Far more animals than previously thought likely have consciousness, top scientists say in a new declaration — including fish, lobsters and octopus.
Bees play by rolling wooden balls — apparently for fun. The cleaner wrasse fish appears to recognize its own visage in an underwater mirror. Octopuses seem to react to anesthetic drugs and will avoid settings where they likely experienced past pain.
All three of these discoveries came in the last five years — indications that the more scientists test animals, the more they find that many species may have inner lives and be sentient. A surprising range of creatures have shown evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.
That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.
Nearly 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment, as a flood of research on animal cognition collides with debates over how various species ought to be treated.
No fucking shit… anyone with half a brain and a minimum of empathy already knows that.
Yes, yes, the scientific method doesn’t discriminate between what is and isn’t obvious, but the headline is, as usual, aimed at people with the intellectual capabilities of a 4 year old.
Wasn’t this already obvious?
Well, maybe, but it sure as he’ll isn’t convenient.
Al Gore marvel movie quip
An Inconvenient Sentience
Not to people indoctrinated by Abrahamic religions.
Yes.
We don’t even know what sentience/sapience/whatever is. We have some thoughts, people argue about the definitions, and stuff; but really… it all comes down to… “are they like us”… but we don’t even really know what that means.
So no. It’s not obvious. (Particularly because humans are surprisingly stupid.)
To people who spend a lot of time around animals or even sea creatures, it may be obvious that they’re more like us than most would assume.
To put it another way, humans just aren’t that special. We started from the assumption that we are somehow fundamentally different
We keep finding out that all sorts of animals have language and culture, and it blows my mind that apparently, just about everything seems to have something akin to a name
Denying such things in other animals has been part of a long-standing, mainly Western, push for human exceptionalism
I mean people have been pushing for recognition of this for at least a few thousand years so I’d say yes.
The lengths people are willing to go in self delusion for a burger are astounding though.
Some people are just straight up fine eating beef because they don’t care. Like, we won the food chain, and that’s enough for them
You really said “we won the food chain” like you wouldn’t run screaming from a slightly pissed off badger haha.
What a fucking absurd stance, the school of “if I can do it: it must be fine to do” ethics.
I didn’t say it’s my opinion, you silly goose.
The lack of critical thinking here is insane
Edit: the whole way we won the food chain isnt about standing toe to toe with any animal, we productionized their whole existence.
Beyond that I don’t know how you could know what animals I am or am not afraid of, that’s a pretty silly assumption
Uh huh, I believe you. You’re so tough and smart and strong, bravely debating and owning the libs, casually fighting badgers armed with nothing but your Jordan Peterson body pillow.
To think that Aldous Huxley was known as the last Renaissance man when you were among us all along.
Ok not sure what I’m debating here, is it really a point of argument that some folks are fine with consuming meat? Is it really a point of argument that humans are at the top of the global food chain?
Edit are you just 3 badgers in a trench coat?
the school of “if I can do it: it must be fine to do” ethics
Some people would call this the “law of the jungle”, or the natural state of things.
It’s also not reasonable to assume any one person would run screaming from a badger. People wrestle crocodiles and mountain lions and win.
If anyone thinks that I hope they get hunted by a sadist, are kept as their plaything, and live a long life begging for death.
It’s a completely asinine opinion that absolutely nobody worth giving a modicum of time or respect to maintains. There’s not even any point talking about, it’s like chiming in with the fact that some people think smearing shit on toilet walls is the correct thing to do when discussing how to grow food.
Also anyone who gets defensive about the idea they would run screaming from a moderately pissed off badger has never interacted with a badger and would absolutely run screaming from one.
My first, second, third and fourth thought. I didn’t have a fifth.
Go. Vegan.
Yup. Species is an insane line to justify killing over. It’s not who can breed with whom, or how somebody looks that matters, it’s is there a ‘them’.
