An article published not long ago by the BBC discusses the latest scientific findings on consciousness in animals. It states that not only do the ‘higher’ animals, such as birds and mammals, appear to experience consciousness, but likely all vertebrates do. The cephalopod molluscs including octopuses, the insects, and at least some crustaceans, are also mentioned as having shown evidence of consciousness.
But this is hardly new news. The evidence of intelligent awareness in animals has been steadily accumulating for decades. In particular, it was Donald Griffin’s work in the 1980s followed by his book, Animal Minds in 1992, that finally broke through the bias of mainstream science with the declaration that some actions performed by animals cannot be done without thinking (called cognition in animals). His book provides a fascinating array of examples of cognitive behaviour from species across the animal kingdom. He and his colleagues considered that cognition must require an over-seer that is doing the thinking. Therefore, already at that time, some degree of conscious awareness was felt to be a necessary part of of the mental life of animals using cognition.
Griffin’s work was met by virulent opposition from traditional scientists, for at that time behaviourism dominated the field. But I was greatly relieved to find my own observations backed up by his views. Watching from the sidelines, I had been appalled that scientists denied consciousness to animals, while at the same time conjecturing that their computers would soon be conscious. Indeed, Daniel Dennett pronounced his thermostat to be conscious (in an intentional state) in 1978! His ideas were taken seriously by leading advocates of artificial intelligence (AI), including John McCarthy, who echoed his ideas in later writings.
However, their hopeful idea that complexity automatically produces consciousness, as in the human brain and complex computers, has been debunked for various reasons. For one thing, it forecast that consciousness should be springing up in places where most people would not expect it, such as in your CDs. Further, it excludes all other living things, as if complexity is more important than life. The quality of life, which is not yet understood, should not be so easily dismissed.
Reading on down the page, the BBC article gives some interesting examples of intelligent animal behaviour, but then the word 'consciousness' is suddenly dubbed a weasel word and replaced with the word 'sentience.'
That struck a discord with me, for sentience and consciousness are two different things. The sentience of an animal (the capability to feel and to suffer), should undoubtedly be acknowledged and taken into account in establishing guidelines for animal welfare laws governing, for example, fishing, agribusiness, and laboratory experiments. But ‘sentience’ is not interchangeable with ‘consciousness.’
Many of the points made in the article come from the position of behaviourism, which has dominated thinking about animal mental states since 1924, when John B. Watson introduced methodological behaviourism, a technique which sought to understand behaviour by measuring observable actions. Behaviourists consider that no one can know what mental states animals might have, so each is considered a ‘black box.’ But this human-centred position fails to take into account the way all life evolved together on this unusual planet.
In ignoring evolution, it smacks of Creationism. Indeed, behaviourism grew out of the Mechanical Philosophy, which appeared in the 1600s and included the Christian belief that the human is divine, and that God put the rest of nature here for us to use. Animals were classified as being mechanical in nature. This opened the door to vivisection and in a short time William Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood by cutting up animals alive. The trend continued.
The Mechanical Philosophy’s view of nature as being mechanical, and thus reducible to its parts, laid the groundwork for behaviourism’s reduction of psychological phenomena to observable actions, while avoiding introspection or subjective analysis. Behaviourism therefore focused on behaviour that could be easily measured in laboratory experiments. An animal’s behaviour was reduced to simple stimulus-response associations, termed ‘conditioning.’
What all this boils down to is that if a creature lacks a human brain, whatever it might think or feel is irrelevant. This is the argument used to claim that fish cannot feel pain, in spite of a vast wealth of evidence that they do. It is also used by the various industries to perpetuate their control over the use of animals for profit.
One gets a very different idea about animal behaviour by observing wildlife in their natural habitats. Watching from a distance, ethologists see what wild animals are actually doing and how they respond in different situations. Thus, they witness their true nature in action. Ethology also emphasizes the role of evolution, environment, and innate behaviours, or instincts. It acknowledges that each individual is different.
