I think a lot of questions about consciousness fall into one of two categories:
- What is it, that is, what features does it have, what states of consciousness are there, what are reasonable tests of whether something is conscious or not (given that we can't directly experience any consciousness but our own)?
- How does it happen, that is, what causes things (like us, for example) to have conscious experiences?
Reading that over, I'm not sure it really captures the distinction I want to make. The first item deals in experiments people know how to do right now, and there has been quite a lot of exciting work on the first type of question, falling under rubrics like "cognitive science" and "neural correlates of consciousness".
I mean for the second item to represent "the hard problem of consciousness", the "Why does anyone experience anything at all?" kind of question. It's not clear whether one can conduct experiments about questions like this at all and, as far as I know, no one has an answer to that isn't ultimately circular.
For example, "We have consciousness because we have a soul" by itself doesn't answer "What is a soul?" and "How does it give us consciousness?" or clearly suggest an experiment that could confirm or refute it. Instead, it states a defining property (typically among others): A soul is something which gives us consciousness. The discussion doesn't necessarily end there, but if there's an answer to How does consciousness happen in it, it's not in the mere assertion that souls give us consciousness.
Similarly, if we substitute more mechanistic terms like "quantum indeterminacy" or "chaos of non-linear systems" or whatever else for "soul" in "We have consciousness because ...", we haven't explained why that leads to the subjective experience of consciousness or provided a way to test the assertion. We may well be able to demonstrate that some aspect or another of consciousness is associated with some structure -- some collection of neurons, one might expect -- where quantum indeterminacy or chaos plays a significant role, but that doesn't explain why that structure correlates with consciousness rather than being just another structure along with the gall bladder, earlobe or whatever else.
If we were able to pinpoint some complex of neural circuits that fire exactly when a person is conscious, or perhaps more realistically, in a particular state of waking consciousness, or consciousness of a particular experience, it would be tempting, then, to say "Aha! We've found the neural circuits that cause consciousness," but that's not really accurate, for a couple of reasons.
First, correlation doesn't imply cause, which is why we speak of neural correlates of consciousness, not causes. Second, even if there's a good case that the neural pattern we locate really is a cause -- for example, maybe it can be demonstrated that if the pattern is disrupted the person loses consciousness, as opposed to the other way around -- we still don't know what is causing a person to have the subjective experience of consciousness. We can talk with some confidence about patterns of neurons firing, or even of subjects reporting particular experiences, but we can't speak with confidence about people actually experiencing things.
If we didn't already know that subjective experiences existed (or, at least, I know my subjective experiences exist), there's nothing about the experiment that would tell us that they did, much less why. All we know is that if neurons are firing in such-and-such a state, the subject reports conscious experiences.
Since we do experience consciousness, it's blindingly obvious to us that the subject must be as well, but again that just shifts the problem back a level: We're convinced that we have found something that causes the subject to experience what we experience, but that doesn't explain why we experience anything to begin with. If we were all "philosophical zombies" that exhibited all the outward signs of consciousness without actually experiencing it, the experiment would run exactly the same -- except that no one would actually experience it happening.
That's more than I meant to say about the second bullet point. I actually meant to explore the first one, so let's try that.
Suppose you're hanging out in your hammock on a pleasant afternoon (note to self: how did I let the summer go by without that?). You hear the wind in the trees, maybe birds chirping or dogs barking or kids playing, or cars going by, or whatever. You are alone with your own thoughts, but for a while even those die down and you're just ... being. Are you conscious? Unless you've actually drifted off to sleep, I think most people would answer yes. If someone taps you on your shoulder or shouts your name, you'll probably respond, though you might be a bit slow to come back up to speed. If it starts to rain, you'll feel it. If something makes a loud noise and you manage to regain your meditative state, you're still liable to remember the noise.
