Animal Consciousness
Figuring out whether animals have consciousness has implications for how we think about animal welfare, and also how we think about creativity
Log in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.Unless we are solipsists, we conclude that all human beings are conscious.
A simple extrapolation to animals would be to say that those with similar characteristics to humans, could also have consciousness.
I am not aware of any strong theories on animals being unconscious, other than intuitions of some AGI researchers who conjecture that sentience hangs together with unique learning capabilities of humans.
And suppose that we have a reasonable (best available) current explanation for why animals are not conscious, I don't think that puts us in a Pascal's wager situation, because considering our own (recognised) fallibility, and the asymmetry of being right and wrong with respect to moral outcomes: enormous suffering versus inconvenience, we should consider to tread on the safe side until we have more evidence.
This implies that we should treat animals carefully, as their sentience allows them to feel pain, until we have a lot more information. Interestingly, this also implies that wild nature is evil and that we should seek to get rid of it (if we continue to believe in animal consciousness).
TL;DR: We only have vague conjectures on animal consciousness
A simple extrapolation to animals would be to say that those with similar characteristics to humans, could also have consciousness.
Sounds inductive.
A simple extrapolation to animals would be to say that those with similar characteristics to humans, could also have consciousness.
In addition to #371, this also sounds vague. Which “similar characteristics” and why?
[S]uppose that we have a reasonable (best available) current explanation for why animals are not conscious, I don't think that puts us in a Pascal's wager situation, because considering our own (recognised) fallibility, and the asymmetry of being right and wrong with respect to moral outcomes: enormous suffering versus inconvenience, we should consider to tread on the safe side until we have more evidence.
You say this wouldn’t put us in a Pascal’s wager situation, but then you employ more or less the same logic as Pascal: comparing a huge, potential downside with a certain, minor downside, and then choosing the minor downside.
I think it's different from Pascal's wager, as with Pascal's wager you have infinite, or many (all known religions) wagers. (Which god?) Whereas with animal consciousness we have only one wager, that we're currently not sure of, on which we're wagering a lot of potential animal suffering. Furthermore, we are not on our deathbed, and hence have the luxury of time to consider our trade.
I see that, according to Wikipedia, Pascal’s detractors criticized the wager for not addressing “the problem of which religion and which God should be worshipped”, but I don’t see how that is relevant here. Maybe there are some differences between how you apply the wager and how Pascal applied it, but the core logic is the same and equally invalid.
[W]e are not on our deathbed, and hence have the luxury of time to consider our trade.
But meat eaters contribute to the death of animals every day, so if animals were sentient there would be more urgency to apply the wager, not less. (I’ll preemptively add that, although meat eaters die every day, too, each one of them is complicit in what would be the murder of several innocent animals, so there’d still be more urgency.)
[C]onsidering our own (recognised) fallibility […] we should consider to tread on the safe side until we have more evidence.
There’s lots of evidence: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience
And reasoning:
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/konrad-lorenz-hacked-animals
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-discussion-tree
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-faq
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-animal-rights-community-is-based-on-fear-a
As I write in the first link, the videos “mostly show bugs and nonsensical behavior, things that wouldn’t happen if animals were sentient.”
[W]ild nature is evil and […] we should seek to get rid of it (if we continue to believe in animal consciousness).
The suffering of some is not an obligation on others (Rand).
Not an obligation, but it would be a Morally Good Thing, whereas without sentience it would be pointless. (Or rather, a Morally Bad Thing, as this would be costly to sentient humans.)
Thanks for your contribution, Dirk.
Your post contains several ideas. In the future, you would benefit from submitting them separately so they have to be criticized separately. As it stands, a single criticism of your post will mark all of the ideas contained therein as problematic. I call this a ‘bulk criticism’, see #362.
To protect against bulk criticism, try to submit one idea per post. You can post multiple sibling ideas (not nested ideas) by using the form where it says “Add another top-level idea to the discussion” for each one.
Would you like to break your post up into several ideas before I offer criticism? They can still reference each other the same way I do above with idea #362 – if you type # followed by a number, it will turn into a link to the corresponding idea, much like GitHub does with issues.
The idea is: given that we know little about animal consciousness, it's better to err on the safe side given the asymmetry of inconvenience versus mass animal suffering.
I think you can attack this by either pointing out how that is a faulty way of thinking about a 'lack of evidence', or that there is indeed enough information on animal consciousness.
I'm mostly interested in finding evidence or thinking of cases that would be evidence, and less about the implications on morality.
I think you’ve replaced my question with a different one.
I asked whether you’d like to break your post up into several ideas to protect against bulk criticism.
You replaced the question with: ‘what is the core of your idea?’ And then you answered the replacement question instead of mine.
So your original post still stands (#364), and is still vulnerable to bulk criticism. I conclude that you are not concerned with bulk criticism and I will comment on the original post accordingly.
I have to admit I was unsure how many claims I actually made, and excused myself from the burden of having to figure it out with the following excuse: I expect that many potential users of your platform would make this error and therefore we should try to run with it. I also don't mind the bulk criticism.
I also don't mind the bulk criticism.
