Animal Consciousness Research Articles

Why the recognition of sentience is so important for animal welfare

Rowan et al. (2022) provide a useful summary of the history and development of the philosophical, public, and legal recognition of animal sentience and its importance in improving the welfare of animals. Here I argue for the incorporation of the precautionary principle in sentience recognition, and the wider significance of sentience recognition to the current climate, biodiversity and human health crises.

Emotional component of pain perception in the medicinal leech?

Crump et al. have provided a series of criteria to assess animal sentience that is focused on the perception of pain, which is known to have both sensory and emotional components. They also provide a qualitative scoring system to assess data that address the eight criteria and apply this paradigm to decapod crustaceans. The criteria laid out have the potential to be applied to other invertebrates typically thought to have sensory response to tissue damage, but no emotional component to pain perception.

Overcoming inertia to deliver sentience policy commensurate with sentience science

Rowan et al’s target article makes clear that meaningful change in policy and practice to protect animals has failed to progress in lockstep with scientific understanding of their sentience and needs. The underlying causes for inertia in political and practical progress for animals in the UK context are multi-faceted and complex, including economic forces; lack of cross-departmental accountability for animal welfare; and challenges where it suits conservation scientists to dismiss or downgrade the impacts of management decisions on individual animals. All of these influences and more must be understood and addressed if we are to deliver meaningful and timely protections for sentient animals.

Sentience politics : a fishy perspective

The plight of fishes has almost certainly got worse since Bentham (1789) coined the phrase “The question is not Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but Can they suffer?” Despite the fact that fishes are increasingly recognised as sentient animals worthy of protection under animal welfare legislation in many countries around the world, fishing practices are almost universally exempt activities. The human population continues to grow, and, surprisingly, per capita intake of fish is still increasing (FAO 2020). The source of this fish is not wild stocks (catches of which have remained more or less stagnant for decades after we pillaged the oceans), but rather from a huge increase in aquaculture production. Aquaculture is currently experiencing a rapid industrialisation phase reminiscent of that seen in terrestrial food production systems over the last century. There is an urgent need for the animal welfare developments of the past 50 years that were established for terrestrial food production systems to be applied to aquaculture. Given these facts, one alarming question presents itself: Who is looking after the welfare of fishes in the context of commercial fishing and aquaculture?

Fishnition: Developing Models From Cognition Toward Consciousness.

A challenge to developing a model for testing animal consciousness is the pull of opposite intuitions. On one extreme, the anthropocentric view holds that consciousness is a highly sophisticated capacity involving self-reflection and conceptual categorization that is almost certainly exclusive to humans. At the opposite extreme, an anthropomorphic view attributes consciousness broadly to any behavior that involves sensory responsiveness. Yet human experience and observation of diverse species suggest that the most plausible case is that consciousness functions between these poles. In exploring the middle ground, we discuss the pros and cons of “high level” approaches such as the dual systems approach. According to this model, System 1 can be thought of as unconscious; processing is fast, automatic, associative, heuristic, parallel, contextual, and likely to be conserved across species. Consciousness is associated with System 2 processing that is slow, effortful, rule-based, serial, abstract, and exclusively human. An advantage of this model is the clear contrast between heuristic and decision-based responses, but it fails to include contextual decision-making in novel conditions which falls in between these two categories. We also review a “low level” model involving trace conditioning, which is a trained response to the first of two paired stimuli separated by an interval. This model highlights the role of consciousness in maintaining a stimulus representation over a temporal span, though it overlooks the importance of attention in subserving and also disrupting trace conditioning in humans. Through a critical analysis of these two extremes, we will develop the case for flexible behavioral response to the stimulus environment as the best model for demonstrating animal consciousness. We discuss a methodology for gauging flexibility across a wide variety of species and offer a case study in spatial navigation to illustrate our proposal. Flexibility serves the evolutionary function of enabling the complex evaluation of changing conditions, where motivation is the basis for goal valuation, and attention selects task-relevant stimuli to aid decision-making processes. We situate this evolutionary function within the Temporal Representation Theory of consciousness, which proposes that consciousness represents the present moment in order to facilitate flexible action.

