucked up what we're doing. aliens forcefully impregnating young women/girls, taking their babies away from them after they've been born, genetically raising them so that they produce as much milk and muscle-mass as possible and then just kill them for consumption. if they're as dumb as us they'll even waste more energy doing all of this than they get from our meat."

doesn't surprise me that this plot already exists, as it's not that creative. i must've been inspired by this, somehow, without being aware of it :D

Does anyone remember how they felt when the original Matrix film showed the scene of humans being farmed? It still stays with me today. The wave of cold sweat that came over me.

The boss/worker relationship within our current mode of production seems to be another way we justify treating others like raw resources. Especially in lean financial times.

you are not wrong to draw this paralell. If humans can't treat eachother well, how little chance do animals have?

I'm sure that consciousness is a spectrum and that big mammals are near us on it, if there's any difference at all except for intelligence levels.

At the same time I have no issues with animal resource factories. I justify their existence by the fact that I'm a carnivore and needed meat and fats to properly operate since forever, no need for complex philosophy here. The necessity to justify that against ethics usually means you got way deeper into it than is reasonable.

If you're human, you aren't an obligate carnivore, because humans can live healthily on a fully vegan diet. Animal products (meat, dairy, eggs) certainly gave pre-industrial humans a big boost as a dense and (at times) readily available source of calories and protein, but that's a far cry from "needing" it.

Modern usage of animal products for food is purely for convenience and pleasure. A point could be made that that's sufficent, but it's objectively not necessary.

I don't feel good without meat, and good substitutes are less available.

But my main point (which I started to write above but seemingly decided to omit, to my own confusion) is that this fear-cold-hunger-devour-alive-die-young bs is how wild nature works every day for eons. I am its creature and should see no guilt except for true sadism.

I agree with regulating bad farms away, but suffering through reduction of my already small demand to zero barely helps anything.

Yes, little animal babies get happily eaten by predators every day.

But they did not put them in cold metal boxes before to rot in their own shit.

Are you sure, you need meet? Personally, I know I want meat and I know I despise the meat factories. But there are alternatives, cattle raised on actual grass. Or game from the forest. More expensive, but I don't need nor want meat every day.

edit: with meat factories I did not talk about industrial packaging of meat. That is fine. What is not fine with me, is having living animals on conveyor belts, who never see the sun or feel the earth.

My toddler couldn't recognize her reflection in a mirror up until some age, we did the lipstick on face test. Same as a cat or some other animal that can't do it. Complex emotions and consciousness are developmental milestones in kids. Not sure why animals would have it differently, they just don't develop to the same level as we do.

Humanity observably is in a category of its own. The human authors of the Bible are just some of the many persons who have made this observation.

One obvious example is morality. Take climate change. No reasonable person says that the life forms responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event were doing something immoral. On the other hand plenty of people say that humans causing a comparatively trivial shift in atmospheric composition is immoral.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26 King James Bible

Don't believe the bible weighs in on animal consciousness. It does weigh in on the question of our use of animals. Modernity believes that consciousness is special, and that we should not eat or use conscious animals, thus, if the bible says that we can eat cows, cows must not be conscious otherwise the bible would be condoning immoral behavior. It's a logical jump, but it is correct moral reasoning based on the premise that consciousness is special.

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?

That’s actually an interesting case of using LLM: statically what is the mundane perspective of a religious perspective.

Here is a prompt to play with:

In Abrahamic religions, what is the ontological status of animals in general and other life forms? Are they considered generally equals or sometime far superiors?

I plugged in your prompt

In Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the ontological status of animals and other life forms generally places them as part of God's creation, but humans are typically seen as having a unique, superior status. Here's a brief overview of each religion's perspective:

### Judaism In Judaism, the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) describes God creating animals and humans, with humans given dominion over animals. This is based on the Genesis narrative: - *Genesis 1:26-28*: God gives humans dominion over all living creatures. - *Genesis 2:19-20*: Adam names the animals, indicating a role of stewardship and authority.

While animals are respected and their welfare is considered (e.g., the commandment to not cause unnecessary suffering, tsa'ar ba'alei chayim), humans are seen as having a special role and responsibility.

