Hi Ted
I have studied consciousness off and on for decades. I decided that
it's pretty much futile to discuss consciousness in animals when we
don't even know what consciousness is in people or ourselves.
But, for example, if an animal performs an intelligent action like
stashing food for later, that is not evidence that it is "conscious'
of doing it. For example, we drive automobiles, which is a highly
sophisticated activity, yet often our "consciousness" is elsewhere (on
the phone?)
But, consciousness includes what we are conscious of, what we are
doing "unconsciously" like driving, or typing (which is also part of
our consciousness). That leaves the real unconscious processes like
breathing, heartbeating, etc.
But, I believe that most of our thought processes are actually
*unconsciously performed* and that what we call thinking is only the
top layer of it, the part that we are conscious of. So an animal could
be conscious in ways similar to us, but not be conscious of its "self"
or even have a self concept at all.
The concept of "self" seems to be reserved for primates and dolphins,
but even here -- a lot depends on the ability to structure the
experiment in such a way that one takes into consideration the mental
process of the subject, and b) one doesn't load the experiment in ways
that cause it to succeed or fail and mask the actual effect.
Quote:
Donald Griffin (1915-2003) made his name by discovering
echolocation in bats and writing a widely accessible book Listening in
the dark. In the
early 1970's, Griffin decided to devote himself to the cause of
animals' consciousness.
From then until his death in November 2003, at the age of 88, Griffin used every
possible means available to him to promote the study of animal minds.
He wrote and
lectured extensively, reinterpreted many old observations, challenged
people studying
diverse groups of animals to devise ways of obtaining a glimpse into
the minds of
animals and wrote three books. The burden of Griffin's message was that, viewing
animals as being in a state comparable to human sleepwalkers, will
never let us find out
if animals have conscious experiences.
See
D R Griffin, The question of animal awareness: evolutionary continuity
of mental experience, Rockefeller University Press, New York, 1976.
D R Griffin, Animal thinking, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984.
D R Griffin, Animal minds: beyond cognition to consciousness,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001.
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