Accuracy of Canine vs. Human Emotion Identification: Impact of Dog Ownership and Belief in Animal Mind

Abstract Humans are adept at extrapolating emotional information from the facial expressions of other humans but may have difficulties identifying emotions in dogs. This can increase risk for compromised dog and human welfare. Experience with dogs, and beliefs in animal minds, may influence interspecies emotional communication, yet limited research has investigated these variables. In this study, participants (n = 122 adults) were asked to identify human and dog emotional facial expressions (happiness, fearfulness, anger/aggression) through an online experimental emotion recognition task. Experience with dogs (through dog ownership and duration of current dog ownership), emotion attribution (through beliefs about animal mind), and demographics were also measured. Results showed that fear and happiness were more easily identified in human faces, whereas aggression was more easily identified in dog faces. Duration of current dog ownership, age, and gender identity did not relate to accuracy scores, but current dog owners were significantly better at identifying happiness in dog faces than non-dog owners. Dog ownership and duration of ownership related to increased beliefs about, and confidence in, the emotional ability of dogs. Additionally, belief in animal sentience was positively correlated with accuracy scores for identifying happiness in dogs. Overall, these exploratory findings show that adult humans, particularly current dog owners and those who believe in the emotionality of dogs, can accurately identify some basic emotions in dogs but may be more skilled at identifying positive than negative emotions. The findings have implications for preventing negative human-animal interactions through intervention strategies that target animal emotionality.

La fonction symbolique chez Trần Đức Thảo

The following study will discuss the notion of symbolic function in Trần Đức Thảo’s (1917-1993) Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951). According to the author, the symbolic function is an important step in the evolution of animal consciousness: the lived experience of the organism is no longer felt in the internal flow of consciousness, but rather is communicated to others by the behavior. After briefly describing how the symbolic function results from a particular physiological mechanism of outlined actions and nervous sketches, we will deal with the semiotic structure of symbols: the repressed sketched act becomes the expression of the outline of the whole uncompleted behavior that has been inhibited at the level of the nervous system (which Trần Đức Thảo calls “meaning”). This work also interprets Trần Đức Thảo’s semiology in the context of the scientific and philosophical debates of the 1930s and 1940s.

Pakistan's Snow Leopards.

The Snow Leopard and the Goat. Hussain, S. 2019. University of Washington Press, Seattle, U.S.A. xix+ 217 pp. US$30.00 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-295-74657-9. Resolving pressures on wildlife requires local support, and that generally comes down to economics. In the case of the mountainous regions of Pakistan, trophy hunting of markhor (Capra falconeri) and ibex (Capra ibex), plus compensation of pastoralists for predation on domestic animals by snow leopards (Panthera uncia), are helping to reduce the loss of wildlife. Over the past 20 years, the author of The Snow Leopard and the Goat has been actively involved in an innovative compensation scheme, whereby about half the funds come from the herdsmen themselves as an insurance premium, and the other half from external sources (including, before 2001 tourist income). He has also studied snow leopards, concluding that numbers in Pakistan have been stable at 300–400 over the past 20 years and form perhaps 5% of the world's population. He recognizes that these numbers are uncertain and controversial. Despite 1400 papers and reports on the snow leopard over the past 40 years, the species is exceptionally hard to study. Nevertheless, those 1400 contributions demonstrate intense interest in conserving the snow leopard. With so many organizations involved, conflicts are rife, especially over competition for funds and how they should be used. As part of the collateral, we may be moving to increasing the resentment of pastoralists to conservation organizations, which wish to impose restrictions on land use. This book offers no strong solutions, but traces the history up to where we are now in an engaging and well-written account, straddling anthropology, biology, and sociology. Why do we care so much about conserving the snow leopard? Respect for the snow leopard in Pakistan traces through its religious past, including the locally extinct Bon religion, which sees sentience in high animals aligned with those of humans. British hunters in the 19th and early 20th centuries wanted to hunt snow leopards (even if they mostly lamented their inability to get a shot in at such an elusive species). We would like future generations to be able to see them. But the Global Snow Leopard Forum in October 2013, which has defined the past 8 years of debate, emphasized both the snow leopard and its habitat. The meeting was designated as “an international effort to save the snow leopard and conserve high-mountain ecosystems.” Large predators may aid conservation by being umbrella species, which require large intact habitats to persist (Caro, 2003). A second justification now comes from the demonstrable role of large predators in limiting herbivore populations; there are many examples where predator removal generated trophic cascades and habitat degradation (Estes et al., 2011). The author notes the above points, but this book is more about people and the snow leopard. The artificially high density of domestic animals grazing in the summer months clearly causes much habitat degradation, probably more than any trophic cascade could. I am most familiar with the scene in Himachal Pradesh, India, where the total number of livestock grazed at high elevations in the summer is increasing as lowland villagers’ wealth increases such that they can afford to send more animals out over the summer months (see also Namgail et al., 2007 and Joshi, 2020). The increase is coupled with technological advances, such as coordination through the use of mobile phones, that enable more efficient use of grazing lands. Given that impacts are high, the ultimate solution must surely require a reduction in pastoralism. In Pakistan, Hussain suggests that as people get richer and less interested in the hard life of pastoralism, this livelihood may already be declining. Ironically, he notes that livestock, which provided 70% of the snow leopard's prey in a study he was involved in, help maintain snow leopard populations. Further, trophy hunting may have increased markhor and ibex populations, but it has also contributed to vilification of the snow leopard for the wild animals it consumes. Nothing is ever straightforward.

