Do animals have consciousness?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Reason is the prerogative of man. Everyone agrees with this. But how difficult it is to deny our smaller brothers the presence of, if not reason, then consciousness. We tend to "humanize" our pets - cats, dogs, horses, we see in them a kind of simplified semblance of ourselves, we feel that they also have emotions, we see that they understand our words, we attribute to them such qualities as quick wit and cunning.

What does science think about this?

It turns out that for science the presence of at least higher consciousness in animals is one of the most difficult and debatable issues. Why? First, because we cannot ask cats or horses themselves what they really think, feel, understand how they make a choice. And are all these actions inherent in them in principle? In human terms, of course.

Secondly, in order to conduct a scientific search, you need to know exactly what to look for. If we are looking for consciousness, then there is no unambiguous generally accepted answer to the question of what human consciousness is. In other words, you need to find a black cat in a dark room. If we go not from behavior, but, for example, from a certain physiological similarity between humans and other mammals, in particular from the similarity of the structure of the brain and the nervous system, then this is also a shaky path, since it is not known exactly, even on the example of a person, how exactly mental and neurophysiological processes.

In the mirror is me

Nevertheless, the question of the presence of certain forms of consciousness in animals is so interesting and important for understanding the nature of living things that science simply cannot give up trying to figure out at least something. For this, in order not to delve into problems of a general philosophical nature, this question is divided into several components. It can be assumed that the possession of consciousness presupposes, in particular, not just receiving sensory information from the senses, but also storing them in memory, and then comparing them with momentary reality.

Matching experience with reality allows choices to be made. This is how human consciousness works, and you can try to find out if it works the same way in animals. Another part of the question is self-awareness. Does the animal recognize itself as a separate being, does it understand what it looks like from the outside, does it “think” about its place among other creatures and objects?

One of the approaches to clarifying the question of self-awareness was outlined by the American biopsychologist Gordon Gallup. They were offered the so-called mirror test. Its essence lies in the fact that a certain mark is applied to the animal's body (for example, during sleep), which can only be seen in a mirror. Next, the animal is presented with a mirror and its behavior is observed. If, after looking at its reflection, it becomes interested in a foreign mark and, for example, tries to throw it off, then the animal understands that a) it sees itself and b) imagines its “correct” appearance.

Such studies have been carried out for several decades, and during this time amazing results have been obtained. Gorillas and chimpanzees recognized themselves in the mirror, which is probably not so surprising. Positive results have been obtained for dolphins and elephants, which is more interesting, especially in the case of the latter. But, as it turned out, birds representing the family of corvids, especially magpies, find the mark on themselves. In birds, as you know, the brain lacks the neocortex, the new cortex responsible for higher nervous functions. It turns out that for some kind of self-awareness these very higher nervous functions are not required.

Ass ain't no fool

The popular belief about parrots is that birds, obeying instinct, only mindlessly imitate the sounds they hear. However, this opinion has long been questioned. The American zoopsychologist Irene Pepperberg contributed to the improvement of the parrots' reputation. For thirty years, she experimented with the gray African parrot Alex, bought at a regular pet store.

According to a scientific paper published by Dr. Pepperberg in the late 90s, the bird was able not only to distinguish and identify colors and objects, but also demonstrated logical thinking skills. Alex had a vocabulary of 150 units, and also uttered whole phrases, and he did it quite meaningfully, that is, he named objects, answered questions "yes" or no. " In addition, the parrot possessed skills of mathematical calculation and even, in the opinion of the learned lady, mastered the concept of "zero". The concepts of “more”, “less”, “the same”, “different”, “above” and “below” were available to the bird.

Few nerve cells

But what about memory and comparison of previous experience with reality? It turns out that this ability is by no means only the prerogative of humans or higher mammals. A group of scientists from the universities of Toulouse and Canberra conducted the famous experiment with insects - honey bees. The bees needed to find their way out of the maze, at the end of which a delicacy awaited them - sugar syrup. The maze contained many Y-shaped forks, where the “correct” turn was marked with a spot of a certain color.

Having trained to fly through the familiar labyrinth and find the desired path, the bees miraculously remembered that, for example, blue means a turn to the right. When the insects were launched into another, unfamiliar labyrinth, it turned out that they were perfectly oriented there, "taking out" the correlation of color and direction from their memory.

Bees not only lack a neocortex - their nerve center consists of a very dense cluster of interconnected neurons, there are only a million of them, compared to a hundred billion neurons in the human brain, and human memory is associated with a complex thought process. Thus, evolution shows that it is capable of realizing such a complex function as making a decision based on comparing reality with an abstract symbol, on a very modest nervous substrate.

I remember what I remember

Experiments with bees, with all the amazing results, are unlikely to convince anyone that consciousness is inherent in insects. The so-called meta-consciousness, that is, the consciousness of consciousness, is one of the important signs of the presence of consciousness in a person. A person not only remembers something, but he remembers what he remembers, not just thinks, but thinks what he is thinking. Experiments to uncover metacognition or metamame have also taken place in the recent past. Initially, such experiments were carried out on pigeons, but they did not bring convincing results.

