Is a chimpanzee conscious? Or your cat or dog? What about a goldfish, prawn, or wasp? Most of us will only begin to waver with goldfish. But scientists and philosophers have often seemed strangely keen to deny a mental life to any animal.
Rene Descartes usually gets the blame for the way we think about animal consciousness. The 17th-century French philosopher lived briefly in St Germain, a suburb of Paris. There, he saw the town’s famed waterwork statues of characters from Greek myth. Intricate hydraulic machinery would cause a figure of the bathing Diana to hide as a visitor approached. A few steps closer and more hydraulic trickery would reveal a fierce, trident-waving Neptune.
These clever statues inspired Descartes to argue that living animals were also just contrivances. Earlier philosophers took the lead. Aristotle had been quite happy to grant animals a sensitive soul, if not a rational one – consciousness, if not cognition. But Descartes said the brain and the body’s nervous system were just a hydraulic network and that animal behavior was purely based on reflexes – there was no mind involved. According to Descartes, only humans possessed the extra component in the midst of all this machinery that could endow the ability to think, speak, and reflect. That component was the soul. Descartes’ idea stuck, partly because it fitted in with Church doctrine. Even scientists felt it was justifiable to regard animals as bundles of reflexes rather than credit them with a consciousness that could not actually be seen or measured.
Inside the animal mind
Descartes’ view of animal consciousness has now been largely rejected because it seems obvious that animals think and feel. Anyone can see the light of intelligent awareness in the eyes of a dolphin, dog, or chimpanzee. However, experts still agree that the animal mind is limited. One answer suggested by philosophers as various as Schopenhauer and Locke is that nirnaJs are conscious, but their consciousness is locked into the present tense. Or, as some psychologists have more recently put it, animals can not think ‘offline. All their responses are associative, being connected to the immediate demands and potentials of the moment.
Watch a cat lazing on a sunny lawn. It is conscious of the bees buzzing, the smells wafting on the breeze, the contented feeling of a full belly. But you probably do not think it is reflecting on its kit teenhood, planning revenge on the old tom next door, or wondering whether it has fish or chicken for supper. The cat is vividly aware of life and ready to respond if something disturbs it. But it does not seem to have an inner mechanism for directing its mind away from the moment to ponder the past or ruminate about the future.
However, these offline capabilities are a part of which psychologists have found that the thought and memory capacities of animals are remarkably similar to humans. For instance, much has been made of the fact that animals lack insight and have to have lessons drummed in reflexively. But even goldfish and toads prove capable of one-shot learning. Toads only make the mistake of snapping at a bumblebee once, and a single electric shock is enough to make a goldfish reluctant to swim toward a corner of a tank. Chimpanzees were once thought to be exceptional because they were capable of making creative leaps of thought – for example, realizing that a crate could be dragged across a floor to serve as a platform to stand on to reach a dangling banana. But then pigeons were also found to be capable of apparently sudden insight on similar set-ups if they were given appropriate training.
Of course, brain size makes a difference: goldfish can remember which way to swim to reach a reward of food for only about ten seconds; pigeons and lizards can remember such information for minutes; apes for hours. Nevertheless, it seems that the general set of mental skills is much the same across the animal kingdom. Even slugs and insects have some degree of memory or learning ability.
What’s it like to be a dolphin?
While the mental abilities of animals are often remarkable, in many respects, animal consciousness is very different from our own. Unlike humans, with their faculties of self-criticism and reflection, animals are thought to live their subjective lives forever in the present, and the present that they inhabit may be very different from human experience. For example, what would it be like to be a dolphin perceiving the world through sonar? Like bats, dolphins emit ultrasonic clicks and build up a picture of their surroundings from the echoes. With their clicks pitched at frequencies of up to 100,000 hertz, dolphins can ‘see’ right through soft structures as if they had ultrasound scanners. Passing a pregnant swimmer, a dolphin would also see the baby wriggling inside. Or what about being able to feel the pressure of the Earth’s magnetic field like a migrating bird? Many birds (as well as mice, dolphins, bees, frogs, and even bacteria) seem able to navigate using an inbuilt compass.
The phenomenal worlds of animals – what it is actually like to sense and perceive as another species – may vary remarkably, but confined to our consciousness, we cannot know what it is like to be a dolphin or what it feels like to be a bird.
How To Read A Cat’s Tail
Cats make more than one hundred different vocal sounds- ten times more than dogs. They also convey a lot of meaning through their swishing tails. Here is how to read some of the signs.
- Tail raised slightly: Cat is interested in something.
- Tail erect, tip-tilted: The cat is friendly with slight reservations.
- Tail fully erect, tip stiff: intense, friendly greeting with no reservations.
- Tail held still, tip twitching: mild irritation.
- Tail swishing violently: Cat about to attack.
- Tail raised and fluffed out: Cat is aggressive.
Ants- A Collective Mind
Individually, an ant is a rather limited creature. But collectively, do ants form a group mine? After all, an ant nest is almost one organism genetically, a single queen living with as many as a million daughters. All those eyes and jaws are linked like brain cells in a network of interactions that can respond to the world with sharp intelligence.
Watch a trail of ants, and you will see they are forever bumping into each other, pausing to touch antennae. In every brief meeting, they exchange information about what they are doing. Their tiny brains then apply some simple rules. If an ant finds it is rarely meeting another eMployed in the same task (or too many others doing the same task), it will switch to a different behavior. So, from nest maintenance to foraging, ants spread themselves out across their territory, doing what needs to be done as if the colony were conscious as a whole.
Deborah Gordon of Stanford University studies Harvester ants in the Arizona desert and has found that colonies develop more intelligence as they mature. A colony sticks to the same sized territory as it grows in number, thereby creating a web of interactions that becomes ever denser and smarter. When Gordon set problems by blocking foraging trails or messing up the nest site with toothpicks, she found that mature colonies were quicker and more reliable in their response. Younger colonies were erratic in their behavior as if they had not quite learned what to do. The older colonies had also discovered how to get along with their neighbors. If foraging trails happened to cross one day, the next day, the ants would head in the opposite direction. But adolescent colonies always returned looking for a fight. The evidence suggests that there is a sort of collective intelligence at work in an ant trail. As a human mind, the trail ‘knows’ the world.
Chickens Have Feelings Too
In one study, scientists tested what chickens really want by making them squeeze through tight gaps in a fence in order to get different things. High on the chicken wish list proved to be a quiet nest box for egg-laying and access to dirt or woodshavings for scratching about in. Surprisingly, chickens were not desperate to rejoin their flock. And when kind-hearted researchers tried to prove that factory-farmed hens ought to have a thicker, more comfortable gauge of wire netting for the flooring of their cages, the birds contradicted them, showing a preference for the old thinner wire.
How To Be a Top Dog In Your Home
Dogs and humans have a long history of more than 100,000 years compared with less than 10,000 years for other domesticated animals. But as former pack animals, dogs need to know where they rank in your family.
Handing over scraps of your dinner to a demanding mutt can be a very bad idea, leading it to think that it is actually a ‘top dog.’ So is giving in when your dog decides to sit in your armchair. But a dog that is relegated to the bottom of the bed or a place at your feet will learn to be happy in this subordinate position. At the edge of the human ‘camp’ is his most natural place. The natural way to stop a dog from barking is to mimic the way a mother wolf silences a noisy cub by grasping its muzzle gently in her jaws and growling a low warning. Wrap a hand over your dog’s muzzle and firmly say’ Quiet’ until it gets the message.
