Chapter 5 - A Bird's Eye View of Consciousness

Abstract

The major contending ideas concerning the nature of consciousness have been current for some hundreds of years. Human beings are conscious living organisms. Not all living beings are conscious—mostly it is supposed that only animals, not plants or fungi or protozoa, can achieve consciousness. Biologists have by now achieved a reasonable grasp of the way in which nonliving constituents can be assembled to produce a living, reproducing organism. However, it remains a mystery how living cells, supposedly nonconscious entities, can be assembled to produce a conscious being. It is not easy to provide a definition of consciousness, and to focus the discussion it can be supposed that the essence of consciousness is the ability to feel pleasure and/or pain, to prefer some states to others. This approach adopted argues that this is equivalent to asking for criteria that should be used to establish whether an organism feels pleasure or pain. If the origin of consciousness is to be found in some aspect of cognitive processing, then in trying to decide which animals are conscious and which not, one should seek some step-change in cognition between one group of animals and another. The chapter reviews efforts to establish differences in intelligence between different animal groups, in the expectation that analysis of those differences could yield insights into specific differences in cognitive processes amongst them.