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Are animals conscious? New research is changing what people think
Charles Darwin enjoys near-god status among scientists for his theory of evolution, but his idea that animals have consciousness like humans has long been shunned — until now.
“There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their capacities for feeling pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness,” Darwin wrote.
However, his claims that animals think and feel were considered scientific heresy among many, if not most, animal behavior experts.
It was considered a mortal sin to assume that animals were conscious based on their reactions: the argument was that there was no scientific basis for projecting human traits, emotions and behaviour onto animals, and there was no way to test what was going on in an animal’s mind.
But if new evidence emerges that animals have the ability to sense and process what’s going on around them, does that mean they are actually conscious?
We now know that honeybees can count, recognise human faces and learn to use tools.
Professor Lars Chitka of Queen Mary, University of London has been involved in much of the leading research into honeybee intelligence.
“If bees are that intelligent, maybe they can think and feel things that are the building blocks of consciousness,” he says.
Professor Chitka’s experiments have shown that the bees appear to be able to change their behaviour after a traumatic event and play by rolling a small wooden ball, an activity they appear to enjoy, he says.
In response to these results, one of the most influential and respected scientists in animal research issued the following powerful, stark, and controversial statement:
“Given all the evidence that’s been presented, it’s entirely possible that honeybees are conscious,” he said.
And it’s not just bees: the emergence of new evidence marks a “sea change” in scientific thinking about animal consciousness, with many saying it’s time to rethink.
Professor Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics is one of them.
“Researchers across disciplines are beginning to dare to ask questions about animal consciousness and to think explicitly about how their work relates to those questions,” Prof Birch says.
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Those hoping for a eureka moment will be disappointed.
Instead, a steady stream of evidence is urging a rethink, creating a buzz amongst relevant researchers, and many are now hoping for a change in scientific thinking in the field.
Prof Birch said that while the findings might not be conclusive evidence of animal consciousness, taken together they were enough to suggest there was a “realistic possibility” that animals could be conscious.
This doesn’t just apply to higher animals like apes and dolphins, which are more advanced in their development than others, but also to simpler creatures like snakes, octopuses, crabs, bees and possibly even fruit flies, the group said, calling for funding for more research to determine whether animals are conscious and, if so, to what extent.
But you’re not alone if you’re wondering what consciousness even means in the first place: it’s a subject of disagreement among scientists.
An early effort was made in the 17th century by French philosopher René Descartes, who said, “I think, therefore I am.”
He added that “language is the only sure sign of the thoughts hidden in the body.”
But Prof Anil Seth, from the University of Sussex, who has spent much of his professional career trying to define consciousness, says such statements have confused the picture for too long.
“This unholy trinity of language, intelligence and consciousness goes all the way back to Descartes,” he told BBC News, expressing some annoyance that the approach had not been questioned until recently.
The “unholy trinity” is at the heart of a movement that emerged in the early 20th century called behaviorism, which argues that thoughts and emotions cannot be measured by scientific methods and therefore should be ignored when analyzing behavior.
Many animal behaviour experts have been trained in this way of thinking, but Prof Seth says it is starting to be replaced by a less human-centred approach.
“Because we see things through a human lens, we tend to associate consciousness with language and intelligence. Just because they function together in us doesn’t mean they function together in general.”
Image source, Wikimedia/Canvas
Some people are very critical of the way the word consciousness is used.
“There are a lot of ambiguous terms in this field, and unfortunately consciousness is one of them,” says Stephen Harnad, a professor at the University of Quebec.
“It’s a word that a lot of people use with confidence, but each one has a different meaning and I have no idea what it means.”
Prof Harnad says a better, less ambiguous term would be “perception,” which is more precisely defined as the ability to feel. “Sensing anything, pinching yourself, seeing the colour red, feeling tired or hungry – these are all sensing,” Prof Harnad says.
Even those who have been instinctively skeptical of the idea of animals being conscious say that a broad new interpretation of what it means to be conscious is making a difference.
Dr. Monique Udell of Oregon State University said she has a background in activism.
“Observing clear behaviors — for example, which species can recognize themselves in a mirror, how many can plan for the future, or remember things that happened in the past — will allow us to test these questions through experiments and observations and draw more precise conclusions based on the data,” she says.
“And if we define consciousness as the sum of measurable behaviors, then animals that are successful at these particular tasks can be said to have what we call consciousness.”
This is a much narrower definition of consciousness than the new group is promoting, but Dr Udell says respectful exchange is the essence of science.
“It’s important to have people who don’t just take ideas with a grain of salt and look at them with a critical eye, because if we don’t address these issues differently, it’s going to be much harder to move forward.”
But where does it go from there? Some say that to investigate the possibility of consciousness, we need to study many more animals than we currently do.
“Right now, most scientific research is done on humans and monkeys, and we haven’t learned about the most basic forms of consciousness, which makes it harder than it needs to be,” says Christine Andrews, a philosophy professor at York University in Toronto who specializes in animal minds.
Andrews and many others believe that while the study of humans and monkeys is a study of higher levels of consciousness, as manifested in our ability to communicate and feel complex emotions, octopuses and snakes may also have more basic levels of consciousness that we are ignoring by not investigating them.
The brief, four-paragraph manifesto states that it is “irresponsible” to dismiss the possibility of animal consciousness.
“We should consider the welfare risks and make evidence-based decisions about how to respond to those risks,” the report says.
Chris McGehee is a member of Understanding Animal Research, a UK-based organisation supported by research organisations and companies that conduct animal testing.
He said that when it comes to whether to experiment on animals, animals are already assumed to be conscious and British regulations require experiments to only be carried out if the benefits to medical research outweigh the animal’s suffering.
“There’s enough evidence to take a precautionary approach,” he says.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know about them, including decapod crustaceans like crabs, lobsters, crayfish and shrimp.
“We know very little about their life experiences, or even basic things like when they will die.
“And that’s important, because we need to have rules in place to protect them, both in the lab and in the wild.”
Professor Birch’s team found that there is strong evidence that these creatures are sentient, in that they can experience emotions such as pain, pleasure, thirst, hunger, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. This conclusion has led the Government to bring these creatures under the scope of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.
“The welfare issues of octopuses and crabs have been ignored,” Prof Birch said.
“The new science should encourage society to take these issues a little more seriously.”
There are millions of different kinds of animals, yet very little research has been done on how they experience the world. We know a little about honeybees, and other researchers have shown signs of conscious behavior in cockroaches and even fruit flies, but there are many other experiments to be done with many other animals.
This is an area of study that has been ignored and even ridiculed by the contemporary heretics who signed the New York Declaration, and their approach of saying the unsayable and risking sanctions is nothing new.
Around the same time that René Descartes was stating “I think, therefore I am,” the Catholic Church was labelling Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei as “highly suspected of heresy” for suggesting that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
It was a shift in thinking that opened our eyes to a truer and richer picture of the universe and our place in it.
Moving ourselves away from the center of the universe again could have similar effects on our understanding of not only ourselves but also the other living things with which we share the Earth.
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