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.
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.
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.
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.
I think Penrose was talking about devising one. What do you think the motives would be?
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…
So, there’s a chance that there’s an afterlife, I mean if the brain isn’t the SOURCE of conciousness? But are you sure it’s popular? I heard neurologists were strictly “Brain is the source”
With a couple of perfect millennia of perfect human development and advances in all fields, we probably wouldn’t think of these versions of ourselves as more or less sentient than other thing populating Earth.
Sure, they paint caves & make 10s videos, but that’s just natural automation, a response to environment, simply not knowing better.
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.
What was obvious to most of us as kids (and what was attempted to be beaten out of us as kids) is now being accepted by scientists. Love it.
Right, I had no idea scientists were trying to say these animals weren’t sentient. Stupid scientists.
It’s not really that they all thought they didn’t, it’s that there was a lack of evidence to declare it to likely be true. Better testing methodology to exclude other possible explanations have contributed.
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.
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.
Also being underwater would make it very hard to develop technology.
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.
Wasn’t this already obvious?
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
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.
Denying such things in other animals has been part of a long-standing, mainly Western, push for human exceptionalism
Yes.
My first, second, third and fourth thought. I didn’t have a fifth.
This is self evident to any animal lover
It’s self evident to anyone not plagued by speciesism, regardless of their feelings about animals; I don’t think we ought to allow that much latitude to opt-out of the obvious moral consequences of this truth.
This reads like “scientists find that women have emotions and feeling and can feel pain”
So arrogant are we
Ofc they are sentient.
I fail to understand why do we will push the ‘no expression of the face means no intelligence or emotions bcs most of us communicate that way’.
It always turns out that whatever brain mechanics we think of as our own we later & with minimal research find in other animals as well.
Evolutionary speaking too, same brain centres (with various density and relative size - of which we dont have all that dense brains & and most parts are underdeveloped), it’s absolutely unlikely we would have developed something new in a few millions of years (especially given smol & fragmented populations facing extinctions and smol gene pools - tho that could be interpreted the other way too). It’s just specialisation, some (advantageous) functions grew, other were optimised to the point of non-existence.
Then again, given how intolerant are we to our own species in terms of our emotional response to slight visual differences (I mean vcompletely evolutionary, uncanny valley thing, the next village of humanoids might have been competing for the same resources, which makes different culture/colours/face shapes = danger, etc), how we choose to ignore compassion (like ‘look at that idiot, ofc they have no feelings, not unlike me, the superior being’) … ofc we can’t immediately recognise and understand what and how animals are feeling. It takes a lot of time, effort, & empathy (mechanical empathy, like to fully underhand their environment from their pov, and emotional empathy, how they are processing that environment).
And the bigger the difference and habitats, the harder it is (like any sea animal really). Anything non-mammal seems alien to us, no matter the smarts (eg cuttlefish, that can clearly experience psychological trauma on individual and population/cultural level).
And then there are fungi. After that plants. And whatever we choose bacteria to be (like beings, or just a literal matter of environment we live within). Etc :).
Insects don’t really have brains. The complexity of their ganglia is not really comparable to what we consider a brain and seems rather unlikely that they have anything like our consciousness, just due to the difference in complexity. Does not mean we should treat them like shit, they are living creatures - but also not sure why we need to pretend they are something they are clearly not.
Jumping spiders show some level of consciousness. They’re intelligent predators that heavily use their sight to identify prey. They can recognise different prey types, learn their behaviours and adjust hunting strategies accordingly. A good example is how they are able to recognise when certain prey is acting odd, deduce it’s injured and drop their stealthy approach for a more direct one. They’re also capable of remembering their environment and using indirect and often complex paths to sneak up on prey.
Scientists have even observed them “dreaming”, which is likely when they do the information processing required for such comparatively complex behaviours https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/jumping-spiders-dream-rem-sleep-study-suggests
Bold claim to go from REM in sleep-like state to dreams and consciousness, and the original paper is not making that claim.
