animal consciousness

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do you think it exists?
i don't, at least not for the vast majority of animals.
i think they are pure automata a la descartes view, operating on instinct with no self-consciousness, or consciousness of one's consciousness, and no ability to think abstractly and to come up with even the idea of other animals being conscious.
another way of saying it is access consciousness (ability to store and recall info among a few other things i think), vs. phenomenal consciousness (which is more about subjective experience, or 'qualia').
a relevant analogy would be the case of a blindsight patient which has access to their visual field, yet isn't actually 'seeing' anything.
an implication in my eyes is that animals don't actually suffer, though they look and sound like they're in pain, they are not aware of it, and thus don't suffer in the way in which we do.
i believe that suffering is the awareness of one's negative mental states, and without that it's all just negative responses to noxious stimuli and such.
i mean human baby brains are probably more complex than animals' right?
yet even we don't become conscious till around 1.5 yrs. i certainly don't remember 'being' a baby.

a pretty good reason to think (at least the majority) of animals aren't conscious comes from anthropic reasoning, which states that if it WAS possible to 'be' anything like a cow, a bat, a chicken etc. then we'd much more likely be one of those many animals instead of humans, which are a minority and also just happen to be the most intelligent, most advanced, etc.
i mean dinosaurs lived for over a hundred million years right? how long have humans lived, a few hundred thousand at most? yet we just happen to be here right now as humans?
with insects it gets much more ridiculous as their numbers are simply astronomical, but no respectable scientists claim that INSECTS are conscious to my knowledge.

i am not an expert in neuroscience but this is my 'instinct' so to speak. i believe it is an open question, so there's plenty of room for opinion. we don't even know what makes us conscious, so it's hard to see how it's justifiable to project our conscious experience onto animals without it being the clear fallacy of anthropomorphization (without justifying it somehow).

If other people are conscious, I have no reason to believe animals aren't also conscious. People are just animals. Animals have individual personalities just like people do, so if personality implies consciousness, then that applies to animals. The main reason for denying animal consciousness is for ethical reasons, people want to be justified in abusing animals. To do this they arbitrarily declared that people have souls while animals don't, and then use Aristotle's definition of a rational soul to combine with empirical evidence of animals being irrational to conclude that animals are mechanistic. It's really not Descartes view, he just gets the blame because he created a more fleshed out framework for it, and it seems he was actually open-mined to the concept of animals having rational souls. He wasn't so much about animals versus people as body versus mind, he just didn't think animals had minds (which is a bit odd considering he thought the soul resided it the pituitary gland, and most animals with observable brains have those).

Anyway, the idea the abstract thinking is needed for consciousness is ridiculous. All that is needed is sentience. One doesn't even need to be self-aware to be consciousness. This arguments again all go back to Aristotle. But even at that, we now know that the cognitive abilities of animals are much greater than they were thought to be in Descartes time. It should also be noted that abstract thinking can exist with just access consciousness, computers do it all the time.

That's very self-absorbed thought. Just because YOU happen to be a human, that doesn't mean that there aren't animals and that they're just some form of automated creature.

"if it WAS possible to 'be' anything like a cow, a bat, a chicken etc. then we'd much more likely be one of those many animals instead of humans"

But, the point is, that their ARE many more of these than humans. This isn't any kind of useful reasoning, as it's already coming from the belief that these animals aren't conscious. So, it's not doing anything to prove that they're not. Fact is, you don't know what animals are thinking and how conscious and aware they are, but this has absolutely no link to the fact that you're human.

"But, the point is, that their ARE many more of these than humans"

yes you're right, that is the point.

"This isn't any kind of useful reasoning, as it's already coming from the belief that these animals aren't conscious."

come again? not necessarily. this example is applicable in an a priori objective view on the matter.

"Fact is, you don't know what animals are thinking and how conscious and aware they are"

i never said i knew for sure, i'm just giving some of my thoughts on why i'd say it's more likely than not that at least the majority of animals are not conscious and don't think abstractly like we do.

i think you're just not getting it, what i'm saying is that if we are a random sample from the overall set of conscious observers (which we have no reason to think we're not), then we should expect to be an animal given the chances if they share consciousness with us.
i think there's something to be said for the fact that our being conscious happens to correlate with being the only species that creates art, has gone to the moon, has a moral compass (aside from some altruism seen here and there etc. in other higher primates - which may at least be partly conscious since they're so close to us evolutionarily), uses complex languages to communicate, etc.

i haven't heard so far any arguments from you for why they should be conscious or even why it's wrong to believe they shouldn't be, you just seemed to get heated up for no apparent reason, which makes me believe you are more emotionally motivated than anything.
i'd just like to see an open honest discussion on the matter hopefully with someone more qualified than me giving their voice (not that i'd believe someone just based on authority alone).

