This summer, a group of scientists at a conference on “Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals” issued a statement (PDF) declaring:
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.
In other words, research shows that animals are more conscious of their experiences than was previously thought. Granted, these scientists weren’t the first to acknowledge animal consciousness, and whether animals are truly “conscious and aware to the degree that humans are” (emphasis mine), as one commentator claimed, seems to remain an open question.
In any case, is animal consciousness really “a big deal,” and a fact that challenges the widely held “belief in human exceptionalism, so strongly rooted in the Judeo-Christian view of the world”? Does it prove that the human mind is merely material?
Edward Feser says no and blames Descartes for the confusion:
It might be supposed that if you regard the human mind as something immaterial, you have to regard animals as devoid of consciousness, so that evidence of animal consciousness is evidence against the immateriality of the mind and thus a “big deal.”
. . . There is simply no essential connection whatsoever between affirming the immateriality of the human mind and denying that animals are conscious. Aristotelians, for example, have always insisted both that animals are sentient — indeed, that is part of what makes them animals in the first place — and that human intellectual activity is at least partly immaterial (for reasons I’ve discussed in many places, most recently here). Descartes’ reasons for denying animal consciousness have to do with assumptions peculiar to his own brand of dualism, assumptions Aristotelians reject. And they have to do especially with assumptions Descartes made about the nature of matter as much or more than they have to do with his assumptions about the nature of mind — assumptions about matter that materialists (no doubt including at least some among those scientists [who signed the statement]) share.
To read Feser’s full argument, which is difficult to excerpt but easy to follow, go here.
September 6th, 2012 | 3:16 pm
How can anyone who has ever loved and lived with a cat or dog doubt that animals have some sort of consciousness, however rudimentary?
It strikes me that Christian anxiety about animal consciousness is the result of fundamental confusion regarding the psychological and the spiritual. Is the mind identical with the spirit? Doesn’t our spiritual life depend not simply on self-awareness, but on awareness of God and the potential to commune with Him through Christ, after whose image we are made?
September 6th, 2012 | 6:21 pm
Although I hardly understood a word of what Edward Feser wrote, he seems to be (as he basically acknowledges) arguing against a point the neuroscientists have not made. And their point seems to be not that animals experience consciousness, but that the consciousness animals experience is remarkably similar to the consciousness humans experience, even when their brains are significantly different from human or mammalian brains (e.g., lacking a neocortex). The similarities are not limited to cats and dogs, but extend all the way to octopuses. The idea that octopuses experience consciousness in much the same way that humans do is startling to think about, even if it does not amount to a “big deal” in terms of philosophy.
Edward Feser seems to know all of philosophy backwards and forwards but—and I hope this doesn’t make me sound anti-intellectual—I wonder how much of it corresponds to anything. Religion A (names changed to protect the innocent) has an extraordinarily elaborate system of thought, and so does Religion B, but if a devout expert in Religion A did an intensive study of Religion B, or vice versa, I think the conclusion would be that there can be extraordinarily intelligent, brilliantly constructed systems of thought that appear compelling only to people who are already believers in that system of thought. Professor of Religion A Apologetics could not make a dent in the faith of Professor of Religion B Apologetics, and vice versa.
September 6th, 2012 | 6:54 pm
related issue: Harvard scientist who discovered language ability in monkeys faked his results. link
September 6th, 2012 | 8:15 pm
David – Right, Feser is not arguing against the neuroscientists’ declaration, as he himself says, but about possible (over)interpretations of it and of the emerging field of animal consciousness more generally. See for example the HuffPo piece I linked to on the words “belief in human exceptionalism” — the writer seems to think that animal consciousness and future research on animals will prove that there are virtually no differences (or at least no differences with moral/philosophical implications) between animals and humans, aside from our more complicated brains. Animal consciousness is definitely significant; Feser’s only saying (as far as I can tell) that it doesn’t demonstrate that the human mind is merely material.
I see what you mean with your second point, but the existence of converts (from atheism to Christianity, Christianity to Buddhism, Protestantism to Catholicism, Christianity to atheism, whatever) shows that some people, at least, change their minds after careful study — that is, apologetics from one group or another can indeed “make a dent in their faith.”
September 6th, 2012 | 10:51 pm
Who in the world has ever doubted that animals have consciousness, and that there is pretty much only one kind of consciousness — you either are conscious or you aren’t. That seems to me to be the biggest non-surprise of the week (unless you want to go with “junk DNA isn’t really junk”). Sometimes academics invent little worlds the rest of us don’t live in. Is an ant conscious in the same way we are? Yes. In the same degree? Probably not.
September 6th, 2012 | 11:26 pm
“the consciousness animals experience is remarkably similar to the consciousness humans experience”
How can the scientists possibly know this? Note “remarkably”.
September 7th, 2012 | 3:10 am
The moral ramifications of this are obvious: how do we continue to kill and eat billions of animals when it’s clear that they possess such rich mental lives?
September 7th, 2012 | 5:42 am
Gail Finke asks, “Who in the world has ever doubted that animals have consciousness?”
Well, quite a few people, actually, including some Catholic theologians. Like Descartes, whose dualism they swallowed whole, via Malebranche, they thought that animals were mere automata, no more conscious than a cuckoo clock. For them, animal behaviour was merely a complex of stimulus and response going on in the animal’s body, but with no conscious subject. For them, “no (substantial) soul” meant “no mind,” hence, no consciousness.
Indeed, their whole account of consciousness was deeply flawed. Misled by grammar, they assumed that “I” was a proper name. In reality, of course, it is no more a referring expression than “it” is a referring expression in “it is raining.”