Or just enjoy being at the top of the food chain, just don’t morally waffle about it, own it. Be into suffering
The idea that humans are at the top of the food chain is largely disputed. On a global level we are at about the same trophic level as anchovies.
Colloquial usage, as I am here, refers to dominance on an ecosystem, and freedom of menu.
In that way there is nothing close to humans. You.csn eat nearly any creature on the planet, ordered over the internet. Next day if you’re in a rush.
Humans have no widespread predators.
Or find a balance and don’t be edgy for the sake of pissing off vegans
I’m closer to vegan than not, I am targeting people who dance around their actions.
If you eat meat you are complicit in suffering. Don’t hide from that.
but consciousness is so tasty
Give it up. I’m not eating bugs. Intentionally.
Shrimp is bugs though
not surprising, I remember watching spider move when I was a kid and thinking they were obviously intelligent. sure they creep me out but I hate killing them for no reason, same with literally any other living thing
That’s true, spider man was pretty sentient in his movie
Yeah, well I’m still not sorry I put out ant traps.
Edit: The downvoters have clearly never had an ant infestation in their kitchen. It’s not a ‘live and let live’ situation.
Ants are also fairly well documented to be on the level of sophisticated biological robots. Death spirals/ant mills are a common occurrence because of this. There are arguments for some insects but ants are not one of them
That’s not what Kurt Cobain told me.
I’d be tempted to go and say “no shit,” but even the most obvious things have to be proven or tested. How you define consciousness can also change a lot.
Considering that as sentient beings ourselves, we don’t really even understand sentience, it’s kinda bold to assume we’ve got a monopoly on it.
Similarly I wonder how much of the observation is projection. We don’t know what the bee thinks it’s getting out of rolling the ball around, we don’t know that the fish was actually reacting to seeing itself. At some level we’re assuming that’s what’s going on because it makes sense to us.
Humans have a really, really hard time NOT assigning human attributes to every other living thing.
One thing that makes this hypothesis seem possible, is that some researchers are suggesting consciousness is external, and eternal. Meaning all living things are essentially antennae.
That really reeks of “scientists invent God.” And I question the actual motives of any researcher that would suggest such an idea.
Show me the data that suggest that. Describe a test that might prove it.
Source?
This is basic, but there are thousands of lectures, books, and papers on it, going back to the 80’s.
https://youtu.be/Ci2npsJIvFc?si=Vaf2Z9m6MLsbgMjR
Or anything with Donald Hoffman, which there is a ton.
Basically, our brain just handles our cognitive needs, and filters consciousness, which is a fundamental property of the universe. Think what you will, but this is a pretty popular theory in the past decade or so. Among physicists and neurologists alike…
We are limited by our own understanding and imagination, but I don’t know any other explanation for silly little nonproductive activities other than “play”. Is it because it is play, or is it beyond our understanding? We can’t communicate with them, but we can draw parallels between their behaviors and our own natural behaviors.
Will we now treat them as well as other clearly sentient animals like pigs?
There is no way I’m clicking on that link
You might be thinking of Sapience.
Sentience means capable of logic and reason. Bare bones perception qualifies. Sapience means wise or learned. Pigs are both.
Anything being that has a sense of self and other has a level of conscious awareness.
It seems odd to me that this article is framing octopodes as a surprising inclusion. Aren’t they generally known to be some of the most intelligent animals of all?
Yes and no. It has long been known that they are surprisingly intelligent, but the structure of their nervous system is very strange and decentralized which makes it fairly surprising nonetheless.
I heard there’s a theory that they didn’t originate on earth
We have fossil evidence otherwise. Their greatest barrier to developing higher intelligence is that they die after reproduction, so they’ll never have pressures to develop more symbolic thought or pass on knowledge.
Also being underwater would make it very hard to develop technology.
