The consciousness inherent in chasing your tail

Rowan et al.’s target article is an outstanding review of some of the history of the science of sentience, but one would have liked to see a much stronger “call to action.” We don’t need any more data to know that many other animals are sentient beings whose lives must be protected from harm in a wide variety of contexts. It is not anti-science to want more action on behalf of other animals right now.

It is very important that we clarify what we owe to nonhuman animals. To that end, we need a better understanding of animal cognition and emotion. Marino & Merskin’s target article is a welcome contribution to this project. Sheep, like most other animals, are sentient beings with interests of their own. It is wrong to discriminate against them based on species-membership or cognitive sophistication. We are morally required not to harm them, and to help them have the best possible lives, just as we would be in the case of human beings with similar interests. We must become the good shepherds, or stewards, of the other animals.

In their target article, Rowan et al (2022) make a welcome attempt to chart the development of Western progress over the past two hundred years toward formally recognizing that animals feel. They outline the heroic efforts of Compassion in World Farming to gain for animals the status of sentient beings rather than merely human property. A broader view exists, from human prehistory to the present day, in which animals have been (and still are) understood to be sentient by indigenous peoples as well as by some Eastern religions. Growing recognition in the West that animals feel represents a new age of enlightenment.

Our target article proposed that vertebrates, cephalopod mollusks, and euarthropods independently converged onto high levels of brain and cognitive complexity and that this macroevolutionary trend was coupled with and facilitated by the acquisition of a small set of pivotal traits, used in visuomotor control of three-dimensional and targeted movements. In response to commentaries that challenged our working premise and conclusions, we (1) use the concept of aggregate complexity to define brain and cognitive complexity and dispel misconceptions about anthropocentric bias, (2) call attention to the explanatory value and power of convergence as an important evolutionary concept, (3) highlight certain architectural and organizational features of the nervous system as scaffolds for the evolutionary expansion of behavioral and cognitive complexity, and (4) consider the phylogenetic distribution of phenomenal consciousness in relation to our findings. We also try to foster a greater appreciation for cognition as a process that involves whole animals as aggregate systems and that requires an extended repertoire of laws and principles to understand its evolution.

The only feelings we can feel are our own. When it comes to the feelings of others, we can only infer them, based on their behavior — unless they tell us. This is the other- minds problem. Within our own species, thanks to language, this problem arises only for states in which people cannot speak (infancy, aphasia, sleep, anaesthesia, coma). Our species also has a uniquely powerful empathic or mind-reading capacity: We can (sometimes) perceive from the behavior of others when they are in states like our own. Our inferences have also been systematized and operationalized in biobehavioral science and supplemented by cognitive neuroimagery. Together, these make the other-minds problem within our own species a relatively minor one. But we cohabit the planet with other species, most of them very different from our own, and none of them able to talk. Inferring whether and what they feel is important not only for scientific but also for ethical reasons, because where feelings are felt, they can also be hurt. As animals are at long last beginning to be accorded legal status and protection as sentient beings, our new journal Animal Sentience, will be devoted to exploring in depth what, how and why organisms feel. Individual articles (and sometimes precis of books) addressing different species' sentient and cognitive capacities will each be accorded open peer commentary, consisting of multiple shorter articles, both invited and freely submitted ones, by specialists from many disciplines, each elaborating, applying, supplementing or criticizing the content of the target article, along with responses from the target author(s). The members of the nonhuman species under discussion will not be able to join in the conversation, but their spokesmen and advocates, the specialists who know them best, will. The inaugural issue launches with the all-important question (for fish) of whether fish can feel pain.

This target article provides a valuable biological basis for life-mind continuity approaches. These explain cognition in the context of the origin and evolution of life itself. We argue that the features which are critical to sophisticated human cognition in late phylogenetic development are already present in the traits highlighted in the target article as pivotal for the development of cognitive complexity.

The three target articles composing this symposium argue persuasively that social inference is influenced by people's goals and needs. Dunning (this issue) describes how the desire maintain a positive self-image leads the development and maintenance of positive self-schemata. According Kunda and Sinclair (this issue), stereotypes regarding a target are activated, applied, or inhibited depending on the target's behavior has positive, negative, or neutral implications for the self. In the third target article, Murray (this issue) shows how people construe their romantic partners in ways that sustain the perception that one's partner has positive attributes and the relationship will continue. In an earlier article, Kunda (1990) classified motivated cognition into two major categories: those in which the motive is to arrive at an accurate whatever it may be, and those in which the motive is arrive at a particular conclusion (p. 480). The articles in this symposium focus on the second category. Regardless of which category of motivated cognition we consider, a common element is the nature of the question posed in selfand other-evaluation. In Dunning's research, the implicit or explicit question is Do I possess positive attributes? For Kunda and Sinclair's stereotyping research, the question is the evaluator who praises or derogates the self is credible or uncredible. The relationship studies described by Murray focus on whether my romantic partner has positive attributes that will help maintain our In each case, a goal frames the question such that information is retrieved from memory or beliefs are constructed that are consistent with the goal. A hot question (using Abelson's hot-cold cognition dichotomy) steers a cold, cognitive process. This follows from reasonably well-understood processes used in lay hypothesis testing: People rely on a positive test strategy whereby they seek out instances in which the hypothesized property is known or expected be present rather than absent (Klayman & Ha, 1987; see also Kunda, 1990). For example, the question, Am I a capable leader? prompts a biased memory search for instances attesting my leadership skills and not those situations when my leadership capabilities were lacking. After receiving negative feedback, Kunda and Sinclair's research participants should want derogate the source. In essence, they are implicitly asking, What kind of person gave me such negative feedback? Consequently, they recruit relevant beliefs that would discredit the feedback. In contrast, if the feedback that participants received was positive, then they frame the question differently because now the self is bolstered if the source is credible. Murray's participants want be part of a committed and sustaining relationship. The question here is Is my partner loving and committed?, which should encourage the retrieval of positive memories and beliefs about the partner. In each of these cases, the evaluative question is framed in a way that increases the retrieval of hypothesis-consistent evidence. The nature of the evaluative question is also important in understanding how comparisons with other people influence feelings and behavior (Smith, 1981). In contemporary social comparison theory (Suls & Wills, 1991), the two categories of motivated cognition are evident. Self-evaluation involves people making social comparison for the purpose of obtaining accurate assessments of their abilities and opinions. According Festinger (1954), self-evaluation is best achieved by comparing with similar others, although he was ambiguous about what constituted similarity. Over the last 40 years, the similarity hypothesis has received mixed support although a reformulation of the theory (Goethals & Darley, 1977) has been more successful. A second motive, self-enhancement, prompts the selection of comparisons that increase or maintain positive affect, particularly if the self has been threatened. Here, a directional conclusion, borrow Kunda's (1990) phrase, is preferred. The self-enhancement approach social comparison has several variants, but the most influential was proposed by Wills (1981), who argued that people under threat compare with other persons who are worse off feel better. Indeed, in several studies with populations under threat, such as medical patients, participants reported downward comparisons that appeared be used as a means cope with their predicament (e.g., Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman, 1985). There is considerable evidence of social comparisons made in accord with the self-evaluation and self-enhancement motives. However, the empirical literature shows much inconsistency in selection and impact of comparison information (Kruglanski & Mayseless, 1990; Suls & Miller, 1977). Similar others are not always preferred assess one's level of ability. In the case of self-enhancement, there are several em-

GENERAL COMMENTARY article Front. Psychol., 17 October 2012Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00416