A good example is how they are able to recognise when certain prey is acting odd, deduce it’s injured and drop their stealthy approach for a more direct one. They’re also capable of remembering their environment and using indirect and often complex paths to sneak up on prey.
All of this seems rather possible even with basic learning mechanisms on molecular level. Not sure why you would claim that this need consciousness. But if you have a paper on this topic I would be more than interested to read them.
No papers that are actually concrete. Most of it is just speculation.
I’m not a scientist, and for me personally it’s enough to make me spend a bit longer thinking before immediately dismissing all insects as mindless automatons. Most probably are simple biological machines. Jumping spiders are however massive outliers in terms of insect intelligence, and a cursory Google search will provide a wealth of evidence for it.
I personally would also go as far as believing that they dream. I just don’t believe there’s a reasonable explanation for the REM like state other than some form of dreaming, even if rudimentary.
I’m not going to state that jumping spiders are fully conscious as 100% fact, there’s not enough proof for that. But they do have a proven ability to learn, and an ability to make somewhat complex plans. And all I’m trying to say is that we need more research before dismissing them so certainly.
Not a scientist my self, but I studies biology and neuroscience more specifically - just left the field. I will look more into jumping spiders, since it’s sounds interesting and I was not really aware that they are that different from other spiders. Now I’m more curious and I definitely agree that we need more research in general.
Yes, I agree, in just pointing out how difficult is to understand that. Theoretically, it’s not like a human-level intelligent insect couldn’t exist.
My thinking to challenge myself/ourselves: Then how do whole colonies decide and plan resources? When to gave truce or war with the neighbouring colonies (of same or completely different species?). Their war strategies resemble human wars without technology/weapons. They also cultivate insects, plants, and fungi. Some within colonies plan, deceive, and try to develop a new queen (instead of the queen doing it in purpose/strategy).
Having brains as such imho is part of the problem as it adds a lot of complexity for humans to relate to.
But even our brains don’t work and govern alone, major organs have a complex nervous systems of their own (complex in the sense of not having a centre).
Not as a direct comparison to insect, but eg cephalopod brains are also vastly different, yet clearly highly intelligent.
My thinking to challenge myself/ourselves: Then how do whole colonies decide and plan resources? When to gave truce or war with the neighbouring colonies (of same or completely different species?). Their war strategies resemble human wars without technology/weapons. They also cultivate insects, plants, and fungi. Some within colonies plan, deceive, and try to develop a new queen (instead of the queen doing it in purpose/strategy).
We understand most of your questions quiet well. It’s been a long time since I studied biology and I’m not working in that field anymore so I won’t be able to give you most answers from memory, but if you are interested you will find a lot of research on those topics. It’s mostly really rather automatic responses through pheromone systems with involuntary responses. Especially the wars of ants are quite well understood in that regard.
Cephalopod have different but also rather complex brain structures. Again - insects just completely lack higher brain anatomy. If you into those question I would highly recommend you to take an introductory lecture into neuroscience online. We don’t understand everything but we understand some things quiet well.
This doesn’t explain complex behavior seen in many insects like how bumblebees can learn how to solve puzzles from watching other bees performing the solution (this requires a minimal degree of visual recognition of the same species, theory of mind to understand they have a goal and what it is, recognition of their actions and the ability to translate them to copy them, etc).
Having a drastically different structure to their neurons doesn’t mean they can’t think.
“Same” neurons (they don’t have all the neuron types we have but in general one can say it’s the same neurons), just no complex brain structures. You can have very complex behavior completely reliant on pheromone systems, quite well studied in ants. I’m not to familiar with bumblebees so I would need to look into literature, but for example simple learning already happens at molecular level and does not require any thinking at all.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002019
They show evidence of a degree of culture (socially shared knowledge)
Thanks, will check the paper out.
