2023-05-14 21:11:02
Consciousness is the ability to experience the world. Sensations provided by the senses, emotions, thoughts, and volitions are examples of conscious experiences. And this ranges from seeing the blue sky or smelling a rose to feeling pain or joy.
But who is aware? I am, of that I am sure. The rest of the human beings have a very similar behavior to mine and are part of the same species. Therefore, I see no reason to say that they do not experience the world in the same way that I do.
This argument can easily be extended to other mammals. We are all closely related, have very similar brains, bodies, and even behaviors. Why then would we deny that they too are conscious?
Saying that a dog is a dog simply means that not only does its brain process visual information, but it also ve; that not only processes information related to a wound, but also feel pain. Anyone who owns a dog knows the emotion so intense that feel when its owner comes home after a day’s work. The word to feel refers to conscious experience.
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Birds and sentient fish
Again we can make a similar leap and grant the ability to experience the world to all vertebrates. Or at least many of them. Some birds (such as crows or parrots) They have a higher density of neurons than the human brain.They present very complex behaviors and show great intelligence.
In the Cambridge Declaration of 2012a group of neuroscientists who are experts in consciousness crystallized a consensus by stating that, at a minimum, all mammals and birds are conscious.
It would not be difficult to go further and grant this power to other vertebrates such as fish. There are even indications that some might be self-aware, a type of experience that consists of feeling that the individual constitutes a being independent of the environment and other beings. Before this perception was only considered present in a handful of animals considered by some as “superior”.
The jump to the crabs, the bumblebees, the octopuses… and the plants?
The next step is more difficult to take. It is a serious blow to human self-esteem to grant invertebrates something that just a few decades ago was considered exclusive to our species. However, there is evidence indicating that crustaceans such as the crabsinsects like bumblebees and cephalopods like the octopuses they also have the ability to experience the world. Specifically, to feel pain.
In a famous experiment, a group of researchers chose the hermit crab as the object of study, which uses various types of shells for shelter, preferring some over others. The scientists inflicted electric shocks on the shell of the crustacean and saw how long it took for the crab to leave it.
When the animal was protected by a shell that it did not like, it only endured a few shocks. But if he found himself in one of his favorite “houses,” he would endure them over and over again, refusing to leave it.
It is true that flight behavior in response to a painful stimulus does not imply awareness. For example, when we pick up a cup that is on fire, a reflex occurs: we drop it before it starts to burn. There has been behavior in the absence of awareness. Is this not what we observe in the hermit crab?
Well no. The fact that he withstands more electric shocks when he is in his favorite shell indicates that he takes into account the pros and cons of the situation. Make an assessment and make a decision. It also points to the fact that an integration is taking place at the level of the nervous system between sources of information as different as pain and the assessment of its refuge. many scientists They consider this to be evidence that it is not a reflection, but that the crab feels pain.
Expanding the range even further, even plants display behaviors –they communicate with each other, learn from previous experiences, defend themselves from threats…– that we would not hesitate to classify as intelligent if they occur in animals. Is that behavior accompanied by subjective experience? This is the hypothesis raised by researchers from the University of Murcia. They do not claim that plants are conscious, but that such a possibility is worth exploring.
Two hypotheses about the origin of consciousness
Now let’s be a little more conservative. Perhaps not all invertebrates are conscious. But at least some crabs, bees and cephalopods seem to. The octopus evolutionary lineage diverged from ours more than 500 million years ago. How is it possible that they also possess this attribute? There are only two possibilities:
1. Consciousness is there from the beginning: it is an inherent characteristic of animals.
2. It is a property of complex nervous systems, developed through completely independent evolutionary pathways (in the case of cephalopods and vertebrates). This hypothesis would imply that only those animals endowed with nervous systems that reach a certain level of complexity would be conscious.
Until there is a theory of consciousness that explains its most fundamental nature and is capable of inferring what characteristics a physical system needs to be conscious, we cannot say with any certainty which organisms are conscious and which are not.
However, the scientific community does not hesitate to grant this power to all mammals and some birds. Some experts go further and also attribute it to all vertebrates and most invertebrates.
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