To prove this would require being able to very clearly define consciousness, but we know that consciousness is not “a thing”— it’s rather “a collection of things”, and it’s not either there or not; rather it’s largely a question of degree. And I don’t just mean this as inter-species variation either: even if we only look at humans, humans exhibit the whole spectrum and/or patchwork of states of consciousness, both developmentally and pathologically. And to some extent, physiologically too.
I find it annoying how we’re even entertaining the idea that animals wouldn’t be conscious. Like what does that even mean?
All these people who aren’t convinced that animals are conscious… I’d really like to know what specific behaviour would convince them one way or another. Pick pretty much any behaviour, and you’ll find animals (and even insects) displaying it.
I can't help but believe that people who think animals aren't conscious are starting from that assumption. If you start from the belief that there's some inherent "human-ness" (soul, etc), then nothing you see will convince you that animals have it too.
I can prove that I am conscious, at least to my satisfaction, because I can think the thought "I am conscious". Outward behavior of other humans also proves to my satisfaction that they're conscious. And when interacting with animals, I see many of the same qualities that lead me to believe other people are conscious, with the difference largely being a matter of degree.
Before you can prove anything about consciousness, even "to your satisfaction" or in relation to yourself, you would need to propose a clear and unambiguous definition of it.
My understanding of the history here is that scientific understanding of the nature of animals was based on folklore, attributing supernatural properties to animals and their behavior. Scientists agreed to throw all that out, and rightfully so, in preference for an evidence-based approach. And what we're seeing today, is that despite a couple centuries of assuming that animals are pure instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence that they are individuals with intelligence, memory, feelings, preferences and even language. Where "they" spans the range from bees to whales.
The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric, but a rejection of folklore as literal truth. While some are still attached to an anthropocentric worldview, that perspective seems dead among people who study animal behavior.
> scientific understanding of the nature of animals was based on folklore
Popular, pre- or proto- scientific understanding perhaps, but not scientific understanding per se.
> despite a couple centuries of assuming that animals are pure instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence that they are individuals with intelligence, memory, feelings, preferences and even language
These things are not mutually exclusive. The words "intelligence", "memory", "feelings", "preferences" and "language" can refer to purely automatic/mechanical processes, even when we're speaking in reference to humans. There's no real reason why we need non-mechanistic magic to explain the human experience. The two ideas are compatible: animals are conscious, and humans are "just" really complex machines. It's all the same stuff, viewed from different lenses.
> The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric
They were, and they still are. Folklore itself is for the most part very anthropocentric.
The human attitude towards our relationship with animals cannot be described as anything other than anthropocentric for the vast majority of people. Whether the origin of that attitude is due to the rejection of certain traditions assuming animals to be sacred or the adoption of traditions treating humans as sacred, it exists, and causes horrific mistreatment of animals on a global scale.
I suspect the attitude is the default / most primitive one, because any other attitude requires higher-order cognitive processes that can abstract one's own experiences (which is the only real input one has) with the behaviours of entities that appear to be very different from oneself. In other words, the capacity for empathy is a "positive feature", in the sense that it is absent by default.
The ability to make this kind of abstraction is a pretty sophisticated thing, and either requires time to evolve (as an instinct), and/or requires socialization/learning (as a partly or totally-intentional practice).
True. It's also sophisticated to have the ego required to believe you should inherently have dominion over the entire planet and all animals on it. I don't think it's an idea most people would have adopted themselves without being born into a society formed by religions that perpetuate such a belief and it's consequences [1].
As an aside, it's not clear to me how "having dominion" should justify such mistreatment, anyway.
> It's also sophisticated to have the ego required to believe you should inherently have dominion over the entire planet and all animals on it.
Is that really "sophisticated", or is that just what happens when an entity outcompetes all others for resource utilization by chance (ie.: in the context of ecology / evolutionary pressure)? This is basically how cancer happens, and yet I wouldn't call cancer cells more sophisticated than healthy ones. I call it dys-regulated.
Yeah, I think it's sophisticated. Our brains are hardwired for empathy, and people are able to mostly ignore their social/emotional programming through a system of beliefs that would be difficult to propagate without language.
You seem to think we're somehow "empathetic by default", but that's something I'd disagree with.
Our primal instinct is one of tribalism and auto-centrism, but over long periods of time we've developed a (fragile) capacity to empathize with 1) other people that look like us, and 2) other people that don't look like us, and 3) perhaps animals. But we didn't always have this capacity, and we see it break down all the time.
What makes you think we "didn't always have this capacity"? Or that other animals don't have it? We have it from a very young age, children like animals, want them as pets, and cry when they see them hurt or killed. We've had at the very least a desire to commune with animals for 100,000 years or we wouldn't have dogs in their current form.
In general, empathy can be either an evolved behaviour, a learned behaviour, or both.
In humans this is largely-but-probably-not-exclusively socialized behaviour. Most cases of (human and non-abused) feral children exhibit behaviour that is not particularly compatible with empathy.
