How can the consciousness of animals be investigated? - Chapter 15

Animals and consciousness

There are two extreme visions about whether animals also have a consciousness.

1. The vision that only people have an awareness. Descartes believed that only people have a consciousness, because only we have language skills. According to him, animals act like automatic machines.

2. Because so many species are physically similar, they must all be conscious. Perch states, for example, that consciousness is a fundamental biological one adaptation is and it already occurred in the first mammals. He argues that we can not say that other species have no subjectivity to experience.

In addition, there are also theories where it is assumed that different animals have different forms of consciousness. We can not assume that there is only one kind of consciousness. Every animal species has developed sensory systems that fit their way of life.

Can we say that some animal species have a more developed consciousness than other animals? Is a frog, for example, more aware of itself than a fly? Greenfield states that consciousness becomes more complex as the brain grows larger. If this is true, then elephants should have a better developed consciousness than humans. This seems to be unlikely. We can try to categorize animals on the basis of their intelligence, but we have to know that our idea of ​​intelligence is connected with our own, human ideas about which skills belong to intelligent organisms.

Another question is whether one animal experiences more pain than the other animal. Stamp Dawkins states that we can determine on the basis of three things whether an animal suffers pain:

1. the general state of health of the animal,    

2. the physiology of the animal and        

3. the behavior of the animal.

Dawkins states that we can best know if an animal is suffering if the animal tries to avoid the reason for the pain. We must therefore not rely on empathy to decide whether an animal suffers, but on the behavior of the animal.

'Mirror self-recognition' (MSR): self-recognition

How do we know if animals are self-aware? To test this,we can use a mirror test, to examine whether animals can recognize themselves in the mirror. Many animals, such as dogs and cats, do not recognize themselves when they are put in front of a mirror.

Darwin put two young orangutans in front of a mirror. He noticed that they were surprised when they saw themselves. They tried to kiss their mirror image. However, it does not appear that they recognize themselves. It could also be that they thought they were looking at another monkey they wanted to give a kiss.

Gallup put chimpanzees in front of a mirror. At first they thought they were looking at another monkey, but after a few days they looked in the mirror to see their teeth. Gallup could not conclude from this, however, that the chimpanzees recognized themselves. Gallup therefore went a step further and drew two red dots on the face of the chimpanzees. When the animals were put in front of a mirror, they found out that something was strange on their faces. They tried to sweep the red dots away. From this Gallup concluded that the chimpanzees recognize themselves.

The test with the red dots is not fair for all animal species. For example, dolphins can not touch their face to make it clear that they are noticing that something strange is going on. However, there is still a way to measure MSR. Reiss and Marino drew a dot on the body of two dolphins, in a place they could not see without a mirror. Both animals wriggled and twisted, apparently to see the spot they had discovered in the mirror.

Another problem with the red dot test is that most monkeys perceive it as threatening when staring at them. This may mean that a monkey probably does not want to look long at the monkey he sees in the mirror. However, we still do not know for sure which animal species can recognize themselves. In addition, it is not certain whether self-recognition is an expression of self-awareness. Gallup is convinced that chimpanzees can recognize themselves and have a concept of self-awareness. Povinelli states that chimpanzees have a self-concept, but that they are not aware of their own psychological state.

Theory of Mind ('Theory of Mind', TOM)

Part of our consciousness is that we have beliefs, desires and mental states and that we also attribute mental states to other people. We also call this ' theory of mind' (TOM) . Dennett speaks in this context of 'intentional stance' : to understand other people's behavior by assuming that others also have desires, convictions and fears.

Babies are not born with this skill. When they are two years old, they begin to follow someone else's gaze and see what someone points to. When they are three years old they can talk about their own desires and preferences, but also about those of other people. However, they do not yet understand that other people may not see something as they see itthemselves. They do not understand that other people can have wrong beliefs. The question is whether animals also have a theory of mind.

Imitation

People find it easy to imitate others and they do so spontaneously. This happens already when a child is very young. Imitation is the basis for experiencing empathy for others. Darwin thought that dogs, cats and monkeys learn through imitation. We now know that there are very few animals that can imitate their congeners. It is possible that there is a habit under a species, but this was previously explained by imitation. This appears to be a wrong conclusion. There is often an individual learning process that results from attempts that lead to mistakes and to success. This means that rarely there is imitation of others.

This is an important point, since evolutionary processes are often explained in terms of imitation. We know that groups of chimpanzees have different cultures. In each group there is a search for food in a different way. However, there is disagreement among scientists about how much cultural skills chimpanzees are taught by imitation. The answer to that question is important for the question of whether or not animals other than human beings have 'memes'.

Language

The biggest difference between people and animals is that animals don't have a language. This means that if language is the cause of someone's self-consciousness, the consciousness of other organisms should be different than our own. However, if the human consciousness is an illusion, then this conclusion would not apply.

Children in every culture pick up a language very quickly, without being specifically taught a language by others and without others improving them. This is also called a ' language instinct' . Animals sometimes have complex forms of communication. For example, monkeys make different alarm sounds for different types of hazards. Yet it can be said that the meaning of animal signals is fixed and that animals can not come up with new representations by combining signals.

Many attempts have been made to teach language to animals. Because monkeys can not pronounce letters, they tried to learn sign language (American Sign Language). It seems they do have some understanding of grammar, because they can understand the difference in meaning between two sentences. However, there is still a big difference between the way in which monkeys and children use language. Monkeys are not intrinsically motivated to use the learned sign language. They only use what they have learned when they need something. Children use language skills for many more reasons.

Resources:Blackmore; Susan. (2010). Consciousness, Second Edition An Introduction. Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor & Francis.