As a wildlife artist, I have observed a wide range of species in nature—reef sharks most extensively. All the wild animals I have known have shown evidence of being able to reason and to hold an idea in mind while working towards a planned outcome. Such goal-oriented behaviour—assuming a future in the making and demonstrating learning from the past—suggests the presence of an over-seeing, self-serving awareness doing the thinking. That is, there is a self or I, who is considering what is happening, making moment-to-moment decisions, and keeping his or her purposes in mind as (s)he pursues his or her life.
Though individual variations among animals are ignored in lab experiments, the essence of the evolutionary process is the natural behaviour of individuals. A community of a given species adapts to changes in its environment through the ingenuity and resilience of each member. For it is each one’s efforts and choices that drive evolution, as each succeeds or fails to reproduce and pass on its unique set of genes to its descendants.
It is self-evident that for an animal to survive, it must be able to understand reality accurately enough to respond to it appropriately, or it will go straight into evolution’s garbage can. And no brain is simple, as anyone who has observed the actions of a spider will appreciate.
Are they conscious? Has anyone ever produced any remotely convincing evidence that an animal can win the evolutionary fight without being conscious?
No.
Consciousness, far from being a weasel word, is currently being studied by scientists from diverse fields. Though neglected for many decades while behaviourism dominated psychology, since 1994, interest in this ‘last frontier of science’ has exploded. The science of consciousness emphasizes broad and rigorous approaches to all aspects of the study and understanding of conscious awareness.
Sir Roger Penrose, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, is one of the pioneers in consciousness science. In his first book on the subject, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics (1989) he presented a beautifully crafted argument that computers would never be conscious, because consciousness is not computable. He pointed out that many other things in nature are not computable either—including simple and evident things. For example, the sun and moon are visible to any creature on this planet—they appear circle-shaped. The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is Pi, a number that cannot be represented by a computer.
Penrose theorized that consciousness is fundamentally a quantum-mechanical phenomenon.
This came at a time when AI advocates were at the height of their hype about their soon-to-be-conscious machines, so he attracted a lot of attention. But so far, he seems to be right. By the early 1990s, most of the large AI labs had shut down, because vast efforts to program the basic cognitive tasks by the most brilliant people on the planet had failed. No one could figure out how to present information to a machine and have it understand. Advances since then have been based on increased speed and complexity, rather than new algorithms permitting machines to perform cognition.
Penrose’s approach to consciousness echoes that of the Athenian philosopher Plato, who first described a world we can access only through our consciousness. Only through reflection can we understand reality. Ideas unfold when we reflect upon them, and mathematical ideas have been found to underlie the actions of the physical universe. For example, anyone can reflect upon a circle, measure the circumference and diameter, and try to figure out the number Pi. More mysteriously, the universal constants, which include the speed of light, Planck’s constant, and the speed of expansion of the universe (plus only a few others), are each extremely precise. These remarkable numbers underlie the reality that we know. And through reflection, many different scientists figured them out.
Penrose describes three realms: consciousness, the physical universe, and Plato’s world. He calls the relationships between them the three profound mysteries. In the physical world appears consciousness, which reflects and finds Plato’s world, the truths of which lie behind the manifestation of the physical world.
Music, too, leads us into Plato’s world and some birds sing using the scale defined by our own musicians. When played at one-quarter speed, a hermit thrush’s song is like a human composition that has between forty-five to one hundred notes and twenty-five to fifty pitch changes. It approximates a pentatonic scale with all the harmonic intervals. Many other species too, compose their own songs and perfect them single-mindedly, apparently trying to match some inner concept of the musically beautiful, which they perceive in their minds—in Plato’s world.
The creations of bower birds, which in every way resemble art, provide another example of the recognition of the beautiful by an animal.
The spotfin lion fish (Pterois antennata) is plumed in patterns of red and white, and presents a flower-like, lacy beauty that is thought to have evolved to attract the crustaceans upon which it preys. What does that tell us about crustaceans?
