Animal Consciousness

An Animal Consciousness is a consciousness that is applied to non-human animals.

• • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Human Consciousness.
  • AI Consciousness.
• See: Sentience, Awareness, Subjectivity, Qualia, Experience, Feeling, Wakefulness, Self-Awareness.

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References

2015

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/animal_consciousness Retrieved:2015-11-19.
  • Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. The topic of animal consciousness is beset with a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form because animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell us about their experiences. Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, for example, has sometimes been blamed for mistreatment of animals because he argued that only humans are conscious. Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism  — something it is like for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself. Other thinkers, such as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent. Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive  — Donald Griffin's 2001 book Animal Minds reviews a substantial portion of the evidence. Animal consciousness has been actively researched for over 100 years. In 1927 the American functional psychologist Harvey Carr argued that any valid measure or understanding of awareness in animals depends on "an accurate and complete knowledge of its essential conditions in man". A more recent review concluded in 1985 that "the best approach is to use experiment (especially psychophysics) and observation to trace the dawning and ontogeny of self-consciousness, perception, communication, intention, beliefs, and reflection in normal human fetuses, infants, and children."

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• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/
  • Questions about animal consciousness — in particular, which animals have consciousness and what (if anything) that consciousness might be like — are both scientific and philosophical. They are scientific because answering them will require gathering information using scientific techniques — no amount of arm-chair pondering, conceptual analysis, logic, a priori theory-building, transcendental inference or introspection will tell us whether a platypus, an iguana, or a squid (to take a few examples) enjoy a life of subjective experience — at some point we'll have to learn something about the animals. Just what sort(s) of science can bear on these questions is a live question, but at the least this will include investigations of the behavior and neurophysiology of a wide taxonomic range of animals, as well as the phylogenetic relationships among taxa. But these questions are deeply philosophical as well, with epistemological, metaphysical, and phenomenological dimensions. Progress will therefore ultimately require interdisciplinary work by philosophers willing to engage with the empirical details of animal biology, as well as scientists who are sensitive to the philosophical complexities of the issue.

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