Came around to read the paper. Indeed very interesting - also not suited to base broader conclusions about coinciosness in insects in my opinion, the idea that culture might be supported by much simpler neuronal mechanisms is fascinating to me. Very speculative it might very well be than that even coinciosness can emerge in less complex systems then previously thought. Also bumblebees are even more dope than I previously thought. Great read thanks.
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Not sure how your answer is related to my.
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Thanks for explaining, I somehow didn’t get your point.
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Just give a small summary at the end maybe, like you did after I asked you? Might help yourself to stay on point.
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.
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Seems like a strong argument that consciousness cannot be determined by testing behaviors.
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Is emergent intelligence the scientific definition of consciousness? The article seems to be describing something else.
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I’ve always thought this, and thought it strange we assumed other creatures experienced lesser levels of sentience.
Vegans are well aware of this phenomenon.
People will tend to wave away atrocities by saying the victims “can’t feel it” or “don’t know what’s going on.”
We see it all the time in things like the treatment of indigenous people and the mutilation of baby’s genitals.
I think it’s fair to assume they experience a “lesser” level of sentience. People just assume it’s a lot more lesser than it is
I don’t even think this to be honest, seems like an absurd humanist position
IS veganism the real solution here, or is the real solution the all-artificial, all-synthetic diet? Me personally, I’m going to down this jug of red 40, and then I think I’ll get back to you
If it ever comes out that plants are sentient and feel pain my moral compass is going to have a bad day.
I’m not even a vegetarian … but I have tried to eat less meat in recent years, in part because of the cruelty.
I’d say eating plants would still be the lesser of two evils in that case. Animals we kill for food also eat plants, so from a pure quantity of suffering, it’s better to not have the middleman there.
But some animals we eat are carnivores, like most wild-caught fish. In which case, killing them reduces the total amount of suffering. Same reasoning as the trolley problem.
Even that’s a bit more complex, without predators many species massively overbreed, leading to mass starvation
That wouldn’t apply to ecosystems where the predator is invasive, for example the lionfish in the Caribbean (which happens to be delicious).
Furthermore, if there is concern for a population explosion then one could also kill and eat the predator’s prey, provided you eat fewer than the predator would have eaten.
We, as omnivores, have a choice. The carnivores do not. I’d rather not cause more suffering than I have to (since I have that choice) even if there was the potential that it could possibly decrease overall suffering.
I will not go into other problems with fish specifically since it’s not on-topic.
Whereas I choose to cause suffering if I expect it will reduce greater suffering, including killing animals if necessary.
Everyone has their own approach to the trolley problem.
Do note that this whole thing is based on the hypothetical of plants being capable of experiencing pain. In reality, they do not possess a nervous system to enable that.
Of course I’d choose to kill an animal if the alternative was getting injured or killed (or starving in some extreme survival situation), but in day-to-day life, I do not see the need to do that.
If the only way to stop a school shooter were to kill them, I think most people would do so even if they were not personally threatened.
And many people, including myself, think it is moral to kill even an innocent person if necessary to prevent the death of a greater number of people. That’s the trolley problem in a nutshell.
But if I’m willing to kill a person in order to prevent them from killing other people, then I should also be willing to kill a fish in order to prevent it from killing other fish.
Finally, the argument for nonhuman sentience does not turn on the presence or absence of neurons. That would just be a cellular version of speciesism, and it inexplicably eliminates the possibility of sentience in extraterrestrials or machines.
The argument in the OP is based on behaviors, like recognizing self vs nonself, avoiding noxious stimuli, creative problem-solving, etc. Plants do many of these things too, just on longer timescales.
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The same is true of milk.
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Milk and fruit are both only produced for a limited time.
For instance, many tomato plants only produce tomatoes for a few months of the year, and then they die.
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No, fruit is produced to be eaten by animals who will ingest the seeds and defecate them somewhere suitable for growth. It is not meant to be eaten by animals who defecate in a toilet.
