Chapter 10: Evolution and animal minds

Humans are animals, so questions about consciousness of the human can also be related to the rest of the animal kingdom. This chapter will introduce the basic of evolutionary theory as a foundation on which to ask about the evolution of consciousness in different species.

What is mindless design?
When we see obvious signs of design, we readily infer a designer. This, in essence, is the argument of design by reverend William Paley in 1802. He supposed that he found either a stone or a watch. For the stone he concluded it had always been there, but for the watch he concluded it must have a maker. Every bit and piece constructed to fulfil its purpose. He could not see how these complex pieces could have come together by accident, nor the effect of natural forces. He thought it self-evident that ‘there can’t be design without designer; contrivance without contriver; order, without choice’.

With animals and their specific and complex designs of anatomy and behaviour, it must indicate there is a designer, in which this argument become evidence for the existence of god.
Paley’s ideas were wrong. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins said there are more than just two options – accident and or conscious design. There is a third, that was not able to be explained in Paley’s time, but was clear by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution.

Evolution means gradual change and living things might, in general sense, change. The fossil world suggested gradual change in living forms and this demanded explanation. What was missing was the mechanism of how evolution works. Darwin came with the answer, natural selection. Over a longer period of time, creatures vary and if there sometimes is a severe struggle for life, then some variation must occur in structure or habit that is advantageous to a creature. The individuals with this new characteristic will survive and produce off spring with that same characteristic. If you have Variation, Selection, and Heredity, you must get evolution.  

Natural selection isn’t the only force in evolution. Together with mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, sexual selection, and layers of self-organisation from the molecular level upwards, it explains how design appears natural without designed.

What is directed evolution?
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck agreed with Darwin. He believed that if an animal used a particular faculty to change itself, the effect would be passed on to their offspring. This suggested evolution is progressive and directional, with species inevitably change over time. Darwin’s scheme suggested no thing as progress. This vastly created a tree with species and subspecies and branching out everywhere.

Lamarckism proved more acceptable than Darwin’s and is still popular today, Darwin’s theory is opposed by a lot of religions, as it opposes creationism and its successor ‘intelligent design’.
‘The great chain of being’ is another alluring idea, with simple creatures at one end and intellectual, conscious humans at the other, a kind of evolutionary ladder.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959) proposed that all live is striving to a higher consciousness, or the ‘omega point’. Some modern ‘spiritual’ theories also invoke conscious direction, such as Ken Wilber’s ‘integral theory of consciousness’, based on the great chain of being and the inevitable progress from insentient matter to super consciousness or transcendence.
Wilber and creationist reject evidence accounting for evolution of eyes and wings, as no creature has any use with half an eye or wing. Three other beliefs were:

• Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard (1997) – urges us all to realise our full potential of our higher consciousness and take control of our own future – conscious evolution.
• Physicist Amit Goswami (2008) – argues that consciousness, rather than matter or energy, is the main force in the universe
• Practioner of integrative medicine Deepak Chopra (2012) – believes Darwin was wrong because a supernatural consciousness directs evolution and allows humans to escape the forces of natural selection that other animals are bound by.

August Weissman first rejected Lamarckism (1833-1914) who distinguished, in sexual species, between the germ line (the sex cells that are passed from generation to generation) and the soma (the body which dies).
We now know, however, that the food you eat, and other lifestyle choices, can and do have effects on future generations through epigenesis.

What are selfish replicators?

If a group of rats lived in a busy city, and they would wait for the humans to be asleep until they go around the trash and looking for food, but there is one selfish one that goes into the trash grabs some food, but will also get chased away by humans, that rat still has got some food and will if he continues will get fatter than all the other rats. This rat will survive and produce offspring. This is an argument against the ‘evolution for the good of the species’.

Multilevel selection theory entails selection operating at many levels, including group selection in which groups of animals, or tribes, or cultures compete with each other for survival. The strongest group or the group with the most favourable features will win. Against group selection is what is known as ‘selfish gene theory’. the ultimate beneficiary of natural selection is neither the species, nor the group, nor even the individual, but the hereditary information: the gene. Another way of putting it is to say that the gene is the ‘replicator’: it is the information that is copied, either accurately and frequently, or not.
Many features of organisms are not adaptions, or are far from optimal if they are. Some are strongly influenced by physical constraints and random forces, and none is optimally designed because evolution always has to start from whatever is available and work from there. Some useless traits remain, because they are by-products. 

So how about animal minds?

It is easy to imagine a ladder in which human’s are at the top, have the highest level of consciousness – or only conscious beings – while further down it is less developed, or absent altogether. The problem of other minds is that we can never be sure what other people are conscious of. Humans and other animals express similar expression of emotion.

There are two extreme positions to consider. One is that only humans are conscious, Descartes said that because other being don’t have languages, they don’t have souls or consciousness. They said there is no evidence for animals having a consciousness. Dennett (1991) said that other animals lack the language with which to create a particular kind of fiction that is conscious experience. Similarly, HOT theories reject other species having a consciousness.
On the other extreme lies the view that all species are conscious. Panpsychism is the obvious example here: an amoeba and even inorganic world, has something which is the same nature with out own consciousness.  We readily attribute consciousness to other people on the basis of behavioural and brain evidence, so we should not deny it to other mammals. Psychiatrist Todd Feinberg and biologist Jon Mallatt go even further back, to the time of the Cambrian explosion more than five hundred million years ago. Unconscious reflexes gradually evolved into brains with ever increasing levels of consciousness leading eventually to unified inner worlds of subjective experience. So in their view, every fish, reptile, amphibian, and insect is conscious, and possibly cephalopods like our octopus, too.

Do animals live in different worlds?

This might seem like an odd question but every species has evolved sensory systems to suit its way of life. This leads to the odd realisation that several different species in the same location may all be inhabiting different worlds.

For instance, a frog is particularly interesting. Frogs have eyes with lenses and retinas somewhat like ours, sending signals along the optic nerve to the optic tectum in the brain. It is tempting to imagine that a picture of the frog’s world is somehow constructed in its brain, but this is not so. The frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain just what it needs to know and no more. It tells it about stationary and moving edges, changes in overall illumination, and bugs. The ‘bug detectors’ respond specifically to small moving objects, not to large moving ones or small still ones, and direct the frog’s tongue to catch flies. An extraordinary consequence of the way this system works is that a frog can literally starve to death surrounded by freshly killed flies. If the fly does not move, the frog does not see it.

So what are the criteria for consciousness?

Ideally we need to find some clear criteria for consciousness that we can apply to other animals. One way is to look for anatomical or other physical features – not just brain size but aspects of brain organisation and function that we think are indicators of consciousness.

Anil Seth argues that among that consciousness ‘involves widespread, relatively fast, low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions’. The lower brainstem is involved in maintaining the state of consciousness, while the thalamocortical complex sustains conscious contents. So, finding these features in the brains of other species should show us that they are conscious, thus most mammals share these structures and therefore should be considered conscious.

Bjorn Merker argues that all vertebrate brains share a centralised functional design with an upper brainstem system organised for conscious function. In simple brains, this system is involved in action control; in more complex ones, it takes on the task of integrating the massively parallel processing of the higher brain areas into the limited-capacity serial processing required for coherent behaviour. On this view, even simple-brained creatures with no cortex at all can be conscious.

If we had a complete theory that specified the neural basis of consciousness, we could use it to determine the status of animals’ minds. But we do not. So making physical criteria is damn hard.

The other main approach is to look at behavioural indicators. For example, a mobile lifestyle might drive the need for general-purpose perception, flexible planning, and precisely controlled action, and these might be conducive to developing subjectivity. We might also ask whether organisms capable of particular types of associative learning that have behavioural as well as functional and structural characteristics are more likely to be conscious. Or we might try to grade animals by intelligence, but one danger is that we base our idea of intelligence on our own species-specific abilities and fail to appreciate other kinds of intelligence.

Sufffering and empathy might be two good criteria, but how do you measure that?

What it comes down to is we don’t know. If we did, this chapter would be very different.

How about self-recognition?

When you look in the mirror, you can understand that you are seeing yourself. Are cats, dogs, or dolphins aware of themselves? Do they have a sense of ‘I’ as a conscious being observing the world? Would they be able to recognise themselves in a mirror?

Dogs and cats obviously cannot. Kittens will rush up to a mirror, look for the other kitten inside or run round the back to find it, and then quickly get bored. Many birds continue to treat their own image as a rival indefinitely, as do some fish. They clearly show no ‘mirror self-recognition’ (MSR).

MSR has sometimes been hailed as proof of a great divide in consciousness between us and the great apes versus all other animals, but this conclusion has been decisively overthrown. Dolphins and whales are extremely intelligent and communicative creatures, and some of them enjoy playing with mirrors. They have no hands to touch a spot, but there are other ways of measuring MSR, such as making markers with ink and watching the behaviour in result.

So what does MSR tell us about consciousness? It does not necessarily follow that because an animal can recognise its own body in a mirror, it has either self- awareness or a concept of self. For example, an ape might work out the contingencies between making movements and seeing effects in the mirror without concluding that the arm in the mirror is its own. Or a magpie might conclude that the mirror shows its own body without having any concept of itself as seen by others, or self as an agent or experiencer.

Or knowing that other minds exist?

Okay, so for the 5 pages that this part spans, all it says is that there is no way of really knowing, because we cannot talk to animals.

If we could, we would know, but because we cannot, all we can find is correlations in behaviour that might possibly indicate that monkeys might understand we also think as well. But again, correlation is not causation, so we really don’t know.

Exercises

10.1 As you go about your daily life, look out for other animals and watch what they are doing. They might be pet dogs and cats, farm cows or pigs, or wild birds, squirrels, or rabbits. Look out as well for insects, spiders, worms, and fish. In each case ask yourself, ‘What is it like to be this cow?’, ‘What is it like to be that spider?’ Can you imagine it? Is it easier with some animals than with others? What does this difference mean?