It doesn't take a genius to notice animals are conscious. Only to prove it and convince their human peers that this is the case. I guess.
I find it annoying how we’re even entertaining the idea that animals wouldn’t be conscious. Like what does that even mean?
All these people who aren’t convinced that animals are conscious… I’d really like to know what specific behaviour would convince them one way or another. Pick pretty much any behaviour, and you’ll find animals (and even insects) displaying it.
Anthropocentrism is a hell of a drug.
The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric, but a rejection of folklore as literal truth. While some are still attached to an anthropocentric worldview, that perspective seems dead among people who study animal behavior.
> scientific understanding of the nature of animals was based on folklore
Popular, pre- or proto- scientific understanding perhaps, but not scientific understanding per se.
> despite a couple centuries of assuming that animals are pure instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence that they are individuals with intelligence, memory, feelings, preferences and even language
These things are not mutually exclusive. The words "intelligence", "memory", "feelings", "preferences" and "language" can refer to purely automatic/mechanical processes, even when we're speaking in reference to humans. There's no real reason why we need non-mechanistic magic to explain the human experience. The two ideas are compatible: animals are conscious, and humans are "just" really complex machines. It's all the same stuff, viewed from different lenses.
> The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much anthropocentric
They were, and they still are. Folklore itself is for the most part very anthropocentric.
I suspect the attitude is the default / most primitive one, because any other attitude requires higher-order cognitive processes that can abstract one's own experiences (which is the only real input one has) with the behaviours of entities that appear to be very different from oneself. In other words, the capacity for empathy is a "positive feature", in the sense that it is absent by default.
The ability to make this kind of abstraction is a pretty sophisticated thing, and either requires time to evolve (as an instinct), and/or requires socialization/learning (as a partly or totally-intentional practice).
As an aside, it's not clear to me how "having dominion" should justify such mistreatment, anyway.
1. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201:25-...
Is that really "sophisticated", or is that just what happens when an entity outcompetes all others for resource utilization by chance (ie.: in the context of ecology / evolutionary pressure)? This is basically how cancer happens, and yet I wouldn't call cancer cells more sophisticated than healthy ones. I call it dys-regulated.
Our primal instinct is one of tribalism and auto-centrism, but over long periods of time we've developed a (fragile) capacity to empathize with 1) other people that look like us, and 2) other people that don't look like us, and 3) perhaps animals. But we didn't always have this capacity, and we see it break down all the time.
In general, empathy can be either an evolved behaviour, a learned behaviour, or both.
In humans this is largely-but-probably-not-exclusively socialized behaviour. Most cases of (human and non-abused) feral children exhibit behaviour that is not particularly compatible with empathy.
I shared my rationale for why we "haven't always had this capacity" a few comments up this thread, and you seemed to agree with it before immediately making the contradicting statement.
I see empathy alone as being much more basic, requiring only a very low-level "theory of mind", likely arising from the type of evolutionary pressure that leads to social species. I would be surprised to learn that was a recent adaptation in our evolutionary line. Maybe most species have it "off by default", if you consider the "default" to be a constant state of duress and resource scarcity.
It was very recently evolution wise that humans started to keep animals as pets, before then we just hunted and ate animals. We would empathize as much with those animals as cats did with mice.
We literally discovered a 32,000 year old burial site where a hunter put a mammoth bone in their deceased dogs mouth when they buried him.
https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/animal-health/our-respo...
That's not utilitarian, to give funerary care.
Another grave site in Germany from 14,000 years ago had a dog buried with a man and a woman, treating it as a family member.
We literally have had fur babies since before we had civilization.
Once you get there, there's far more evidence: ancient Greeks burying pets and writing inscriptions about how they loved them, dogs and baboons were kept as pets in ancient Egypt, and given names, which was a big deal in Egyptian religion, and wasn't done for utility animals at all.
We have no evidence of a specific period of homo sapiens in which we know they did not keep pets.
Also, other animals have been observed keeping pets.
[0] It's the least important imprecision because in general, when we talk about the evolution of a species, we typically also consider common ancestors that don't necessarily have the same label as the modern species. When we speak of "human evolution", we're referring to proto-humans and human-primate common ancestors as well. Anyone would gloss over this in context.
[1] Note also that the imprecision was someone else's, not mine.
People don’t like it, just like many people don’t like animals being aware.
I had a fascinating theological discussion with a guy once. He was a farmer and he believed strongly that animals lack souls. I, on the other hand, believe that even amoeba have souls. I feel it’s just a condition of being a living thing while he felt that this was unique to humankind. Obviously, he has an interest emotionally in viewing animals as soulless. Easier to slaughter them that way.
it means that "science" has been infiltrated with grifters living off research grant gravy trains producing conjectures entirely obvious for hundreds of thousands of years...and reproduced by the previous round of grifters a handful of years earlier. i say that as someone who sees these faux revelations recur every few years. it's ridiculous...as if we're as a species not conscious of the pattern, ironically.
Common sense tells you and I that animals are conscious to some degree. But as there is no current scientific definition of what the system of consciousness actually is (and I'm speculatively calling it a system) it's difficult to say animals have it through observation. We know they respond to anesthetics just like we do. We know anesthesia can shut off consciousness, so there's some physicality to whatever consciousness is. We just don't have a classification for it yet.
Science doesn't admit anything. It is a methodology that is practiced.
This isn't a gotcha question: to me they're both obviously true. The question is what kind of evidence do you require, and why do people require different evidence for people vs other animals.
It's easier to test humans than other animals because it's easier to communicate.
For sentience scientists mainly look at behavioral cues:
> For example, "if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant." Avoiding painful stimuli unless the reward is significant can also provide evidence that pain avoidance is not merely an unconscious reflex (similarly to how humans "can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience#Indicators_of_sentie...
> I'm pretty sure dogs are conscious, but you can’t really tell from the outside.
when talking about dogs, but not when talking about people?
Maybe you're not conscious, I can't tell from the outside.