### Christianity Christianity inherits much of its view on animals from Judaism, with additional interpretations from the New Testament: - *Genesis 1:26-28*: Same as in Judaism, humans are given dominion over animals. - *New Testament*: Jesus emphasizes the value of every creature (e.g., Matthew 10:29-31 where sparrows are valued by God), but humans are considered more valuable.

Christian thought often emphasizes stewardship and care for God's creation, including animals, but maintains the superiority of humans.

### Islam In Islam, animals are also seen as part of God's creation with humans given a special status and responsibility: - *Qur'an 6:38*: Animals are considered communities like humans and are part of God's creation. - *Qur'an 16:5-8*: Animals are created for human benefit, but humans must treat them with kindness and care.

Humans are considered superior and responsible for stewardship of the Earth and its creatures, but there is an emphasis on compassion and justice towards animals.

### Comparative Perspective - *Equality and Superiority*: In all three religions, humans are generally considered superior to animals due to their unique role and responsibilities assigned by God. Animals are valued and their welfare is important, but they do not have the same status as humans. - *Stewardship*: There is a common theme of stewardship and responsible dominion, where humans are expected to care for and protect animals and the environment. - *Respect for Life*: Despite the hierarchical view, all three religions emphasize respect for life and the importance of treating animals humanely.

Overall, animals and other life forms are respected and valued in Abrahamic religions, but humans are considered to have a unique, superior status with specific duties towards other creatures.

and asking GPT in this context, if animals are conscious

In the context of Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—there are varying interpretations regarding the consciousness of animals. While none of these religions provide a detailed scientific explanation of consciousness as understood in contemporary terms, they do offer insights that can be interpreted in different ways regarding the awareness and sentience of animals.

### Judaism In Judaism, animals are seen as sentient beings capable of feeling pain, which is reflected in the ethical treatment prescribed by Jewish law (Halakha): - *Tsa'ar Ba'alei Chayim*: The principle of not causing unnecessary suffering to animals suggests an acknowledgment of their ability to experience pain and distress. - *Genesis 9:5*: After the flood, God makes a covenant that includes animals, implying their significance and value in God's creation.

While animals are recognized as having feelings and some level of awareness, they are generally not considered to have the same level of consciousness or spiritual capacity as humans.

### Christianity Christianity, building on Jewish teachings, also acknowledges the sentience of animals to some extent: - *Matthew 10:29*: Jesus mentions that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without God's knowledge, indicating awareness of their existence and experiences. - *Proverbs 12:10*: "The righteous care for the needs of their animals," suggesting that animals have needs and can suffer.

However, like in Judaism, animals are not seen as having the same level of consciousness or soul as humans. The emphasis is more on human responsibility and stewardship rather than the intrinsic consciousness of animals.

### Islam Islam also recognizes that animals are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain and distress: - *Qur'an 6:38*: "There is not an animal on earth, nor a bird that flies on its wings, but they are communities like you," suggesting a form of consciousness and social structure. - *Hadiths*: There are several hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) that emphasize the humane treatment of animals and acknowledge their suffering.

In Islam, animals are seen as part of God's creation with their own purpose, but humans are considered to have a higher level of consciousness and spiritual awareness.

### Comparative Perspective - *Recognition of Sentience*: All three religions recognize that animals are capable of feeling pain and experiencing distress, which is why they emphasize humane treatment. - *Hierarchy of Consciousness*: Humans are generally viewed as having a higher level of consciousness, with unique spiritual and moral responsibilities. - *Ethical Treatment*: The acknowledgment of animal sentience in these religions forms the basis for ethical guidelines regarding the treatment of animals, stressing compassion and kindness.

In summary, while animals in Abrahamic religions are considered sentient and capable of experiencing pain, they are not typically regarded as having the same level of consciousness or spiritual status as humans. The ethical treatment of animals is an important aspect of these religions, reflecting a recognition of their sentience and value within God's creation.

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.

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.

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.

The other thing to realize is that the brain's available neuro-chemicals are different in different people. For example there exists people where you could kill their mom, but as long as you replaced it with a sufficiently similar person that provides the exact same services, the child would not be sad - all the services would exist and therefor the atomaton human would operate normally. I've seen this in both autistic and non-autistic persons. The bigger issue with that person being capable of handling the change in their life is how other people push emotional baggage onto them. (For example telling people how they should feel - doesn't make them feel it, but rather makes them feel wrong and then the sadness comes)

In other words we have described emotions that we attribute to all people, but the reality is, not all people have the same emotions - they are some idealised state - and in reality everyone is very different in their emotional capabilities.

