For a naturalist, the problem with accepting consciousness as real is that it is also immaterial, even in an animal like a dog that has a minimal self.
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The dog’s life is easier than human life in some ways; if he isn’t in trouble with humans or other dogs, everything is fine.
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Humans have reason and ethics and other animals don’t, and there is no evidence that these qualities — that shape our societies — simply “evolved.”
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No one knows how animal knowledge of this sort is transmitted. Genetics? Environment? Design in nature? It’s not new and it is still a mystery.
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The “human evolution” narrative that ignores the critical distinction handicaps the thinking of philosopher Hugh Desmond and many others.
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Perhaps sociovirology is an instance of the slow creep of panpsychism in the sciences. But it is early days yet to be sure.
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Given that human consciousness is a Hard Problem in philosophy, we can expect useful discussions to follow — but also a good deal of silliness.
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A 2024 study suggests that T. rex was only as smart as a crocodile, not a chimp. That might seems like a comedown — except that crocs are fairly sharp.
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It will be interesting to see whether other orangutans in the area begin to imitate their new neighbor in using chewed akar kuning leaves to treat wounds.
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The “hippie ape,” it turns out, is yet another product of the human imagination; the bonobo is an animal in nature. It’s best not to confuse the two.
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Their discussion of animal behavior depends wholly on the uniquely human ability to abstract. That ability also radically changes how humans use tools.
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At one point, Southeast Asian ants invaded the sealed Biosphere II project in Arizona (intended for space exploration studies), using it as a honeydew farm.
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It’s no surprise if a wide range of animals understand human contentedness vs. anger. Those are precisely the elements of the mind that we and goats share.
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Terrace attempted to teach infant chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky to form a sentence but conceded defeat. His apparent early successes were traced to human prompting.
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Animal languages deal in emotions and sometimes in basic information but not in ideas. Humans can understand them to the extent that we can follow the emotions.
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In the human sense, cats neither love nor hate neither because for us these emotions are mixed up with the indelible effects of human reason.
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Panpsychism is a faith, like materialism; its assumptions and assertions are not “value-free.” We are likely to be unpacking them for some time.
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The researchers, refreshingly, made clear that they were NOT making unsubstantiable claims about mouse self-awareness; they were studying neural wiring.
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Efforts to relate insect consciousness to the human type are doomed because the key features of human consciousness are abstract thinking and moral choice.
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Octopus information-gathering is fundamentally different from that of intelligent mammals. Are comparisons in intelligence even meaningful then?
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