September 7th, 2012 | 9:00 am
Anna,
But how is arguing that human consciousness is not merely material relevant to a defense of human exceptionalism? Does Feser have an underlying assumption that animal consciousness IS merely material? If so, what’s his evidence?
September 7th, 2012 | 9:55 am
The idea that animals lack consciousness, or are incapable of suffering, has always been contrary to observable reality. That animal consciousness is considerably similar to human consciousness is also to me obvious, from the experience of living and interacting with and training a variety of animals (horse, dog, grey parrot etc). When I first encountered the Catholic idea that only humans have “intellect, memory and will” I was baffled and rather upset by this claim, because of course animals are provably able to reason, to remember, and obviously have intentions and desires. If you did a study, in all likelihood you would find that those who deny that would be more likely to cause unnecessary suffering and death to animals (which the Catechism of the Catholic Church says is contrary to human dignity). In the Bible, God’s covenant with Noah is also a covenant with the animals, though on very different terms than the people. But I have come to think that my confusion about “intellect, memory and will” was partly from not understanding adequately the meaning or significance of these in scholastic theology. They are the faculties by which man, created uniquely in God’s image, is capable of union with God in love, capable of the moral and theological virtues, and ultimately capable of the Beatific Vision. The animals, similar though they are, capable though they are of friendship with men and working together with us, do not have this same capacity.
September 7th, 2012 | 10:04 am
Nickp,
I don’t think Feser is assuming/arguing that animal consciousness is merely material — he’s only saying that our current knowledge of animal consciousness does not prove that the human mind is merely material. Again, the scientists in the declaration did not say that it was, but some press coverage has leaned in that direction.
The materiality/immateriality of human consciousness is related to human exceptionalism insofar as it’s related to debates over free will vs determinism, the mind/brain debate, the soul, rationality, etc., as the writer of the HuffPo piece I linked to seems to recognize. Obviously Feser’s piece and my post were much more limited in scope — neither of us set out to defend human exceptionalism. But I think most people see animal consciousness as relevant to those debates — and, as Bret points out, to the treatment of animals.
September 7th, 2012 | 10:53 am
The thought that these kinds of finding have some enormous bearing on the question of “human exceptionalism” grows out of how controversies about animal rights and animal welfare have been framed over the last 40 years. Peter Singer and others have successfully linked “speciesism” and its evils to the idea that humans are unique in some way that puts them in a special moral category. They have also successfully tied both to “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Feser is right too in suggesting that broadly Cartesian assumptions have furthered encouraged many to link the idea that humans are special to our having an immaterial soul or mind animals lack. Lastly, a common move against this carefully constructed picture is to argue that it’s undermined by modern biology, which has made Cartesian dualism implausible and which highlights the continuities between human and animal cognition. (James Rachels’ “Created From Animals” is a particularly good example of this argumentative strategy.) Against this background, the kinds of results reported here can look to be a big deal.
While it’s obvious enough that discoveries that compel us to attribute consciousness to more and more of the animal world have very significant moral implications for how we treat other animals, overall the way in which these questions have been framed is wrong from start to finish. A belief in “human exceptionalism”—in the sense that humans are in a different moral category than other things–can be found in traditions uninfluenced by either the “Judeo-Christian” tradition or Cartesianism. Some of these—Confucianism for example—are not committed to any kind of a mind/body split, or to anything suggesting a radical ontological distinction between humans and other animals. The ethical pictures that come out of these kinds of tradition is as untouched by the neurophysiological discoveries as Feser’s Aristotelianism.
September 7th, 2012 | 12:10 pm
By definition, consciousness as experienced by animals must be very like that experienced by humans. That’s why we can subsume it under the single word.
September 7th, 2012 | 12:19 pm
Even grass has a soul, according to fairly traditional Christian teaching. I think the point Feser is making is that vegetative and animal souls are “of a certain type,” and that human souls are of a distinctly different type.
In other words, he is just pointing out that we are not “just animals,” for those who want to use animal consciousness to that end.
September 7th, 2012 | 12:22 pm
Dear Anna Williams: I just read your point about human exceptionalism, and I think you are right. But certainly an argument for the non-material aspect of humans does tend to lead to exceptionalist claims, such as the one I was making. So I think we’re on the same page, pretty much.
September 7th, 2012 | 3:36 pm
It should be noted that Feser’s main point is that there is almost nothing to be gained from comparing animal consciousness to human consciousness. Animal consciousness consists of an awareness of the individual things and physical processes that are accessible through the senses. What makes human consciousness different is that we are also aware of the abstract, immaterial, universal, and eternal aspects of reality. Humans have an awareness of ideas like goodness, truth, justice, beauty, and morality that animals know nothing about.
Why is this important? It is because we know what a thing is by what it does. There are no exceptions to this principle. Since human beings can form abstract immaterial concepts, there must be in humans an immaterial mind or soul that can do immaterial things like reasoning and understanding. Those who reject God are driven to deny the existence of the human soul. They must argue that human beings are just like other animals even though it is obvious that human beings are not just animals.
September 8th, 2012 | 8:50 am
Gian said,
““the consciousness animals experience is remarkably similar to the consciousness humans experience”
“How can the scientists possibly know this? Note “remarkably”.”
What they can know is what they can measure, which is activity in the brain. They certainly can’t measure the subjective correlate to whatever is going on in the brain.
However, if they know that activity in such and so portion of the brain corresponds to such and such feeling in a human, perhaps they could make a reasonable guess about what the animal is experiencing.
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