““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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.”