Animal Consciousness

Great Debates
1

I saw an interesting show on PBS last night on the subject of animal consciousness–definitions, experiments, and theories.

Basically, the panel was of the collective opinion that there were so many ways to define the terms “awareness,” “self-awareness,” and “consciousness” and “self-consciousness,” that one had to be very careful when theorizing about animal versions of these phenomena. Another important consideration was the wide spectrum of animal brain sizes and intelligences. For most, language was considered a sign of a higher consciousness in that it provides a way to ‘talk’ about thoughts in the abstract.

I am curious as to what other posters think: what sort of consciousness do animals have, and to what extent? How do you define it and what in animal behaviour leads you to believe in this consciousness? What do you think about animal “language”?

For instance, I take my cats…these are not among the most advanced animals intellectually, but by golly, I’d swear they do have a certain amount of self-awareness outside of the strictly bodily kind of self-awareness. They are capable of a certain amount of empathy, it seems, and wouldn’t empathy imply recognition of other animals/humans as emotional beings like themselves?

I also wonder about interpretations of the ‘elephant graveyard’ behaviour…do you think elephants are aware of their mortality, or just attached to deceased family/group members?

2

I think social animals tend to have a certain amount of ability to think “abstractly”. They have to transpose how they would respond to a behavior to other members of the group in order to anticipate reactions. It is pretty clear that a lot of this is learned, not instinctive, and I take that to be strong evidence of some level of self-awareness. Cats are more social than most people like to think (because they are not as social as dogs).
I think your question would go farther if you gave a more specific definition of what you mean by consciousness.

3

This is a link to a former debate on Consciousness in general, but animals played a fairly large role in it.