Regardless, animals and plants used in agriculture have been modified by selective breeding to suit human needs, so the milk and fruit they produce are now meant for humans. And human agricultural practices ensure a constant supply of both fruit and milk.
I do like fruit…
Im pretty sure i have read articles about study finding that show certain trees can communicate distress via pheromones or something when under attack by insects that strip their leaves and some plants give off a very faint ‘noise’ when they are dehydrated or distressed.
Me too. I still eat cheese but no more meats. Regardless of the sentient thing, it’s good for you to not eat meat.
Considering how pain is a trigger for an animal’s fight or flight response, and considering plants can neither fight nor flee, it would seem like a cruel cosmic joke for plants to feel pain. What purpose would it serve, evolutionary speaking?
No idea; though I think a consciousness could be independent of whether or not something feels pain. For instance, there are people that don’t feel pain but they’re very much conscious and killing them wouldn’t be any more just simply because they don’t feel pain.
Plants are autotrophs in that they create their own energy from the sun with the help of microbes in soils to supply nutrients to enable plants to do so.
Imo, the closer we can descend on the food chain to autotrophic nutrition, the better for all.
Of course, all of this has to be taken in balance. There needs to be a healthy discussion between domesticated and wilded lands.
But much research has been published showing that if the world moved to primarily plant-based/vegan/herbivore/autotrophic diets, then we’d quickly move to living inside of our planet’s boundaries which we aren’t now. Think about rewilding corn fields or wheat fields or soy fields and still having enough food left over to feed the entire population.
#govegan
Welllllll… What if you found out that every time you cut into a plant, it let out a high pitched scream that humans can’t hear?
https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-loud-we-just-never-heard-it-until-now
Yeah the fresh cut grass smell is actually a call to aid. They “think” the damage is caused by herbivorous insects, so they release chemicals to attract carnivorous insects to come and kill the other insects.
Plants probably qualify for a separate category of low sentience. If you’ve grown plants you know they’ll turn towards the sun, and you need to move them around a bit to make sure they don’t end up with a prominent lean. Some plants will use their tendrils to wrap around a trellis for extra support.
I don’t think we can qualify these actions on the same level of sentience as animals, but there is certainly something there. All living things probably have some degree of this, since they react to stimulus with chemical signaling. That’s not terribly different from what we do.
There’s an old book called “the secret life of plants”… An interesting part explains how after a human, who had never entered a particular greenhouse before, smashed a plant to bits, and an electric response in the survivors spiked only when that particular human returned to the greenhouse.
Veganism is the solution, yes.
Future generations will look back on us like we were crazy and barbaric for eating meat.
I agree that veganism is/could be a good solution moving forward. I strongly disagree that eating meat can be considered barbaric, as it is completely natural and present in every corner of the animal kingdom. Now, how we treat the animals we get that meat from is absolutely barbaric and should be considered so, but I don’t think meat eating itself should be villainized, at least in a retrospective sense.
Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it isn’t barbaric. Male lions will regularly kill cubs to make the mother ready for sex - that’s natural but we’d never accept (correctly) a human doing that.
I understand your point but I dont think that the male lion’s proclivity for infanticide is equivalent to human life simply because that is not a typical (i.e. natural) aspect of human society
Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Pre-Islamic Arabia, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans.
Well, it is always possible that I am under informed so I guess my argument may not stand, at least not on the grounds I have claimed. Thank you for the link, I will read about this.
Rape then? Lots of animals rape and humans do so too. It’s ‘natural’ but barbaric.
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Be that as it may, wasps can still fuck right off.
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.
In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were merely “material automata” — lacking souls or consciousness.
I believe we’re all “material automata.” The mistake isn’t thinking animals are more primitive than they are, but thinking we are more sophisticated than we are. We’re nothing special.
The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?
Jeremy Bentham, 1789
so it’s time to stop masturbating with my dog in the room
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I mean your dog IS just waiting for some “food” to fall on the floor AAAAND I’ll show myself out