Beastly Modernisms: The Question of Animal Speech and Psychology in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

This essay analyses the ways in which James Joyce and Virginia Woolf addressed from a very early stage key issues related to contemporary posthumanist theories such as the question of animal speech and psychology. Both Joyce’s description of human-animal encounters in Ulysses and Woolf’s depiction of a sentient animal subject in Flush: A Biography at first present, and then subvert, the idea of the use of language as evidence of a human surpassing of the animal. By challenging preconceived notions of species distinctions, these authors ultimately decenter the human to focus instead on the centrality of animal subjectivity and sensory experience. While the question of a sharp divide between human and nonhuman animals along the axis of speech can be traceable to the anthropocentric tradition of western humanism and not least to such a possible source as Cervantes (whose novella “The Dialogue of the Dogs” is listed as part of both Joyce’s Trieste library and the library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf), the idea of expanding the typically modernist focus on inner life by also including other forms of subjectivity may have derived from the coeval, burgeoning fields of zoology, ethology and comparative psychology. Drawing from these sources and popular areas of knowledge which formed part of the cultural climate of the time, both Joyce and Woolf explore cross-species intersubjectivity in ways that shift the terms of representation away from anthropocentric views in order to affirm, blur and deny the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

Balancing Prediction and Surprise: A Role for Active Sleep at the Dawn of Consciousness?

The brain is a prediction machine. Yet the world is never entirely predictable, for any animal. Unexpected events are surprising, and this typically evokes prediction error signatures in mammalian brains. In humans such mismatched expectations are often associated with an emotional response as well, and emotional dysregulation can lead to cognitive disorders such as depression or schizophrenia. Emotional responses are understood to be important for memory consolidation, suggesting that positive or negative ‘valence’ cues more generally constitute an ancient mechanism designed to potently refine and generalize internal models of the world and thereby minimize prediction errors. On the other hand, abolishing error detection and surprise entirely (as could happen by generalization or habituation) is probably maladaptive, as this might undermine the very mechanism that brains use to become better prediction machines. This paradoxical view of brain function as an ongoing balance between prediction and surprise suggests a compelling approach to study and understand the evolution of consciousness in animals. In particular, this view may provide insight into the function and evolution of ‘active’ sleep. Here, we propose that active sleep – when animals are behaviorally asleep but their brain seems awake – is widespread beyond mammals and birds, and may have evolved as a mechanism for optimizing predictive processing in motile creatures confronted with constantly changing environments. To explore our hypothesis, we progress from humans to invertebrates, investigating how a potential role for rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in emotional regulation in humans could be re-examined as a conserved sleep function that co-evolved alongside selective attention to maintain an adaptive balance between prediction and surprise. This view of active sleep has some interesting implications for the evolution of subjective awareness and consciousness in animals.

Peirce’s legacy for contemporary consciousness studies, the emergence of consciousness from qualia, and its evanescence in habits

Abstract The paper argues that contemporary consciousness studies can profit from Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of consciousness. It confronts mainstream tendencies in contemporary consciousness studies, including those which consider consciousness as an unsolvable mystery, with Peirce’s phenomenological approach to consciousness. Peirce’s answers to the following contemporary issues are presented: phenomenological consciousness and the qualia, consciousness as self-controlled agency of humans, self-control and self-reflection, consciousness and language, self-consciousness and introspection, consciousness and the other, consciousness of nonhuman animals, and the question of a quasi-consciousness of the physical universe. A detailed account of Peirce’s three modes of consciousness is presented: (1) primisense, qualisense or feeling-consciousness, (2) altersense (consciousness of the other), and (3) medisense, the consciousness of cognition, thought, and reasoning. In contrast to consciousness studies that establish a rather sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious states of mind, Peirce adopts the principle of synechism, the theory of continuity. For him, consciousness is a matter of degree. An important difference between Peirce’s concept of qualia and current theories of qualia in human consciousness is discussed. The paper shows how consciousness, according to Peirce, emerges from unconscious qualia and vanishes into equally unconscious habits. It concludes with a study of the roles of qualia, habit, and self-control in Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular in qualisigns and symbols, and the question of signs as quasi-conscious agents in semiosis.

