Animal minds are conscious (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 20, 2016, 02:40 (3140 days ago) @ dhw

A good discussion of conscious animals:-http://phys.org/news/2016-04-insects-consciousness.html-
"Do bees like the taste of nectar? Does the ant foraging for your crumbs feel better when she finds one?-"Are insects merely tiny robots? Or, in the phrase popularised by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, is there something it is like to be a bee?-***-"It is worth clarifying what we mean when we talk about insect consciousness, since the term consciousness carries a lot of baggage. Everyone agrees that bees can take in environmental information and perform impressive computations on it.-"We want to know something more: whether insects can feel and sense the environment from a first-person perspective. In philosophical jargon, this is sometimes called "phenomenal consciousness". Each of these feel a certain way to us, and they feel like something for the dog too. If that is right, then dogs are conscious, at least in the minimal sense.-"Consciousness is sometimes used to refer to a much more complicated capacity: the ability to self-reflect. That is a rare achievement. Humans may well be the only animals that can become aware that they are aware. Even then, we are mostly just conscious in the more minimal sense, rarely pausing for true self-reflection.
The consciousness of others is a thorny philosophical problem. Our typical handle on consciousness is through observing behaviour. We think babies and dogs feel hungry, in part because they act like we do when we feel hungry.-"Behavioural analogies become harder when we consider animals such as insects, which don't look or act much like us. We might say that a bee is angry when we disturb its hive. But an angry bee doesn't act much like an angry toddler, so it's easy to remain sceptical. Behaviour alone certainly doesn't prove that any animal is conscious.-***-"While insect brains are minute - the largest are far smaller than a grain of rice - new research has shown that they perform the same ancient functions as the human midbrain.-"The insect central complex ties together memory, homeostatic needs and perception in the same integrated way. This integration has the same function as well: to enable effective action selection.-"In the bee, this detailed representation of the animal in space is what allows it to perform remarkable feats of navigation. Thus, while insect brains and human brains could not look more different, they have structures that do the same thing, for the same reason and so support the same kind of first-person perspective.-"That is strong reason to think that insects and other invertebrates are conscious. Their experience of the world is not as rich or as detailed as our experience - our big neocortex adds something to life! But it still feels like something to be a bee.-***-"One important driver of this process is mobility in the environment. Parasitic worms that have lost their ability to freely navigate have also lost the brain structures responsible for the first-person perspective.-"This suggests a close relationship between consciousness and the demands of moving around the world. By clarifying the environmental demands that press animals to evolve the capacity for consciousness, we might thus shed light on the relationship between subjectivity and the external world."-Comment: No question animals have to be aware of their environment and are consciously aware, but they do not have the introspection of humans, the ability to conceptualize. It is a vast difference.