Fishnition: Developing Models From Cognition Toward Consciousness

A challenge to developing a model for testing animal consciousness is the pull of opposite intuitions. On one extreme, the anthropocentric view holds that consciousness is a highly sophisticated capacity involving self-reflection and conceptual categorization that is almost certainly exclusive to humans. At the opposite extreme, an anthropomorphic view attributes consciousness broadly to any behavior that involves sensory responsiveness. Yet human experience and observation of diverse species suggest that the most plausible case is that consciousness functions between these poles. In exploring the middle ground, we discuss the pros and cons of “high level” approaches such as the dual systems approach. According to this model, System 1 can be thought of as unconscious; processing is fast, automatic, associative, heuristic, parallel, contextual, and likely to be conserved across species. Consciousness is associated with System 2 processing that is slow, effortful, rule-based, serial, abstract, and exclusively human. An advantage of this model is the clear contrast between heuristic and decision-based responses, but it fails to include contextual decision-making in novel conditions which falls in between these two categories. We also review a “low level” model involving trace conditioning, which is a trained response to the first of two paired stimuli separated by an interval. This model highlights the role of consciousness in maintaining a stimulus representation over a temporal span, though it overlooks the importance of attention in subserving and also disrupting trace conditioning in humans. Through a critical analysis of these two extremes, we will develop the case for flexible behavioral response to the stimulus environment as the best model for demonstrating animal consciousness. We discuss a methodology for gauging flexibility across a wide variety of species and offer a case study in spatial navigation to illustrate our proposal. Flexibility serves the evolutionary function of enabling the complex evaluation of changing conditions, where motivation is the basis for goal valuation, and attention selects task-relevant stimuli to aid decision-making processes. We situate this evolutionary function within the Temporal Representation Theory of consciousness, which proposes that consciousness represents the present moment in order to facilitate flexible action.

Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals)

The multidimensional framework to the study of consciousness, which comes as an alternative to a single sliding scale model, offers a set of experimental paradigms for investigating dimensions of animal consciousness, acknowledging the compelling urge for a novel approach. One of these dimensions investigates whether non-human animals can flexibly and spontaneously plan for a future event, and for future desires, without relying on reinforcement learning. This is a critical question since different intentional structures for action in non-human animals are described as served by different neural mechanisms underpinning the capacity to represent temporal properties. And a lack of appreciation of this variety of intentional structures and neural correlates has led many experts to doubt that animals have access to temporal reasoning and to not recognize temporality as a mark of consciousness, and as a psychological resource for their life. With respect to this, there is a significant body of ethological evidence for planning abilities in non-human animals, too often overlooked, and that instead should be taken into serious account. This could contribute to assigning consciousness profiles, across and within species, that should be tailored according to an implemented and expansive use of the multidimensional framework. This cannot be fully operational in the absence of an additional tag to its dimensions of variations: the experience-specificity of consciousness.

The Science of Animal Welfare

This book is intended as a guide for anyone who is interested in animals and how their welfare can be assessed scientifically. It addresses the question of why, despite growing public interest in how animals are treated, it has proved so difficult to arrive at an agreed definition of what ‘animal welfare’ is and it then provides an answer. A definition of animal welfare as ‘health and animals having what they want’ can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions and shows what evidence we need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts an animal’s own point of view at the heart of the assessment of its welfare. The book shows how ‘health and what animals want’ also helps us to make sense of the long and often confusing list of welfare measurements that are now in use, such as ‘stress’ and ‘feel-good hormones’, expressive sounds and gestures, natural behaviour, cognitive bias and stereotypies. Animal sentience (conscious feelings of pleasure and suffering) are discussed in the context of our current knowledge of human and animal consciousness. Finally, the book highlights some key ideas in the relationship between animal welfare science and animal ethics and shows how closely the well-being of humans and that of animals are linked together.

Is absence of evidence of pain ever evidence of absence?

Absence of evidence arguments are indispensable to comparative neurobiology. The absence in a given species of a homologous neural architecture strongly correlated with a type of conscious experience in humans should be able to be taken as a prima facie reason for concluding that the species in question does not have the capacity for that conscious experience. Absence of evidence reasoning is, however, widely disparaged for being both logically illicit and unscientific. This paper argues that these concerns are unwarranted. There is no logical barrier to formulating cogent absence of evidence arguments; indeed, accepting such arguments is part of what it is to be committed to falsifiability as a critical aspect of the scientific method. Absence of evidence arguments can always be blocked, however, by assuming that psychological properties are ‘multiply realizable’. While we take multiple realizability to be highly likely at some level of analysis, we argue that it is question-begging to assume that it exists at every level of analysis, and thus it should not automatically be thought to undermine absence of evidence reasoning in the animal consciousness debate. Using the example of pain and focusing on homologies at the level of information processing tasks, we show how, in the science of consciousness, an absence of evidence might well serve as evidence of absence.

« Comment peut-on être cochon ? » : darwinisme et conscience chez Darrieussecq

The confluence of cognitive science and Darwinian theory has produced a wealth of fascinating research in recent decades, often enthusiastically embraced by the humanities, and given rise to the new disciplines of evolutionary psychology and neurophenomenology. Darrieussecq’s interest in human and non-human cognition makes her work a site of exploration for several issues related to these fields of research. Her characters speculate on the inner lives and perceptual worlds of dogs, cats and insects. The narrative focalization of her story will leap unexpectedly from a human consciousness into that of a sea-lion or a basking shark. And, most famously, in Darrieussecq’s debut novel we follow the narrator’s subjectivity as she metamorphoses between human and pig form and states undecidably in-between, during which process, we gradually realize, it is not only her physical form that is shifting but her mentality as well. This article examines how Darrieussecq’s exploration of animal consciousness and its relation to the human not only serves as a metaphor for intersubjectivity and the unknowable mind of the other, but also offers a meditation on the nature of humanity and of its place within an evolutionary spectrum of differently adapted minds.