Animal consciousness: what to do?

Topic: are animals conscious? An analysis of Marian Dawkins’ "Through our eyes only? The search for animal consciousness."

. . . a point of contention with my fellow biologists at school: the prof wanted more than a cursory debate. Here's my paper . . . thought you might be interested (don't worry guys, I turned it in and received it back already 8) ).

21 Oct. 2003

Consciousness, extremely difficult to define yet central to the human experience, is among the world’s most enigmatic and fascinating phenomena. We find the subject captivating in great part because our species has evolved such that its members actively seek information about each others’ mental states. Not surprisingly, most people are unaware of their deep-seated reliance upon social interaction: they simply experience an intense curiosity about and a keen aptitude for interpreting what their fellow humans think and feel. Also quite understandably, the notion of human consciousness outside our species appeals to the same inborn craving we display for interaction with conspecifics (consider: our fixation on stories that feature animals with human cognition and language capacity). Unfortunately, we cannot assume that other animals are conscious, as we most readily, indeed unknowingly, assume for other people. Our study of animal cognition should not be a search for qualities like consciousness but an open exploration of unknown, foreign territory. In this regard, Marian Dawkins (1998) fails “to give an account of what we now understand of the experiences of other species” (Dawkins 1998, preface ix). She conducts not an exploration of animals’ mental worlds but a search outside the human species for her ambiguous, anthropocentric, and experimentally intangible notion of conscious experience. Despite attempts to avoid undue bias, she effectively assumes that some animals share human consciousness before analyzing the results of her focus experiments. These errors render her book wholly unconvincing, for she suffers from the misconception that our inferences about human mental worlds can ever apply to non-human mental worlds as well. Animal cognition deserves and requires an exploration completely free of preconception and bias. Now, we may not be able to achieve that idealistic goal, but we can certainly avoid the mistakes committed in Through our eyes only.

Dawkins begins her book with the proposal that “the same processes of unlocking and understanding that we use with other people can be applied, at least to some extent, to other species of animals as well” (Dawkins 1998, 1-2). She never explains or acknowledges why her “processes of unlocking and understanding” arose in the first place; that is, she does not mention how and why people can even use these processes on other people. We must understand the evolutionary context of this inference system before considering its use, however easily logical it may seem, on species outside our own. Humans occupy what Pascal Boyer and other anthropologists call a “cognitive niche;” they “need information about the world around them; and they need cooperation with other members of the species.” More specifically, people “depend on information about other people’s mental states – that is, what information they have and what their intentions are” (Boyer 2001, 120-121). A great deal of our environment consists of information supplied by conspecifics, and consequently a great deal of our inference systems are oriented toward representing, interpreting, and manipulating human mental states. The inferences we make about human behaviour rely completely upon several tacit assumptions, one of which is that the individuals with whom we interact are in fact capable of the same inferences we ourselves are making. We automatically, uncontrollably take it for granted that other people are conscious; that vitally important assumption is built into our inferences about human behaviour. By using “processes for unlocking and understanding . . . other people” (my emphasis) to interpret animal cognition, Dawkins actually begins her argument with the assumption that animals are conscious! She does make an effort to enumerate the potential biases in her argument; however it is not the details of her search but its entire principle that comprises the book’s most debilitating flaw.

