They have theory of mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saRsq9pe9Hc

I suspect we fool ourselves into thinking this journaller has any control over our situation and so we give it more value than it has. I don't see how it would give us free will, for instance. But it is a powerful illusion, none the less.

I've had lots of dogs, horses, cats, and think they all are on the consciousness spectrum, but i'm guessing (couldn't possibly know) that they lack this constant overarching journaller in their brains. For species that have a richer communication, i still don't think they would have this... I think the need to write down language, and make it available to others asynchronously plays a part in it.

Interestingly, some people report that they have no such journaller, or sometimes called inner voice that talks to them. I have no way to know what it's like to be them, or if my understanding of what they are saying is indeed what they are saying, but if true, i wonder if these folks are more like what other animals feel in their heads. I have no clue. Frankly, i can't imagine that someone wouldn't have a journaller in their heads, and so it's even hard for me to imagine. I assume i just don't understand.

What about the meat alternative insects? Are they conscious? If so there are people investing millions. to kill gazillion lives a year

Or are they definitely "inferior"?

Do we even know what suffering and consciousness is?

Why did nature evolved for animals to eat each other?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_in_Jainism#Overview

This would make one think that until "recently", most scientists were in the same boat as Descartes, but I think this is really misleading. Descartes believed that mental stuff and physical stuff were categorically different ("cartesian dualism"), whereas almost all scientists would subscribe to some form of monism / physicalism. But the reason for the cogito, which has persisted until at least "recently" is that subjective phenomena are intrinsically not accessible for objective observation. At best, we can capture the "correlates" of consciousness, whether those be behaviors, fMRI BOLD signals, EEG readings, etc, none of which directly shows that there's an inner subjective experience. There's still maybe the possibility of a philosophical zombie, who has the right objectively available signals but doesn't have any internal experience.

But scientists have all the while been working under the operational assumption that animals have something like our experiences. When we study aggression or stress or motivation or whatever else in animal models, and draw parallels between the brains of mice or monkeys and humans, we're assuming that their emotional states feel at least somewhat like ours do. A classic protocol for rodents, relevant in testing anti-depressants (where the whole point is to change some aspect of our subjective experience) is the "forced swim", where you drop a mouse in water in a vessel with smooth vertical sides, and time how long it takes for them to stop struggling. This is taken to be a measure of "despair". If scientists decades ago didn't believe animals experienced anything, they wouldn't do this research.

Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was the minimal statement he could make with absolute certainty -- but we all operate with at least a smidge less solipsism if we assume that other humans are conscious. And it's of course only a small extension to guess that other primates, who have rich social relations and brains similar to ours have a lot of overlapping experiences. And that other mammals, like rodents, who have a bunch of stuff in their brains like ours, have overlapping experiences. And then suddenly you're open to this landscape of different kinds of creates with different kinds of mental experiences.

About placing humanity (or something else) in a category of its own, that depends on how the categorization is made, and it could be done in any way, so such a categorization of humanity does not really help, and can be deceptive to think it is the only one or the best one.

I also think that "intelligence" would not be simply defined by higher vs lower; it is more complicated because of different kind of intelligence and more subclassifications of those too, and then there is the difference of e.g. speed vs knowledge vs etc. There is a sense to identify the intelligence of kind of animals (and of the same kind of animals, e.g. human), but if you merely say it is higher or lower then it is imprecise.

This article also mentions colours, such as red colours. (And other things that you can also feel.) But, not all kind of animal can see all of the colours; some can see some colours that humans does not see but also does not see some that humans does see. Humans can see three colours, but some animals might see four colours. (And, some people also are partially or fully colour blind.)

I had also read in a book once, they said, they are sure that insects have feelings but is not sure about emotions. Well, my guess is probably they do; but, it would be a mistake to think that having emotion would necessarily mean that it is like humans emotions; it can be difference.

Nevertheless, many things that people have said are only for humans and are not what other kind of animals are. In many cases, I think they are wrong (and may even apply for some kind of plants, etc); "conscious" is not the only thing. However, there are also differences (including differences in the details of the things that actually are similar in many ways); and probably some of the differences have been missed as much as many of the similarities have been missed. (There are also differences between individuals, but that is a different thing.)

> And this is important because we need to set rules to protect them either in the lab or in the wild.

You do not need to know exactly how those animals will feel to justify avoiding treating animals badly.

Differences of different kind of animals does not justify to treat them badly.

But, it is good that scientists are actually finally figuring out this stuff scientifically, now. Although I and others had said such things before, that is not the same as doing it scientifically; so now that it can be done scientifically, it will be understood better scientifically, too.

We can't know anything for certain, and the zombie idea is a convenient stonewall that allows us to ignore the behavioural evidence and continue to abuse animals as a society (mainly by killing them).

All which is to say that objectively and scientifically speaking they are obviously conscious although stupid.

...except by every single dog or cat owner ever.

Seriously, I've never understood how anyone could interact with or observe animals for any length of time and not perceive obvious signs of conciousness.

Edit: reading below, the answer appears to be: God.

These animals must not be conscious, or we would never do such a thing, right?

Oh, and we keep over a billion pets in our homes and call them our friends. But they can't be conscious.

The science must be flawed. /s

[1] https://www.humanesociety.org/blog/more-animals-ever-922-bil...

[2] https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/killing-...

[3]

It is a long-standing religious belief that animals do not possess a rational immortal soul and neither do they possess the ability to choose good or evil but are instead governed by instinct, which is why we don't put animals on trial for crimes as it is presumed they have no consciousness of what is right and wrong like humans do

It might be worth reviewing many of the characteristics unique to humans to by way of contrast appreciate how different humans are from other creatures

Animals lack the "moral consciousness" and dignity that is unique to humans which is why most people are comfortable even killing animals and eating them as food, while "cannibalism" is thought to be a barbaric immoral practice contrary to unique human dignity

Articles like these in our view are being pushed possibly to degrade humans to the level of animals so as to justify animal-like immoral behavior

> the article (wrongly in our view) calls Darwin "god-like"

It does not. The exact quote is:

    Charles Darwin enjoys a near god-like status among scientists for his theory of evolution.