Nope. Your attempt at invoking the anthropic principle is blatantly illogical. By the same reasoning, I could say that I'm the only conscious being, because there are billions of people and only one me, so the probability of me being me is so small it could only happen if I was the only conscious being, yeah, no. The real illogic comes from the fact that if you were a bat, you could make the same argument to claim humans aren't conscious. The only reason the strong anthropic principle works for necessary consciousness is because if there was no consciousness there would be no observation and thus no meaningful universe (which is pretty ironic considering you rejected that reasoning from me in another thread), but here your argument is assuming a priori that animals aren't conscious, so it doesn't work as evidence that animals aren't conscious. It seems overall you're just bunging the weak anthropic (which is to say you SHOULDN'T make such deterministic conclusions about us being humans like you just did because humans are already what we are, basically the Texas sharp-shooter fallacy) with the strong one.

"i haven't heard so far any arguments from you for why they should be conscious" Why should humans be conscious? Fact is at least some of them obviously are, so unless you can make a distinction between people and animals, there is no reason to believe otherwise.

"or even why it's wrong to believe they shouldn't be" Because if they are conscious, but you act according the belief that they aren't, you could commit moral atrocities. For example, if you believe an animal is non-sentient, there is nothing wrong with inflicting apparent pain on it, which may be useful for the sake of science. But if the animal is sentient, then it's not okay. Thus there is a clear problem with believing it shouldn't be.

it's not an argument just to say other animals must be conscious because we're animals too.. there's obviously unique traits among different species, especially ours in relation to the rest (at least i think so).
i don't see how personalities imply consciousness or an intellectual life of any sort, but i haven't thought about or read much about that.

i think you have it backwards, i believe the cambridge declaration of consciousness was mainly motivated by ethical and politically correct reasons rather than purely scientific ones.
if you look at their statement(s), it's far from convincing.
it basically boils down to other creatures doing things in similar ways to us, and therefore the internal structure which operates them must also be like ours and they must think like us too.
similar parts of the brain lighting up isn't particularly interesting either because there could well be other parts of OUR brains which interpret that brain activity in different ways.
they bring up the old 'mirror test' thing even though it clearly doesn't prove consciousness (even if it proved self-awareness, self-awareness is not the same thing as consciousness), as you could easily program a robot to react to themselves. even if it meant anything significant, VERY few animals have passed it, most of them being close relatives to us (surprise?? i think not).
christof koch, one of the main guys behind it, actually admits how it's still a big mystery if anything, and it's hard to say if consciousness is behind the scenes or just a program running in the hardware.

'you' couldn't really have been another person as you're defined by your current person.
what species are you though? that's what matters. if you're going to arrive on a world you're obviously going to be part of a conscious species, the particular person you are doesn't matter.
'you could make the same argument if you were a bat'.. what's the point in this assertion when the hypothetical already presupposes the conclusion being on your side?

i don't reject the strong anthropic principle, i reject the notion that it implies that observer-free universes don't exist. that's not part of the deal.

explain how i'm assuming that animals aren't conscious in the argument? you have it backwards in fact, for the sake of argument i'm actually assuming they ARE conscious, which means that we'd more likely BE one of them.
the reason that it's significant is that we are obviously special in other ways, which means there may be something to the correlation of our being conscious and the fact that we are exceptional in other ways.

why should humans be conscious? that's cute, but obviously holds no serious weight. it's not anthropomorphization to assume our own fundamental mental experiences apply to members of the same species as our brains are all of the same stock more or less.

and nope. i never said that if animals aren't conscious then we are free to do anything we like. i do think we should experiment on them freely to save humans though even if they are conscious. giving them the benefit of the doubt is fine, and also just the fact that we cause mental suffering on other people by hurting animals is reason enough to refrain from doing so.

From a biological perspective the most unique things about humans is not our brains, but our butts. Seriously, everything unique about us is just in relation to our particular method of locomotion. While it is theorized by many that only humans are capable of symbolic thought, this has recently been challenged and there is evidence other animals might be capable of it. Anyway, there is no reason to assume symbolic thought has anything to do with consciousness, that's just the abstraction fallacy you made earlier.