On the other hand, it's something of a different state of consciousness than much of our usual existence. There's nothing verbal going on. There's no interaction with other people, none of the constant evaluation (much of which we're generally not aware of) concerning what people might be thinking, or whether they heard or understood you, or whether you're understanding them, or what their motives might be, or their opinions of you or others around, or what they might be aware of or unaware of. You're not having an inner conversation with yourself or that jerk who cut you off at the intersection, and there's little to no self consciousness, if you're only focusing on the sensory experience of the moment (indeed, this is a major reason people actively seek such a meditative state).
I've become more and more convinced over time that we often underestimate how conscious other beings are. I don't subscribe to the sort of literal panpsychism that holds that a brick has a consciousness, that "It is something (to a brick) to be a brick". I doubt this is a particularly widely held position anyway, so much as the anchor at one end of a spectrum between it and "nothing is actually conscious at all". However, I am open to the idea that anything with a certain minimum complement of capabilities which can be measured fairly objectively, including particularly senses and memory, has some sort of consciousness, and, as a corollary, that there are many different kinds or components of consciousness that different things have at different times.
For example, a hawk circling over a field waiting for a mouse to pop out of its burrow likely has some sort of experience of doing this, and if it spots a mouse, it has some sort of awareness of there now being prey to pursue with the goal of eating it or, if there are no mice, an awareness of being hungry. This wouldn't be awareness on a verbal, reflective level we experience when we notice we are hungry and tell someone about it, but something more akin to that "I'm relaxing in a hammock and things are just happening" kind of awareness. I also wouldn't claim that this awareness is serving any particular purpose. Rather, it's a side effect of having the sort of mental circuitry a hawk has and being embodied in a universe where time exists -- another mystery that may well be deeply connected to the hard problem of consciousness.
I think this is in some sense the simplest hypothesis, given that we have the same general kind of neural machinery as hawks and that we can experience things happening. It still presupposes that there's some sort of structural difference between things with at least some subjective experiences and things with no such experiences at all, but that "something" becomes a fairly general and widely-shared capacity for sensing the world and retaining some memory of it rather than a specialized facility unique to us. The difference between us and a hawk is not that we're conscious and hawks aren't, but that we have a different set of experiences from hawks. For the most part this would be a larger set of experiences, but, if you buy the premise of hawks having experiences at all, there are almost certainly some that they have but we don't.
Which leads me back to the title of this post.
I suspect that if you polled a bunch of people about consciousness in other animals, you'd see more "yes" answers to "is a chimpanzee conscious" or "is a dog conscious" than to "is a hawk conscious" or "is a salmon conscious". Some of this is probably due to our concept of intelligence in other animals. Most people probably think that chimps and dogs are "smart animals", while hawks and salmon are "just regular animals".
However, I think our judgment of that is strongly colored by chimps and dogs being more social animals than hawks or fish (even fish that school are probably not social in the same way we are -- I'd go into why I think that, but this post is already running a bit long). It doesn't take much observation of chimps and dogs interacting with their own species and with humans to conclude that they have some awareness of individual identities and social structure, the ability to persuade others to do what they want (or at least try), and other aspects of behavior that are geared specifically toward interaction with those around them. Other animals do interact with each other, but social animals like chimps, dogs and humans normally do so on a daily basis as a central part of life.
This social orientation produces its own set of experiences beyond "things are happening in the physical world" experiences like hunger and an awareness that some potential food just popped out of a burrow. I think it's this particular kind of experience that we tend to gravitate toward when we think of conscious experience. More specifically, self-awareness is often held out as the hallmark of "true consciousness", and I think there's a good case that self-awareness is closely connected to the sort of "what is that one over there thinking and what do they want" calculation that comes of living as a social animal.
To some extent this is a matter of definition. If you define consciousness as self-awareness, then it's probably relatively rare, even if several species are able to pass tests like the mirror test (Can the subject tell that the animal in the mirror is itself?). However, if you define consciousness as the ability to have subjective experiences, then I think it's hard to argue that it's not widespread. In that formulation, self-awareness is a particular kind of subjective experience limited to relatively few kinds of being, but only one kind of experience among many.
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