Octopuses are mostly antisocial anyway and wouldn’t want that. Squid, by comparison, use they high intelligence for social interaction but most of it is trying to navigate a social setting where you want to eat as much as you can, mate with your neighbors, and avoid offending your neighbors enough that they eat you. There’s still only so much you can do when you die after a year or two because of a biological time bomb that kills you with sex hormone overload.
H. P. Lovecraft just in absolute shambles in the corner over there.
Lol what’s even a mollusc amirite?
I also think these eukaryotic creatures that fit neatly in evolutionary lines must be… aliens.
In my opinion the idea of animal conscious has been fairly well supported for decades at minimum. There was a certain anti-consciousness orthodoxy in the animal behavior field that held back understanding of this topic. But I mean simple observation of animal behavior and the similar nervous structures surely leave animal consciousness the most likely explanation, even if it’s difficult to definitively prove.
A more interesting question in my mind is whether plants are conscious. This is a question that we truly have no idea how to answer.
The idea that turned me into a vegetarian is the realization that my pets most definitely had personalities, and what is a person if not something with a personality?
I might not be able to have a complex discussion about shared interests with them, but there are plenty of humans you can say the same thing about, and I’m still not going to eat them, or be okay with them being tortured from birth to execution.
I might not be able to have a complex discussion about shared interests with them, but there are plenty of humans you can say the same thing about, and I’m still not going to eat them, or be okay with them being tortured from birth to execution.
Well, I mean…
🧐
so it’s time to stop masturbating with my dog in the room
I could make a very crude joke, but I refuse. You win this time.
They’re conscious, not a prude.
I mean your dog IS just waiting for some “food” to fall on the floor AAAAND I’ll show myself out
I dunno about all that, but I used to have an African fish that would always get the zoomies when I’d come home from work. He’d spit water at me or gravel at the glass to get my attention, and loved playing hide and seek and always brushed up on my hands when I was working on his tank. He never reacted this way to visitors, just me.
Exactly this.
And to get to this you need experience, research, and knowledge.
And trying to explain this to humans in general would take several generations in best case scenario (much less actually doing/changing anything with that knowledge).
Usually anything attacking the doctrine of how extra super special & way more unique than other equally unique species are is meet with severe (auto-?)hostility.
Even without our status in question, just the “threat” of something being slightly less/differently inferior to us is immediately attacked by the vast majority.
And once we decide something is inferior to us it takes extra effort to change the popular belief (like racism between humans as well - just designate some human as non-human & they are considered about as much as billions of yeast bacteria as we are baking bread).
I think the auto-hostility is just hubris. Some people would like to pretend they know everything about everything. So when learning new things they get hostile because, oh no, we found them out.
Especially in today’s environment, I agree, hubris and greed.
This raises some interesting questions. The premise of these scientists is that consciousness can be quantified empirically. Yet many of the tests described in this article can be passed by machines. Does that mean that the scientists who signed the declaration consider some smart devices to demonstrate consciousness? And what are the implications?
These arguments never make much sense because there’s no broadly accepted philosophical consensus on what sentience is.
I agree with this. I’ve read the statement that the scientists wrote and I honestly could not figure out what they are trying to say. I just don’t see how any of the tests they reference would challenge the idea that we don’t know how to define or test consciousness.
Sentience is not necessarily the same thing but its in a similar place. It may be possible to test depending on the definition.
I’d hazard the guess they don’t, and it’s easy to justify it - our current AIs don’t have the internal aparatus needed to develop counsciousness (yet). They’re way too simple and way too straightforward to be intelligent, whether intelligence is an emergent property or a fundamental structure.
Seems like a strong argument that consciousness cannot be determined by testing behaviors.
True, you can’t test a literal rock and expect the result to be telling of counsciousness. Good thing the researchers aren’t solely determining it by testing behaviour, and instead selected a group in which emergent intelligence is one of the probable phenomena.
Is emergent intelligence the scientific definition of consciousness? The article seems to be describing something else.
Is emergent intelligence the scientific definition of consciousness?
There exists no practical or effective difference.
