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There are two extreme visions about whether animals also have a consciousness.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.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:the general state of health of the animal, the physiology of the animal and 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...
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The problem of consciousness is related to some of the oldest questions of philosophy: what does the world consist of? Who am I? It relates to the mind-body problem: what is the relationship between the physical and the mental?
Despite the fact that we are learning more and more about the functioning of the brain, consciousness remains a mystery. In the past, they used the term 'élan vital' to explain how non-living things could be made alive. Nowadays this concept is no longer used, since we know that biological processes are responsible for this. Some scientists believe that the same will also happen with the term consciousness. Once we understand how brain processes create a sense of consciousness, then we might not need to use this term anymore.
Consciousness requires some sort of dualism: objectivity vs. subjectivity, inner vs. outer, mind vs. body...
For example: Take a pencil in your hand and look at it. You see the pencil from your own unique perspective, which you cannot share with others. The pencil is part of the outside world, your experience with the pencil is part of your inner world.
The way philosophers view the consciousness problem can generally be divided into monist theories, which suggest that there are one kind of things in the world, and dualist theories, which suggest that there are two kinds of things. Some theories state that the mental world is fundamental and some theories state that the physical world is fundamental.
Monistic theories assume that the world consists of only one kind of matter (body or mind). Some monistic theories state that everything consists of the mind, according to these theories we only have ideas and perceptions of a pencil. We do not know if a pencil really exists. People who assume this are called mentalists or idealists. Berkeley supported this principle. The disadvantage of this perspective is that we can never know for certain whether objects with fixed characteristics exist.
Materialists are also monists. They believe that there is only matter. An example for this is the identity theory, which states that mental experiences are the same as physical experiences. Another example is functionalism, which assumes that mental experiences are the same as functional experiences.
Epiphenomenalism assumes that physical processes cause mental events, but that mental events have no effect on physical events. Huxley was a supporter of this idea. He did not deny that consciousness or subjective experiences existed, but stated that they have no (causal) connection with physical processes. He used
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