Dawkins explicitly states in the subtitle of Through our eyes only that the effort therein constitutes a search. Every search has a specific search image: hers is animal consciousness. She readily admits, however, that the search target is a “phenomenon, known vividly to each of us [humans] as individuals but impossible to define in any simple way . . . . The question that will concern us is whether it is also known, at least in some measure, to other animals” (Dawkins 1998, 5). So, the author searches for something without definition, something that humans feel but cannot wholly describe, something ethereal but also concrete. Dawkins’ rhetoric provides no foundation for rigorous proof or even compelling suggestion. Because she defines consciousness in a human-centric fashion, all she can search for among her animal subjects is the consciousness that she herself experiences and assumes, correctly, that her readers experience as well. Thus, although Dawkins claims to search for animal consciousness, she actually combs the non-human world for human consciousness, which is not only misguided but a great disservice to animals as well. Why is her effort a disservice? After all, her interests do lie in animal welfare . . . but disregarding important interspecies differences and consequently allowing cognitive properties to leak across those same barriers is an anthropocentric and misleading approach to behaviour. For example, Dawkins asks us, while following her search for species that “are sufficiently like [humans]” to show a degree of conscious experience, to ignore the fact that no non-human species possesses a language of remotely comparable complexity to our own (Dawkins 1998, 16). An honest approach to this issue, however, reveals that “language . . . plays an enormous role in the structuring of a human mind, and the mind of a creature lacking language – and having really no need for language – should not be supposed to be structured in these ways” (Dennett 1991, 447). In his book, Consciousness Explained, and particularly with the above passage, Dennett highlights an important objection: Dawkins’ cross-species analogies for high order brain function are simply senseless. Humans evolved within a uniquely hyper-socialized niche in which communication of unmatched complexity played a central role. The substantial differences in evolutionary history between humans and non-humans provide no reason to expect animal brains to be ordered in a way that allows for extrapolation about consciousness between animals and people. It is therefore inappropriate to use an anthropocentric quality state, namely consciousness in the human experience, as the target image of a search through the rest of the animal kingdom.

So, are some animals conscious? We see now that the question itself is irrevocably tied to the human conscious experience, because human consciousness is all we can imagine. Consider a more fruitful enquiry, in my regard: How do animals interact with each other and their environment, and why do they behave in those ways? We can construe answers to these latter questions without the equivocation that discussions of consciousness carry in cross-species analyses. Further, we can build models of animal behaviour from a base of absolutely minimal assumption, exploring their world as one alien to our own rather than searching it for qualities that are familiar to us. It may well be that some animal species outside Homo sapiens share sensory experience akin to ours; to that end we would like to treat consciousness not as an all-or-none quality but something that can exist to many degrees. One may object: How could we study animal cognition this way? It’s impossible to imagine being half-conscious, or a third conscious! Yes, exactly: animal mental states may be so foreign to us that representing them would be akin to conveying eleven dimensions on a flat piece of paper. Rather than leaping into a cursory attempt at knowing exactly how non-human animals think and feel, it may be wiser to study the consequences, which are readily observable, of their mental states. Let us treat animal minds as an unknown landscape that acquires shape by virtue of its shadows, which we see in their behaviour. Dawkins takes steps toward this approach at the end of her book, but her analysis of emotional expression in animals again presupposes in them a degree of human consciousness. After describing an experiment on hen behaviour, the author suggests that, in their effort to reach nest boxes, hens “experience a strong state of frustration at not being able to find one” (Dawkins 1998, 155). This passage may seem relatively innocuous, but in fact it assumes that hens are conscious animals with mental states so similar to our own that they can “experience . . . frustration.” Her description makes no sense unless we take it in stride that hens are conscious like we are, at least in the limited context of emotional response. It is precisely such slips of thought and diction that we must avoid.

Explaining human conscious experience is among the most daunting and exciting projects modern science faces. The progress we’ve made to that end is exhilarating and uplifting, but, tempted as we may be to do so, extending our intuitive inferences about human minds to animal minds is not conducive to understanding cognition outside our species. Why: because those inferences carry tacit assumptions about human mental worlds, which do not apply to non-human mental worlds. We will probably never be able to put ourselves into animals’ shoes, so to speak, but we can certainly build extensive, impartial records of animal minds’ input and output. By exploring the patterns in those input and output records, we can achieve a greater understanding of cognitive architecture outside Homo sapiens.

Literature Cited

Boyer, P. Religion Explained. New York, USA: Basic Books: 2001.

Dawkins, M. S. Through our eyes only? The search for animal consciousness.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 1998.

Dennett, D. C. Consciousness Explained. Boston, USA: Back Bay Books: 1991.

Replies:

Consciousness: We're Not Alone, by James Brody, 11/08/03

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