Enhancing Legal Protection of Stray Animals Welfare Through Society Intervention And Enforcement in Malaysia

The plight of strays is one of the most visible animal welfare issues in the world today. Stray animals can be seen as a nuisance and threatening public health through the spread of diseases and the environment. Nevertheless, stray animals also may experience poorer welfare themselves through a lack of resources, such as shelter, food and water and exposure to cruelty. Therefore, an evaluative study in legal perspective on the protection of the welfare of stray animals is imperative. Generally, the Malaysian law in animal welfare is clear in protecting them from any kinds of cruelty as well as proper humane treatment. However, the protection received by stray animals under the current animal protection regime is seen as inadequate as the increasing numbers of cases reported since the Animal Welfare Act 2015 came into force. Hence, it is felt that the lack of clear guidelines in the enforcement concerning stray animals has resulted in their welfare receiving insufficient protection. This study utilizes doctrinal and non-doctrinal legal research techniques. In complementing the doctrinal discussions, various valuable insights in understanding the law and the practices were adopted. This study provides possible suggestions to enhance solutions in protection of the welfare of stray animals in Malaysia. By using information from current developments in philosophy concerning animal welfare, with references to international instruments and comparing it with the domestic elements of animal protection, this study considers measures and possible ways to enhance protection of the welfare of stray animals in Malaysia. The research suggests that Malaysia should consider incorporating references to animal sentience and the principles in promoting kindness towards animals. Most importantly, this survey urges the government, local authorities and public to improve their commitment through legal intervention to better enforce in protecting the welfare of stray animals.

The Facts That We Have Been Mistaken About Our Minds, Language, and Octopuses; “Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness”

To date, we have made inferences on the behavior and mind of humans and animals from the perspective of humans, or for the sake of familiarity, vertebrates. The book, “Other Minds; The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness” by Peter Godfrey-Smith makes us realize how erroneous preconceived notions could be, and presents a novel perspective on the results of evolution. Through-out this book, readers will learn about the characteristics of the nervous system, behavior, and habits of cephalopods, which include oc-topuses. Through this book, readers will gain a new perspective on the embodiment, minds, nervous systems, consciousness, and soci-ality of humans and animals. Furthermore, the book will provide the imaginary experience of swimming in “Octopolis” inside the ocean with the author.

Multiple Routes to Animal Consciousness: Constrained Multiple Realizability Rather Than Modest Identity Theory.

The multiple realizability thesis (MRT) is an important philosophical and psychological concept. It says any mental state can be constructed by multiple realizability (MR), meaning in many distinct ways from different physical parts. The goal of our study is to find if the MRT applies to the mental state of consciousness among animals. Many things have been written about MRT but the ones most applicable to animal consciousness are by Shapiro in a 2004 book called The Mind Incarnate and by Polger and Shapiro in their 2016 work, The Multiple Realization Book. Standard, classical MRT has been around since 1967 and it says that a mental state can have very many different physical realizations, in a nearly unlimited manner. To the contrary, Shapiro’s book reasoned that physical, physiological, and historical constraints force mental traits to evolve in just a few, limited directions, which is seen as convergent evolution of the associated neural traits in different animal lineages. This is his mental constraint thesis (MCT). We examined the evolution of consciousness in animals and found that it arose independently in just three animal clades—vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod mollusks—all of which share many consciousness-associated traits: elaborate sensory organs and brains, high capacity for memory, directed mobility, etc. These three constrained, convergently evolved routes to consciousness fit Shapiro’s original MCT. More recently, Polger and Shapiro’s book presented much the same thesis but changed its name from MCT to a “modest identity thesis.” Furthermore, they argued against almost all the classically offered instances of MR in animal evolution, especially against the evidence of neural plasticity and the differently expanded cerebrums of mammals and birds. In contrast, we argue that some of these classical examples of MR are indeed valid and that Shapiro’s original MCT correction of MRT is the better account of the evolution of consciousness in animal clades. And we still agree that constraints and convergence refute the standard, nearly unconstrained, MRT.