No, I don't have it backwards, the issue is you are looking back to the Cambridge declaration (and you probably don't understand what ethics actually is), when people have been thinking about things WAY longer than that. Aristotle is older than Cambridge, so is the bible. On the other side of the argument, Pythagoras is older than Aristotle, and so is Indian beliefs in reincarnation. So, let's go to what ethics actually means rather than what you think it means. Let's consider it this way: if animals weren't conscious, then what ethical gains would there be in thinking animals are conscious? Ethical gains can be made by assuming animals aren't conscious through exploitation of them. Of course, if they are conscious, that would be an ethical disaster. But people are selfish and carnal, and they prefer the ethics which directly benefit them over potentially evading disaster which they do not personally experience. And there is nothing scientific about the assumption animals don't have consciousness. Again, look back to Descartes and pituitary glands.

The rest of your post has nothing to do with anything I was talking about because I was not referring to Cambridge.

You are saying species matters, but it doesn't. It's the exact argument as the individual argument, only much more arbitrary because species themselves are arbitrary. Let's replace species with race. Does that men black people aren't conscious because I'm white? Of course not. Your argument is just plain stupid, and it seems to be based entirely on the fallacious assumption that consciousness is inherently tied to species rather than individuals, even though that makes absolutely no sense if you have ANY understanding of biology.

"you have it backwards in fact, for the sake of argument i'm actually assuming they ARE conscious, which means that we'd more likely BE one of them." No, because I can apply that same reasoning to any arbitrary characteristic differentiating humans. You've got it backwards because you're assuming the reason we aren't them is because they aren't conscious.

"why should humans be conscious? that's cute, but obviously holds no serious weight. it's not anthropomorphization to assume our own fundamental mental experiences apply to members of the same species as our brains are all of the same stock more or less." YOUR argument holds no serious weight, because burden of proof is on you for species being a significant (and if you knew anything about biology you would know it's SUPER arbitrary). If you can extend it to all humans, I can extend it to all animals, it's as simple as that. Really the only reason it's extended to all humans is to be politically correct, your hypocrisy is outstanding.

stop w*king your brains and look into their eyes.

This.

But a good "brain w*king" is the point of this place, right? I like to look in their eyes, well, at least some things. Spiders scare the crap out of me, especially gigantic orb weavers. But I assume consciousness isn't unique to us. We aren't all that unique, IMO. We certainly think we are, but our powers of perception and what we think we know aren't all that impressive, again, IMO. PET scans trying to identify regions of brain activity and correlating it with behavior, etc. It's incredibly rudimentary. I remember folks being so excited about decoding the genome, and how life could be boiled down largely to a simple code. And look how that's turned out - it just ain't the case.

I'm sure my background in medicine and the history of science (eg. Thomas Kuhn) colors my perspective significantly.

I completely disagree...

I know a lot of animals are much more instinctual than humans and behave more in accordance with basic instincts than more complex thought but even then think they are aware of their actions even if they don't have a reason 'why' that they could explain if given the ability to speak.

Just the other day I was watching some nature documentary and it was showing sperm whales correlate together to steal fish from humans fishing in aslaska...some sort of fishing where they go into the open ocean and drop baited hooks deep into the water and leave it down there for a rather long time so fish can be caught before pulling it up. But the whales have some how caught on and can recognize the sound vibration of fishing boats so they'll surround the boat and wait till the humans go to pull up the lines and eat all the fish off of it...and apparently they've been spreading teaching each other this trickery. I don't think beings with no consciousness would have the capacity to do something like that.

I mean have you ever interacted with a cat or dog?...they need some level of consciousness to interact the way they do.

The real question should be if it is possible to make artificial intelligence conscious? And how advanced virtual reality can become.

fetus consciousness. do you think it exists?

The idea that animals don't feel pain the way humans do might be true with simpler forms of life, such as simpler insects, microscopic life, and such. But there is no way in hell that dogs, cats, whales, horses, and such do not. That's especially true for domesticated animals that have picked up on human emotion such as love. No one can tell me that the animals I've owned throughout my life didn't feel something for me, or that it was just my perception of wanting them to love me. Such emotions might not be as developed or complex among animals as it is among humans, but I absolutely believe it's there in some simpler form.

As soon as a fetus has enough brain mass and inter-connections then consciousness of some degree should emerge.

Unborns in their seventh month can respond to sound coming from outside the mother. In a word, a seventh month fetus can hear. Experiments have shown that newborn babies recognize their mother's voices.

Please see: http://www.parenting.com/article/what-b ... n-the-womb