Concept

Animal consciousness

Overview

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 of 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 use human language, cannot communicate their experiences. It is also difficult to reason objectively about the question because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that they do not feel, their life has no value, and that harming them is not morally wrong. For example, the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes is sometimes criticised for enabling animal mistreatment through his animal machine view, which claimed 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 their world in the way they do themselves. 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—Walter Veit's 2023 book A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.

Animal consciousness has been actively researched for over one hundred 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". In 2012, a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which "unequivocally" asserted that "humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neural substrates." In 2024, more than 500 academics and scientists signed the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. The declaration states that there is strong scientific support for consciousness in mammals and birds and that it is a realistic possibility in other vertebrates and many invertebrates. It calls for these considerations to be taken into account in decisions affecting animals.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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Dogs show this by barking in their sleep. It is not clear whether oviparous animals dream, but it is quite plain that they sleep. 2. And so it is in aquatic animals, as fish, the malacia, the malacostraca, the carabi, and such like creatures. The sleep of all these animals is short: it is plain that they do sleep, though we can form no conclusion from their eyes, for they have no eyelids, but from their not being…
Aristotle, Aristotle's History of Animals In Ten Books
States what Animal consciousness is; the author is tied to Animal consciousness in the knowledge graph.
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When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the result of education. The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some of those…
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
States what Animal consciousness is; the author is tied to Animal consciousness in the knowledge graph.
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Wood, again, is only relative in so far as it is some one's property, not in so far as it is wood. It is plain, then, that in the cases mentioned substance is not relative. But with regard to some secondary substances there is a difference of opinion; thus, such terms as 'head' and 'hand' are defined with reference to that of which the things indicated are a part, and so it comes about that these appear to have a…
Aristotle, The Categories
States what Animal consciousness is; the author is tied to Animal consciousness in the knowledge graph.
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Animal consciousness

Overview

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