Animal Consciousness (Part1)

Sidenote: Long break! Ouch. One-post a week minimum from now. (Challenge Accepted)

So one of my favourite hobbies (particularly on days approaching deadlines & work responsibilities) is the browsing of ncbi.

It’s one of those excellent websites where either academics <sleep-deprived PhDs> find their work linked for all its glory, or blasé word-browsers amuse themselves in knowing the latest about “orchestra hallucination via whiplash” or “unusual spoon swallowing” (don’t ask me how I searched that - googling ‘”foreign body insertion” makes me sound...well. shall we say, suspicious)

But in any case, avoiding distractions it behoves us to discuss a smidge of consciousness.

Searching “animal consciousness” gives a surprisingly sparse list of resulting papers – it circles around appropriate-sounding titles such as “biology and quantum hypotheses” (on-topic if a little pretentious to QM), to “a catholic evaluation of..” (a reading point where I stop analysing and look into my soul) - to my favourite, simply entitled “Qualia” as if biology by design is to be thus redefined in philosophical terms with a bit of Wittgensteinian charm thrown in.

Sure they’re all centred on consciousness – a miasmal field if any can be so described – but few of them fittingly qualify exactly when we deem an organism to possess consciousness, and what external markers are truly representative of this. We could descend into philosophical arguments – Many of you dabblers would have read all about the mind-body problem, the typical Chinese room or philosophical zombie idea. Perhaps you've even read some David Chalmers or been thoroughly fired up exploring Locke (especially if like me, you came across him in Sophie’s World as a kid and experienced complete mystery).

You’ll have experienced snippets of such ideas in Fox’s Dollhouse – what is consciousness when the human has been fully reduced to a tabula rasa?

Or equally pondered AI emergence –

For that matter - Why is it that we’re so very aware of machine development – a fascination that has ranged from Turing tests and Deep Blue’s chess championship to imbuing our SciFi fantasies with talking holograms (Trekkies, I #wink at you) and Cyclons - ?

- Yet animals are to us, a passé, irrelevant consciousness?

Hmm.

It’s so much easier to notice only that which benefits us.

Or discount a chipmunk because they lost a game of tic-tac-toe (assuming we challenged him in the first place)...

We live in a world where we consume – consumerism is the primary economic mover – the rabid hoarding of oil and natural resources, of land for our mass crops and animal farming, of money for our market manipulation. Medicine has advanced to such an extent that we see 60 or 70 as an age of little fear (excepting a top-heavy age distribution increasing retirement age).

A quote I quite love, attributed by the QI elves to Edward J. Stieglitz – “in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years” – yet our focus on consumerist growth has resulted in a culture of “more-than-better” materialistic as opposed to emotion-experiencing preferences, with little political sway over regulating climate impact, conservation, species-preservations and indeed – the topic of this series of posts – laws taking into account the life and emotion animals experience at our hands.

NOW... I’m not a vegan (although I advocate limiting your meat intake – mmm, SALAD! Good right?) – neither am I an advocator of ceasing all animal use/testing/research (having worked in a neuroscience lab using mice this past summer) – but current regulation (excepting the occasional self-imposed human kindness) isn't sufficient.

On July 7^th this year a whole bunch of neuroscientists (& even fancy wigs – yes, Stephen Hawking) signed a declaration proclaiming:

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

Their views point out that human and animal consciousness should be deemed EQUAL. Lack of human-comprehensible verbal communication or complex rational reasoning doesn’t exclude then from feeling, thinking, requiring stimulation, seeing themselves – possessing self-consciousness. Just consider even the tip of our animal-mishandling iceberg – fishing. Mass, cruel wastage of life – caught, left to die on deck, and thrown back into the sea (disrupting the web’s ecosystem and distribution as seen here and here). This extends to out handling within kitchens (who thought throwing live lobsters into boiling water is fine?) and animal farming and breeding.