Leading scientists declare animals to be conscious – they feel pain, joy and sadness

Which animals other than us have the capacity for conscious experience? For a long time, this question was neglected; consciousness being one of the most problematic problems in science.

But leading scientists in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare, veterinary science, the social sciences and the humanities have just endorsed a declaration saying there’s a “realistic possibility” of conscious experience in mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, crustaceans and even insects.

The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was signed by 264 leading professors, researchers, neurobiologists, natural science lecturers and animal behaviourists who met to discuss the future of human engagement with our fellow creatures.

The declaration aims to “convey the excitement of the emerging science of animal consciousness… and to encourage reflection on animal welfare.”

“The last 10 years have been an exciting time for the science of animal cognition and behaviour,” states the declaration. “Striking new results have hinted at surprisingly rich inner lives in a very wide range of other animals, including many invertebrates, driving renewed debate about animal consciousness.”

Octopuses avoid pain and value pain relief in the place-preference test. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

 

Apart from examples of consciousness in “higher” mammals, the declaration cites a range of other examples that point towards consciousness:

• Crows can be trained to report what they see.


• Octopuses avoid pain and value pain relief in the place-preference test.


• Cuttlefish remember details of specific past events, including how they experienced them.


• Cleaner wrasse fish appear to pass a version of the mirror-mark test, exhibiting awareness of their reflection.


• Garter snakes pass a scent-based version of the mirror-mark test.


• Zebrafish show signs of curiosity.


• Bees show apparent play behaviour.


• Crayfish display “anxiety-like” states which are altered by anti-anxiety drugs.


• Crabs balance competing motivations to make flexible decisions.


• Fruit flies have active and quiet sleep – and social isolation disrupts their sleep patterns.

“It is entirely appropriate,” says the declaration, “to interpret these remarkable displays of learning, memory, planning, problem-solving, self-awareness and other such capacities as evidence of consciousness in cases where the same behaviour, if found in a human or other mammal, would be well explained by conscious processing.”

Consciousness

All of this begs the question, what exactly is consciousness?

The term has a variety of meanings. The declaration focuses on “phenomenal consciousness” or “sentience”: which animals can have subjective experiences? This can include sensory experiences (like touch, taste, sight or smell) as well as experiences that feel good or bad (like pleasure, pain, hope or fear).

Subjective experience, says the declaration, requires more than the mere ability to detect stimuli. But it doesn’t necessitate sophisticated capacities such as human-like language or reason.

With mammals and birds, the declaration says there’s ‘strong scientific support’ for attributions of consciousness. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

“Phenomenal consciousness is raw feeling – immediate felt experience, be it sensory or emotional– and this is something that may well be shared between humans and many other animals. We need to take seriously the possibility that a very wide range of animals, including all vertebrates and many invertebrates, can have subjective experiences.”

With mammals and birds, the declaration says there’s “strong scientific support” for attributions of consciousness, and for other vertebrates like fish and reptiles and many invertebrates like octopuses and crayfish, there’s a “realistic possibility”.

Nothing new

While the declaration is an important milestone, the case for invertebrate sentience is not new. Philosophers and activists have long argued for the moral consideration of nonhumans based on their capacity for subjective experience. The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness recognised the likelihood of consciousness in many nonhuman animals.

However, the New York Declaration is more robust than the Cambridge Declaration, embracing a wide range of other-than-mammalian-or-avian animals, including invertebrates.

The case for octopus sentience was made in Craig Foster’s award-winning film, My Octopus Teacher. These utterly boneless, ancient creatures think their way into novel tool-using, predator escape and social signalling behaviours. They flash not only colourful patterns of mimicry and camouflage on their skin but also their moods. When subjected to unethical experiments, they suffer pain.

https://youtu.be/3s0LTDhqe5A?si=u6Dn8tNdHvtLT57f

 

According to Dr Adam Cardilini writing in PAN (People-Animals-Nature), the declaration’s shift from “certainty” is much more in line with the way that science typically works.

“Our world is incredibly complex, and achieving some level of certainty often results in additional uncertainty, as answers often beget more questions,” he writes.

“In this way, ‘certainty’ as a benchmark for the consideration of animal consciousness in decisions affecting them is an unrealistic, moving target, and the declaration was right to encourage a new one.”

German philosophers Leonard Dung and Albert Newen say we should stop approaching animal consciousness as a ‘do they/don’t they?’ question and rather measure nonhuman consciousness on a spectrum alongside human consciousness. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

A recent paper by two German philosophers, Leonard Dung and Albert Newen, questioned whether we are coming at the issue of sentience from the right angle, or even asking the right questions at all.

They say we should stop approaching animal consciousness as a “do they/don’t they?” question and rather measure nonhuman consciousness on a spectrum alongside human consciousness.

Even among humans, consciousness is difficult to define. The term generally refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood and the executive control system of the mind.

Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there’s a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.

As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.” DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk