[LINK] The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
The Francis Crick Memorial Conference, held in Cambridge last month, has come up with the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (PDF).
tl;dr humans still aren’t special, consciousness seems to arise in quite a variety of nervous systems and working out what it is is a problem in neurology.
We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from
experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the
neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with
the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that
humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-
human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also
possess these neurological substrates.”
I think there’s a pretty substantial leap from “Animals experience moods” (a claim which wouldn’t invoke too much controversy) to “Animals experience consciousness” (a claim which would).
Granted, there are definitions of consciousness which are satisfied by the possession of mood, I doubt those definitions are what the authors had in mind when they made this claim, even if those are the definitions they used; such a claim stinks of sneaking in connotation.
Mood and agency. I think you’d have a hard time claiming that no non-human could be reasonably described as an agent that works toward goals.
(I think of my cat, a smart and scrappy ex-stray, and how he and the kitten worked out how to get into the fridge: old cat lies down, young cat stands on him and pulls door open. Note that the older cat thoroughly disliked the kitten even as he conceded they were in the same pack. We saw them do the fridge trick and were flabbergasted. We put a lock on the fridge to keep out the cats, not the kid.)
But yeah, argument about this does descend into definition wrangling.
It seems clear to me that most common definitions of consciousness do not lend themselves to precise categorization. There’s a slope from bacteria to the nematode worm to amphibians to mammals and birds to primates and cetaceans, and then humans on top, because we’re clearly better at this than anybody else, for the time being. You can impose a decision boundary on that slope, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the real world.
I thought that what makes humans somewhat special is self-awareness and introspection. Not sure if there is a “neurological substrate” for that.
Well, clearly we’re special enough to take over the world. I’m not sure how we can be sure that chimps or dolphins don’t have something that could be called introspection. (That’s partially an expression of my opinion and partly of my personal ignorance—I welcome enlightenment on the topic.)
I wonder when and how we started time-binding.
Following The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and many other sources, I suspect the dominating differences between chimps and us is abilities we have evolved that greatly enhance the effectiveness of our working together in large groups. The more you enable cooperation, the more things like complex language and cognition suitable for highly specialized (i.e. a specialized cog in a larger machine) production.
It seems to me that introspection is valuable even in a non-cooperative world: if I can fine tune my reactions to prey and my attractiveness to the opposite sex, that is valuable in a band of 20 possibly nearly as much as it is valuable in a band of 20,000.
I love watching the “naturalness” with which female humans game the attractiveness-system. While at a young age I don’t think their instrospectiveness extends to them realizing they are gaming a system, I do think that they spend a lot of time studying themselves and figuring out how to enhance their attractiveness with increasingly well developed skills and clever fashion decisions. Is there anything like this “self-enhancement” in an individually customized (introspective) way among other primates or other animals?
In some sense, no one is “sure” of anything. But what might you imagine the substrate might be other than neurological?
Not “other than neurological”, but which neurological substrate specifically might be responsible for self-awareness. I think the current model is that that it is the prefrontal cortex with some heavy links to the rest of the brain.
Is there a comprehensive list of science declarations anywhere?
Clive Wynne, Do Animals Think?, November 1999.
See also Humans in Funny Animal Suits by EY from July 2008.
This guy wants really badly to believe that animals aren’t people, so he’s likely biased.
His arguments are:
Recognizing one’s reflection and self-awareness are poorly correlated; chimps can be trained to pass theory-of-mind tests but there’s no evidence they’re using theory of mind to do so. Plus there are humans who definitely are people who still have trouble with self-awareness and theory of mind. So those tests prove nothing.
Animals pay attention to different things from humans, so they don’t have humanlike consciousness.
The latter is obviously a confusion between senses of “conscious” as “a valuable mind” and “aware of something”. The former is true, but doesn’t cover Cambridge’s main argument about emotions (states that lead to similar brain activity and behaviors in humans and animals and are described as emotions by humans, and are disrupted in similar ways by hallucinogens).