Then there is the peacock. In its quest to become beautiful, it did not just grow a radiant plume to attract the gaze—it evolved a fabulous fan of intricately designed feathers, each detailed to the microscopic level, all fitting together to produce a breathtaking over-all design.
If intricacy, rather than beauty, was selected for in order to produce a disguise, why is it of such loveliness? The surpassing beauty of so many animals suggests that the most beautiful ones had the most offspring. Therefore the appreciation of beauty could be widespread throughout nature, and not confined to vertebrates, providing further evidence that animals, too, can access Plato's world and are conscious.
The intricate and precise colouration of many invertebrates is spectacular. Their flamboyant patterns tell us something of the minds of these ephemeral life forms who, through aeons of evolution, have chosen their dress.
Indeed, the delicacy and the beauty of the biosphere convey something of the underlying quality of the consciousness behind it.
Paramecia are one-celled animals, so they have neither brain nor nerves, yet they can learn, remember, and make decisions based on whether or not they were in a place before, and whether or not they had a good time when they were there. There is now evidence of rational behaviour in bacteria, too.
The vast gulf assumed to separate humans from animals does not exist.
The sensitivities of plants have also been well documented. Films of them in motion look uncannily animal-like when sped up. Researchers have found that plants show many of the same types of awareness and thinking found in animals. They are aware of their environments, including the location of other plants, and, in the case of climbing vines, objects that they can use as they climb upwards. The Asian dancing plant will learn to dance to music, if it is exposed to music repeatedly, and individuals improve with practice, suggesting learning and memory. The modern view of plants is that they are a completely different form of life that evolved in another direction from the one taken by animals. Though plants lack organs, they send messages through their systems the way nerves transmit information in animals. They are just as evolved as animals, and apparently they are aware of reality in other ways.
Research into the inner workings of forest ecosystems have revealed that far from standing alone, each tree networks with others through fungi, slime moulds, and others, to share water and nutrients as needed. The slime mould (Physarum polycephalum) is neither plant, animal, nor fungus, but an amoeba, and an underground inhabitant of temperate forests. Slime moulds connect with trees and distribute nutrients, showing that living things are not necessarily devoted exclusively to their own survival. The slime mould has cognitive abilities that have been assumed to depend on brain circuitry, and its intelligent behaviour is one of the unexplained mysteries of science.
Likely there are similar examples in the marine environment, so far unrevealed by science.
These findings suggest that intelligent awareness, or consciousness in some form, may be an intrinsic aspect of life—a comprehension of reality in which the creature, simple as it might be, understands its environment as it functions within it. This shared understanding becomes the ground for interaction among the vast and diverse network of living things that covers our planet from pole to pole.
Reflection on life’s processes suggests other curious facts. While science holds that consciousness evolved from matter, religion holds that matter evolved from consciousness.
Let us consider how evolution works. The flight capabilities of birds have been documented through the fossil record to have evolved slowly as their ancestors tried to stay in the air for longer and longer spans of time. At first, just the ability to hop higher, with the fore-limbs reaching up, must have begun the transition as the creature fled from increasingly nimble predators. Gradually, gliding developed, as only those who were able to leap highest reproduced. At last, over aeons of strife by each individual trying to survive, wings evolved.
Thus, the behaviour came before the structure: birds have wings because they fly. Here it is consciousness that gives rise to matter. Following this line of reasoning leads to a picture in which the species have created themselves, each being a manifestation of all of the efforts of all of its forebears, down through the abyss of time since life appeared.
Thus from many perspectives, there is evidence that we live on a planet filled with conscious, thinking life forms.
However, so far, researchers have made very little progress in discovering what conscious awareness is. It has even been suggested that from our limited perspectives, we are simply unable to understand it, just as fish cannot do mathematics. And consciousness is not the only enigma that remains.
For life itself, and how it appeared here on Earth, is another deep mystery.
(c) Ila France Porcher
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