> humans exist along a spectrum and there isn't a sharp cliff where humans are 100% conscious and empathetic but dogs are 0%

I disagree, to a certain extent. In my layman terms, I believe "consciousness" is how humans define and differentiate the human mind, so it's exclusive to humans. Other living beings (or even AI) display human-like traits but they should not be defined as "conscious" because that's our own definition of our innate human experience, of how we describe our inner selves. We can grade animals on a scale of human consciousness but the "consciousness" threshold is very high, I believe too high to be awarded to any known species besides our own. Risking becoming a tautology, the "animal consciousness" scale could be a thing, but then it should be a thing on its own.

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.

Yes, my definition would be more originalist ("because it has been this way") if you may.

Consciousness has been a definition of the inner human experience made by humans themselves, regardless of the lack of clear understanding of what precisely denotes consciousness. Can animals experience what we experience? Well, maybe, but that's not consciousness, as I'm reserving that term to define the human inner experience exclusively. In particular, I'm here to argue that a "scale" proposed by parent is not possible. Why? Because the concept itself was born exclusively from the human experience to summarize the undefinable complexities and interactions of the human mind. Given consciousness is undefinable by specific terms and their relationships (ie. there's no "formula"), we can't really assign partial consciousness consistently to other species. We can say "bees play" or "dogs fear" but that can't really be put in a consciousness scale, because what would "10% conscious" even mean?

> it could be just as possible that animals experience consciousness in the exact way we do

Other species may experience something analogous to consciousness as they also experience complex interactions of different traits in their minds. But it's always going to be their own interaction and I would not call it consciousness. And whatever it is it's definitely not the exact way we do.

if they are undefinable and unmeasurable i'd argue you don't understand them well enough to prove or even argue that there aren't similar complexities in other species

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.

There seems to be more dimensions to it though. Trivially, a dog and a human might be on one axis, but you can't rank differently intelligent humans along that same axis. The average dog, while strictly and obviously not as intelligent as a human is not impaired, they function at their fullest. While as humans go further down and away from mainline human intelligence become obviously impaired.

We seem to have a notion that intelligence has multiple dimensions to it, so it's more likely that human intelligence exists as some kind of probabilistic gradient on a hyperplane in a high-dimensional space, and sampling from that plane yields any possible human intelligence profile, while sampling away from that space yields something decidedly not human. Other animals thus must be similar hyperplanes, perhaps in their own space, and likely not intersecting with humans at all.

Had to log in to upvote this. The sheer arrogance of this not being obvious to people is telling.

Even very stupid animals can think about the future and have anxiety which is pretty direct evidence they are thinking about the good things and the bad things that happen to them. You could argue well yeah, but they don't have an opinion about it, but Occam's razor suggests otherwise. We are built from the same plumbing in most cases even if ours is better.

There are a lot of reasons to put humans atop a sharp cliff though. Ascending the cliff means devising language, farms, fire, steel, math, NFTs etc. Reminiscent of Brin’s Uplift novels about giving dolphins (if you’ll pardon the joke) a leg up.

> The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial

The hilarious part here is that you claim that animals must be conscious, and that humans aren't special and that only the religious would dispute this. But the only reason that we think there is a special quality to human cognition is religious, and now you're wanting to extend that to animals. I see no evidence of human consciousness in my day to day activities, and I would be hard-pressed to describe any evidence I've ever stumbled across in my half-century life. You people keep looking for a soul, even if you're reluctant to use that word. It's bizarre. Have you ever been without a consciousness, such that you can compare the two states and confirm that there is this big difference? Can you deduce consciousness from first principles? Philosophers who believe in inane bullshit like consciousness need to pull their heads out of their own asses.

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

> humans are 100% conscious

If using humans as a comparative baseline, then sure, that's trivially true. I don't see any reason to believe there could never be anything 'more conscious' than a human, i.e. >100% conscious when compared to a human.

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

How about the rest of the world, since this is not universal? The fact that we mame, kill, and consume them probably has more to do with treating them as "less" and "other", otherwise you feel sad every lunch. I think it's simple avoidance, at a grand scale. Many cultures that do embrace the experience of other animals are also vegetarian, otherwise they would feel sad every lunch.