Are animals conscious?

Do animals deserve rights the equal of human moral patients (that is, people who by reason of age or disease etc are not responsible for their own actions, but are still owed a duty of care by others)?

The answer given by Tom Regan, and I think the intuitive answer, is that animals deserve rights only if they are conscious; the subject of a life. “What is it like to be a bat?” If it turns out that it isn’t “like” anything because bats don’t have a phenomenal consciousness (ie don’t have any awareness of anything - as if they were asleep) then they cannot feel pain - or anything else.

This seems straightforward enough but most people seem to intuitively believe both that most larger animals (let’s say mammals and birds - the creatures that share our habit of requiring sleep) have feelings and a mental life similar to humans’ and also that animals can be treated entirely differently from people.

My own view is that only humans have phenomenal consciousness. Most of those arguing for animal consciousness appear to say essentially that just about every other property of mind that humans used to think they held uniquely have been discovered in animals, either in the wild or in scientific tests. Language, tool use and creation, decision making, logic, creative adaption of behaviour, problem solving etc. Maybe animals are not as smart as people but there is a continuum for these other properties so why not for consciousness? And how can a creature do all that without consciousness?

This view sees consciousness as a big deal within the mind. Integral to the life of the animal. But while experiments have been demonstrating that animals can do on a small scale just about everything a human can do mentally, we’ve also been realising just how much of the brain’s work goes on unconsciously. Recent stories about Ambien abuse causing many people to sleepwalk has highlighted for me how consciousness is perhaps better characterised as a somewhat useful add-on enhancement rather than the cornerstone of a mental life.

If you can drive a car when you are asleep, if you can fry yourself breakfast, eat it and then go back to bed without waking up, then what is consciousness necessary for? Just how much of our lives are really handled by “zombie” processes (ie unconscious processes) with our consciousness playing little part in the decision making? Before we demand that animals must be conscious on the basis of their actions, shouldn’t they be able to do better than a sleepwalker?

I am not arguing epiphenomenalism (the belief that consciousness has zero effect on our actions and we’d act just the same if we were all 100% zombies / unconscious). But it seems likely to me that consciousness is not all that big a deal from the point of view of survival in the wild. It’s vital today because our society has a lot of highly complex puzzle solving situations arising from the completely unnatural way we live. The original evolutionary advantage perhaps 100,000 years ago was probably better social integration and language use. Not something most animals would have a ton of use for but quite possibly the main thing which allowed humans to expand their social group from the largest non-human mammal group sizes of 20 to 80 individuals, up to the hundreds required to start civilization.

Some say that since we are not sure whether animals are conscious or not we ought to err on the side of caution. To me this sounds suspiciously like Pascal’s wager, and is wrong for the same reasons.

Unlike the question of God’s existence however science is close to an answer one way or another it seems. There’s been a lot of work both from the point of view of studying animal behaviour and from the point of view of studying the so-called “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC - what part of your brain does what when you experience something) in humans.

This is an excellent site run by the ASSC (Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness). It has a lot of essays referring to the latest research on this topic. As yet there is no consensus and there doesn’t seem to be a political shadow over this stuff (as there is for global warming or stem cell research).

So what happens if in the next five years someone discovers exactly where in the brain consciousness is located and then takes a look at the brains of a few other species and announces, say… dogs are not conscious but chimpanzees are? Quite a different reaction from if the same sort of evidence establishes that all mammals and birds are conscious.