What if… Sponges Originated 890 Million Years Ago? On the Emergence of Some Precursors of Animal Sentience

What if… Sponges Originated 890 Million Years Ago? On the Emergence of Some Precursors of Animal Sentience

Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals).

The multidimensional framework to the study of consciousness, which comes as an alternative to a single sliding scale model, offers a set of experimental paradigms for investigating dimensions of animal consciousness, acknowledging the compelling urge for a novel approach. One of these dimensions investigates whether non-human animals can flexibly and spontaneously plan for a future event, and for future desires, without relying on reinforcement learning. This is a critical question since different intentional structures for action in non-human animals are described as served by different neural mechanisms underpinning the capacity to represent temporal properties. And a lack of appreciation of this variety of intentional structures and neural correlates has led many experts to doubt that animals have access to temporal reasoning and to not recognize temporality as a mark of consciousness, and as a psychological resource for their life. With respect to this, there is a significant body of ethological evidence for planning abilities in non-human animals, too often overlooked, and that instead should be taken into serious account. This could contribute to assigning consciousness profiles, across and within species, that should be tailored according to an implemented and expansive use of the multidimensional framework. This cannot be fully operational in the absence of an additional tag to its dimensions of variations: the experience-specificity of consciousness.

Recognising sentience in animals.

Recognising sentience in animals.

Ethics, Experimentalism, and Hybrid Purpose: Navigating Science and the Military in Star Trek: Discovery

Abstract In “Context Is for Kings,” “The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry,” and “Choose Your Pain,” three season one episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, the hybrid nature of Starfleet becomes apparent when its scientists come into conflict with its soldiers. The order to treat a potentially sentient tardigrade-like creature as a military resource, subject to what is essentially slavery and vivisection, makes scientific ethics subject to strategic value. In each episode, a separate pairing between scientist and soldier develops, which both critiques the competing philosophies and acts as a metaphor for historical conflicts of this kind.

Should we Ascribe Capabilities to Species and Ecosystems? A Critical Analysis of Ecocentric Versions of the Capabilities Approach

Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is today one of the most influential theories of justice. In her earlier works on the capabilities approach, Nussbaum only applies it to humans, but in later works she extends the capabilities approach to include sentient animals. Contrary to Nussbaum’s own view, some scholars, for example, David Schlosberg, Teea Kortetmäki and Daniel L. Crescenzo, want to extend the capabilities approach even further to include collective entities, such as species and ecosystems. Though I think we have strong reasons for preserving ecosystems and species within the capabilities approach, there are several problems with ascribing capabilities to them, especially if we connect it with the view that species and ecosystems are subjects of justice. These problems are partly a consequence of the fact that an ascription of capabilities to species and ecosystems needs to be based on an overlapping consensus between different comprehensive doctrines, in accordance with the framework of political liberalism on which the capabilities approach builds. First, the ascription of capabilities to species and ecosystems presupposes the controversial standpoint that they are objectively existing entities. Second, the ascription of capabilities to ecosystems and species and the view that they are subjects of justice is justified by claiming that they have integrity and agency, but these characteristics have different meanings when applied to collective entities and humans, respectively. Third, the view that species and ecosystems are subjects of justice seems to require the controversial assumption that they have interests of their own, which differ from the interests of the sentient beings that are part of them. However, even if we do not ascribe capabilities to species and ecosystems and regard them as subjects of justice, there are still strong reasons to protect them within the capabilities approach, as the preservation of ecosystems and species is an important precondition for many human and animal capabilities.

A Test of ‘Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People’

Abstract Many people believe that animals possess moral status, but human beings possess higher moral status than animals. To try to identify a theoretical basis for this view, Robert Nozick proposed Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People. The present manuscript evaluates Nozick’s proposal by identifying the tradeoffs in welfare that it permits in medical research with animals and assessing whether those tradeoffs are indeed permissible. This analysis suggests that at least some deontological side constraints apply to the treatment of sentient animals, hence, Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People is mistaken. Because Nozick’s proposal represents a prominent attempt to provide a theoretical basis for the common belief that human beings possess higher moral status than animals, this conclusion is noteworthy in its own right. Moreover, by granting equal moral weight to the interests of animals, but reserving deontological side constraints for human beings, Utilitarianism for Animals, Kantianism for People offers one of the more plausible bases for the claim that there are degrees of moral status among those who matter morally. The manuscript thus ends by considering the implications of the present analysis for the possibility that moral status comes in degrees.