I shared my rationale for why we "haven't always had this capacity" a few comments up this thread, and you seemed to agree with it before immediately making the contradicting statement.
If you think I'm contradicting myself, then I didn't know what "abstraction" was referring to in "sophisticated abstraction". (FWIW, it's pretty difficult to review the conversation and formulate good responses on mobile, since all I can see easily without switching back and forth is the comment I am replying to). I think it's "sophisticated" to have the language and philosophy required to follow a moral system that you prioritize over your own instincts—in this case, the prioritization of members of your species. I don't think it's "sophisticated" to not attempt to maximally exploit everything around me for even the most modest benefit to the deteriment of all else. Maybe I have too high an opinion of people. Maybe it's just a consequence of scale.
I see empathy alone as being much more basic, requiring only a very low-level "theory of mind", likely arising from the type of evolutionary pressure that leads to social species. I would be surprised to learn that was a recent adaptation in our evolutionary line. Maybe most species have it "off by default", if you consider the "default" to be a constant state of duress and resource scarcity.
It was very recently evolution wise that humans started to keep animals as pets, before then we just hunted and ate animals. We would empathize as much with those animals as cats did with mice.
Another grave site in Germany from 14,000 years ago had a dog buried with a man and a woman, treating it as a family member.
We literally have had fur babies since before we had civilization.
Once you get there, there's far more evidence: ancient Greeks burying pets and writing inscriptions about how they loved them, dogs and baboons were kept as pets in ancient Egypt, and given names, which was a big deal in Egyptian religion, and wasn't done for utility animals at all.
I'm not backtracking, you're simply not operating within the proper context boundary, or perhaps getting hung up on the least important[0] semantic imprecision in the thread[1]; regardless of whether we're talking about "human" or "primate" evolution (of the kind that is relevant to this discussion), it simply does not happen at these time scales. We're talking about evolution of highly conserved behavioural traits, not about "the History of homo sapiens sapiens" stricto sensu.
[0] It's the least important imprecision because in general, when we talk about the evolution of a species, we typically also consider common ancestors that don't necessarily have the same label as the modern species. When we speak of "human evolution", we're referring to proto-humans and human-primate common ancestors as well. Anyone would gloss over this in context.
[1] Note also that the imprecision was someone else's, not mine.
Eh, plants too. Many plants react to the environments, recognize kin, seem to communicate with each other, etc
People don’t like it, just like many people don’t like animals being aware.
I had a fascinating theological discussion with a guy once. He was a farmer and he believed strongly that animals lack souls. I, on the other hand, believe that even amoeba have souls. I feel it’s just a condition of being a living thing while he felt that this was unique to humankind. Obviously, he has an interest emotionally in viewing animals as soulless. Easier to slaughter them that way.
> I find it annoying how we’re even entertaining the idea that animals wouldn’t be conscious. Like what does that even mean?
it means that "science" has been infiltrated with grifters living off research grant gravy trains producing conjectures entirely obvious for hundreds of thousands of years...and reproduced by the previous round of grifters a handful of years earlier. i say that as someone who sees these faux revelations recur every few years. it's ridiculous...as if we're as a species not conscious of the pattern, ironically.
For a while, science didn't admit to a female orgasm, either. There was "no evidence" in the sense that no one had bothered to perform scientific observation and collect data. There was common sense, and reasonable assumption, but no studies. Then there were studies.
Common sense tells you and I that animals are conscious to some degree. But as there is no current scientific definition of what the system of consciousness actually is (and I'm speculatively calling it a system) it's difficult to say animals have it through observation. We know they respond to anesthetics just like we do. We know anesthesia can shut off consciousness, so there's some physicality to whatever consciousness is. We just don't have a classification for it yet.
How do you "prove" that other people are conscious?
This isn't a gotcha question: to me they're both obviously true. The question is what kind of evidence do you require, and why do people require different evidence for people vs other animals.
> How do you "prove" that other people are conscious?
For sentience scientists mainly look at behavioral cues:
> For example, "if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant." Avoiding painful stimuli unless the reward is significant can also provide evidence that pain avoidance is not merely an unconscious reflex (similarly to how humans "can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building").
Exactly. All of that is reasonable and the behavior described are obviously present as anyone who's ever had a dog would tell. So I don't understand why "are animals conscious" is being debated at this point.
I’m not saying that this is the case, but all the mentioned behaviors are only indicators and could also be reflexive actions which the dog is genetically programmed to do because they work. If a beetle is flipped, it also has a “program” to get upright again, but that doesn’t mean it’s aware of its situation and is actively deciding something. I’m pretty sure dogs are conscious, but you can’t really tell from the outside. LLMs also appear to reason and make arguments but I wouldn’t call them conscious.
You’re right, you also can’t tell for other people. You can make an assumption because they are very similar to you and you yourself appear to be conscious to yourself. But you can’t really disprove solipsism as far as I know.
I mean, same with gravity, right? In ascending order of complexity, noticing gravity, using gravity for benefit, and explaining gravity are orders of magnitude different.