Even if the person submitting a post doesn’t mind bulk criticism, others still have a harder time discerning which ideas in the post are true/salvageable and which should be discarded. Meaning error correction is harder.
It helps when critics quote the part they’re criticizing, like I’m doing above, but the responsibility still lies with the original poster.
I agree many people would make the same error and that it’s a good idea to see how things play out when it does happen. There’s going to be a learning curve for new users. I will probably just point it out every time. I may even implement a feature where ‘AI’ analyzes text and helpfully points out to users that they’re about to submit multiple claims at once.
I don’t think animals are sentient.
I realize this view sounds outlandish to most but it’s a considered, researched conclusion.
There’s lots of evidence of insentience in the way animals behave. If they were sentient, they would not behave the way they do: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience
Dozens of videos compiling and explaining evidence of animal insentience: https://libertythroughreason.com/insentience-in-animals-and-sleepwalkers/
Additional reasoning:
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-faq
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/konrad-lorenz-hacked-animals
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-discussion-tree
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-animal-rights-community-is-based-on-fear-a
You propose in your writings that universal creativity can emerge from lower-level, mindless computation, and that consciousness is among the emergent properties associated with creativity. But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?
The fact that simple execution-only systems are not conscious does not show that no noncreative computation can have phenomenal properties. For example, pain could in principle have emerged from a different kind of lower-level computation long before that system acquired universal creativity.
So unless there is an explanation for why phenomenal experience cannot emerge from noncreative computation, the inference from “animals are noncreative” to “animals are insentient” does not seem to follow.
The inference would seem more natural in the opposite direction: evidence that animals lacked phenomenal experience might support doubts about more general mental capacities, but the absence of universal creativity does not by itself explain why even pain or color experience should be absent.
Hi Vincent, welcome to V. Nice meeting you at Conjecture Con.
But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?
Idk why you switched from “consciousness” to “phenomenal experience” here. But the argument is that behavior that may just as well be preprogrammed and then executed mindlessly is not evidence of consciousness (because it is, again, mindless).
I have seen no evidence of any animal behavior that could not have been preprogrammed. If you know of any, please show me.
But the argument is that behavior that may just as well be preprogrammed and then executed mindlessly is not evidence of consciousness (because it is, again, mindless).
This seems to be circular reasoning:
Your reply seems to move from “the behavior could have been preprogrammed” to “the behavior is therefore mindless.” But those are different claims.
“Preprogrammed” describes how the behavior is generated. “Mindless” additionally says that no phenomenal experience accompanies that process. That does not follow unless we already assume that non-universal or preprogrammed computation cannot support phenomenal experience. Which is precisely the connection my criticism questioned.
So showing that animal behavior could be preprogrammed may show that the behavior does not prove sentience, but it does not by itself provide evidence of insentience.
I have seen no evidence of any animal behavior that could not have been preprogrammed. If you know of any, please show me. <
You ask for animal behavior that could not have been preprogrammed. But I’m not sure any finite observed behavior could meet that standard.
For any finite sequence of behavior, it seems possible in principle to posit a sufficiently elaborate fixed program that produces it. The same would apply to human behavior.
So if the criterion for sentience is behavior that could not possibly have been preprogrammed, it is unclear how sentience could ever be established behaviorally, including in humans.
In the reasoning you link in support of animal insentience, you argue that sentience and the capacity for universal creativity/critical thought come as a package deal. Dreaming seems to provide evidence against that connection.
Ordinary dreams can involve vivid visual experience, fear, pleasure, pain, etc., while metacognition, reality testing and critical reflection are greatly diminished. Lucid dreaming makes the distinction especially interesting: metacognitive awareness can return during an already conscious dream. The dream does not become phenomenally conscious only when lucidity begins; rather, an additional capacity for recognizing and critically reflecting on the experience appears.
This suggests that phenomenal experience can occur independently of the active critical capacities you take animals to lack.
This suggests that phenomenal experience can occur independently of the active critical capacities you take animals to lack.
I don’t think so, since, as you write yourself, the critical attitude while dreaming is only “diminished”, not completely gone.
If vivid phenomenal experience persists while the relevant critical capacities are greatly diminished (and some forms of meta-awareness appear to be absent altogether in ordinary dreams) that seems at least evidence that phenomenal experience does not closely depend on the degree to which those capacities are active. Lucid dreaming strengthens this: reflective/metacognitive capacities can return within an experience that was already phenomenal.
In the reasoning you link in support of animal insentience, you argue that similarities between human and animal nervous systems do not tell us whether the same conscious “software” is running. But humans and other mammals are not analogous to two identical computers on which entirely unrelated programs happen to have been installed. The relevant systems have a shared evolutionary history, with substantial continuity in sensory, affective, nociceptive and learning mechanisms.
A change in that inherited system may indeed have produced the qualitative leap to universal creativity. Since universality is necessarily all-or-nothing in the relevant sense, that leap is unsurprising. But it does not follow that every other aspect of mental life (including pain or other phenomenal experience) must have appeared in the same leap, or even require a comparable leap at all.
Neural continuity therefore seems evidentially relevant even if it cannot by itself prove sentience. The observation that universal creativity is uniquely human still leaves open whether older, shared systems already supported phenomenal experience.