Then, using a similar methodology, American researcher Robert Hampton decided to test rhesus monkeys and published the results of his work in 2001.

The essence of the experiment was as follows. At first, the monkeys were offered the simplest exercise. The experimental animal got the opportunity to get a treat by pressing on the image of a certain characteristic figure on the touch screen. Then the task became more difficult. Macaques were offered a choice of pressing two figures on the screen. One figure meant "start the test." After pressing, four figures appeared on the screen, one of which was already familiar to the animal from the previous stage of the experiment. If the macaque remembered what exactly it was, then it could click on it and again get a tasty treat. Another option is to drop the test and click on the adjacent shape. In this case, you could also get a delicacy, but not so tasty.

If after the first stage of the experiment only a few tens of seconds passed, both macaques boldly chose the test, found the desired figure and enjoyed their meal. After more time (two to four minutes), one of the macaques ceased to be interested in the dough altogether and was content with less tasty food.

Another still took the test, but found the right figure with difficulty, making many mistakes. To test whether some other factor other than memory itself affects macaques' decision-making, Hampton conducted a test experiment. From the figures proposed for the test, the correct one was removed altogether. Under these conditions, one macaque, having tried a new test, did not choose it again, the other did try, but the number of refusals increased.

The results of the experiments showed that rhesus monkeys have a metamory, albeit in a very imperfect form. When choosing a test shortly after the first experiment, they remembered that they had memorized the correct figure. After more time passed, one monkey simply resigned himself to the fact that he had forgotten the desired drawing, the other "thought" that he would still remember, but made mistakes. The exclusion of a figure once remembered from the test became the reason for the loss of interest in him. Thus, the presence of mental mechanisms was established in monkeys, which were previously considered only a sign of a developed human consciousness. In addition, from metacognition, meta-memory, as you might guess, is a close path to the feeling of oneself as a subject of thinking, that is, to the feeling of "I".

Rat empathy

In search of elements of consciousness in the animal kingdom, they often point to the neurophysiological community of man and other creatures. One example is the presence of so-called mirror neurons in the brain. These neurons are fired both when performing a certain action, and when observing how the same action is performed by another creature. Mirror neurons are found not only in humans and primates, but also in more primitive creatures, including birds.

These brain cells are not fully understood, and many different functions are attributed to them, for example, a significant role in learning. It is also believed that mirror neurons serve as the basis for empathy, that is, the feeling of empathy for the emotional state of another being without losing understanding of the external origin of this experience.

And now, recent experiments have shown that empathy can be inherent not only in humans or primates, but even … in rats. In 2011, the University of Chicago Medical Center conducted an experiment with two experimental animals. The rats were inside the box, but one of them moved freely, and the other was placed in a tube, which, of course, did not allow the animal to move freely. Observations have shown that when the "free" rat was left alone in the box, it showed much less activity than when the "sufferer" was next to it.

It was obvious that the constrained state of the tribesman did not leave the rat indifferent. Moreover, compassion prompted the animal to act. After several days of "suffering," the free rat learned to open the valve and free another rat from captivity. True, at first the opening of the valve was preceded by some time of thought, but at the end of the experiments, as soon as it got into the box with the rat sitting in the tube, the "free" rat immediately rushed to the rescue.

Amazing facts related to the discovery of elements of consciousness in a wide variety of living beings are not only valuable for science, but also raise questions of bioethics.

Brothers in Consciousness

In 2012, three prominent American neuroscientists - David Edelman, Philip Lowe and Christoph Koch - released a declaration following a special scientific conference at the University of Cambridge. The Declaration, which became known as the Cambridge, received a title that can be loosely translated into Russian as Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals.

This document summarized all the latest research in the field of neurophysiology in humans and other living things. One of the central points of the declaration was the statement that the neural substrate of emotions and experiences is not exclusively in the neocortex.

The example of birds that do not have a new crust shows that parallel evolution is capable of developing elements of a complex psyche on a different basis, and the nervous processes associated with emotions and cognition in birds and mammals are much more similar than was previously thought. The declaration also mentioned the results of "mirror experiments" with birds, and argued that even the neurophysiological nature of sleep in birds and mammals can be recognized as similar.

The Cambridge Declaration was perceived in the world as a manifesto, as a call to reconsider the attitude of man towards living things, including those that we eat or which we use for laboratory experiments. This, of course, is not about giving up meat or biological experiments, but rather about treating animals in terms of their more complex mental organization than previously thought. On the other hand, all the data referred to by the authors of the declaration do not make the question of the nature of human consciousness clearer.

Feeling its uniqueness, we find that one or the other of its elements are scattered in the world of the living and we have no monopoly on them. Ascribing "human" qualities to our pets, we, of course, often wishful thinking, but nevertheless, in this case, it is better to be a little delusional than to hurt the feelings of "lesser brothers" with cruelty.