> which is why we don't put animals on trial for crimes

You may not but many animals have been put on trial for crimes throughout history.

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

> Animals lack the "moral consciousness" and dignity that is unique to humans

Your opinion is noted .. although appears to have been eronously made as if a statement of fact which is debated, as discussed in the article.

(if you walk into an old physics building where experiments of import have been done, there is often a vestibule filled with the old hardware. In some ways it feels like a holy temple of science containing relics....)

One can live his life one way due to practicality and believe in another. In fact, if this is any news, almost everyone disagree with their country's laws in at least some matters. This doesn't mean anything.

I believe that killing some conscious stuff is OK and others bad, but not because me or others feel bad or good about it or because the ones I agree to kill taste good. Because believe in a complete moral system that isn't based on another human's fallible reasoning or worse, feelings.

I did. Obviously. Why would I retell what another philosopher said? That would be rather silly. If they want something to be known, they can let you know themselves.

> Which others disagree?

Whichever ones disagree. Again, they can speak for themselves.

> Some claim that Mathematics is the Queen of Sciences

In other words, not science?

> yet without which science is and has nothing

I am not sure you have made a convincing case that science is more than nothing. If that is what you are trying to convince us of, you are not making providing a compelling argument.

I suppose we mean the ability to learn language.

more like Aristotle

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Care to elaborate/expand?

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

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.

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

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.

Symbolic communication is much more precise.

Just like people thinking low-code or diagram based software development should be better. It isn’t an it was tried multiple times already.

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

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

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

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.

‘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.)

1. Intellect

2. Ego

3. Mind

5. Sensory capacities

6. Action capacities

Humor would be a part of the Mind and Sensory capacities which reflects back the changes in Action capacities.

So 'consciousness' is actually none of these things. It's the irreducible entity, or in simple terms energy or force that animates what would otherwise be dead matter.

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.

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

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.

The only thing you can be sure of is that you experience some qualia; that you are conscious is an assumption.

I did IT work on a farm for a few weeks and was there 3-5 days a week. The cows were far more active than any other animal I saw. They clearly liked each other and had friends and non-friends in the group. They would run and walk dozens and dozens of miles per day and a horse would move 1/4 mile in total over the course of an entire day.

Indeed, though* all of us should be confident that there is at least a second conscious being besides ourselves, the one who coined the term.

* ignoring A J Ayer for a moment, even though "there is a thought now" would be the only form of consciousness that a current LLM could possibly have if it had any at all

So I don't know if the fact that your cats are agents that are reacting to stimuli is proof that they're conscious. Again, if we were an outside observer, like an alien, we would have no way to prove humans are conscious. The only reason we believe scientifically that other humans are conscious is because we personally perceive conscious, and since other humans have the same neurological structures that we do, we can posit that they experience the same thing. Philosophically though we can't 'prove' other people are conscious, which gets us back to the philosophical zombie thought experiment.

Because there’s no rigorous scientific definition of what consciousness is, and you can’t even just roughly point to it, just like most quasi-sciences it’s all up for debate.

From my perspective, the only people questioning whether or not non-humans have consciousness are coming from a religious perspective trying to reconcile their cognitive dissonance

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.

The other thing that people have to do is drawing lines, life's issues are otherwise overwhelming. Now, where they draw the lines differ widely. It's common to take external markers and make the separation according to that - a safer bet, given that others can see those markers as well, and so, maybe more readily validate the discrimination. Skin color, gender, age, signs of sickness, mental conditions are easy targets for this. In most cases, they are coupled with vulnerability as well, so the history of their abuses is as old as humanity itself - hence I don't think it's that wild that people think such a thing. Unfortunately they think the wildest things, myself included. It's actually quite scary to me.

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.

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 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...

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

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.

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.

This was the idea behind spontaneous generation, for example: souls find their way into rotting meat and maggots are born.

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?

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

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

Uncertainty is the soft synonym for entropy.

Entropy is the distribution of potential over negative potential.

It is not that Truth is impossible to find, it is that undeceiving the self is difficult.

Undeceive yourself of your own words if you will find something you have not anticipated.

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.

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.

The claim that certain individuals lack an inner monologue is a testament to this—I can't imagine what that would be like but that is certainly nothing like my conscious experience is. To me, the lack of an inner monologue sounds very much like the 'dark universe' in which the brain is doing all of the processing and there is no conscious observer to witness the unfolding. I'm sure people without a inner monologue are still conscious.. but—it's interesting to think about how different their experience may be like.

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.

I am not opposing your view, just trying to understand the logic - perplexed by downvotes on a simple question...

I dont want to beat a dead horse, but I have to insist on a qualifier. Some medical professionals believed something silly, not all of them. Leaving the qualifier out changes the claim… and makes it wrong!

I can't see how distracting yourself with something else (thoughts) could make you more conscious.

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?

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.

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.

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.

pun intended?

As an aside, it's not clear to me how "having dominion" should justify such mistreatment, anyway.

1. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201:25-...

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.

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

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.

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).

As for myself, I can't believe that animals aren't concious.

Excellent move for your family and yourself, congratulation.

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.

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

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.

    > i do eat meat (would love to stop)

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.

We literally discovered a 32,000 year old burial site where a hunter put a mammoth bone in their deceased dogs mouth when they buried him.

https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/animal-health/our-respo...

That's not utilitarian, to give funerary care.

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.

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!)

[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.