Foundations of Animal Consciousness: Beyond Apes
Chair(s): Nadine Meertens (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich), Azenet Lopez (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich)
Abstract
Human beings are likely not the only organisms that enjoy conscious experiences, yet, the standards traditionally used to assess conscious state in humans (e.g., subjective reports) have limited applicability to non-human animals. The time is now ripe for departing from conventional anthropocentric approaches to examine the foundations and minimal instances of consciousness more broadly within the animal kingdom, across species with diverse neural and bodily architectures. The talks in this symposium explore promising foundations of non-human consciousness, with a special focus on key properties and capacities of non-mammalian organisms. Azenet Lopez discusses the roles of informational integration, a key property of any form of consciousness according to the Integrated Information Theory, for sensory experience in corvids and cephalopods. Nicola (Nicky) Clayton compares mental time travel abilities also in corvids and cephalopods, drawing implications for the evolutionary and biological foundations of consciousness. Nadine Meertens advocates a minimal concept of awareness based on action-perception abilities in a variety of organisms. Finally, Carlos Montemayor contrasts the attentional capacities of mammals with the more minimal attentional capacities of some insects. Altogether, this symposium promotes a gradualistic, evolution-based stance, with emphasis on variability and gradability in conscious experiences and associated abilities across species. It highlights the importance of comparative approaches for understanding how different neural and bodily architectures may give rise to varying degrees of consciousness (or awareness) and ways of being conscious, helping to move beyond anthropocentric models toward a more inclusive framework.
Rationale on symposium's general scientific interest
This symposium moves beyond anthropocentric and mammalian models of consciousness. It engages with the growing body of work that examines consciousness across a diverse range of species, highlighting the gradability and variability that conscious experiences can take in nonhuman animals. Specific capacities widely used to probe consciousness are discussed, namely mental time travel (Clayton) and attention (Montemayor). Novel conceptual work is introduced, based on a minimal notion of awareness (Meertens). Finally, the promising but controversial framework of the Integrated Information Theory is extended to two species often cited as counterexamples, but rarely discussed in depth (Lopez).
Rationale on complementarity of talks
Our four talks show how cognitive diversity and environmental pressures shape consciousness, offering a cohesive cross-species view, informed by philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and comparative cognition. Our focus lies on the foundations of consciousness, accounting for varieties in bodily and neural architectures, environmental niches, and the demands faced by organisms that play a role in the development of consciousness. Azenet Lopez applies Integrated Information Theory, typically used to explain human phenomenology, to non-human animals with importantly dissimilar neural architectures, namely corvids and cephalopods. Nicky Clayton follows by exploring mental time travel in these same animals, examining its role in the evolutionary foundations of consciousness. Where the first talk provides a discussion on the various neural architectures of these animals, the second emphasises the evolutionary and biological role of mental time travel in conscious experience. Nadine Meertens focuses on action-perception abilities across species, proposing a minimal notion of awareness that encourages structured interspecies comparisons, such as those discussed in the previous talks. Finally, Carlos Montemayor compares the attentional capacities of mammals with those of insects, further highlighting variations in conscious abilities across species. Together, these talks offer complementary perspectives on how neural and cognitive diversity, alongside variation in environmental and social pressures, shape the emergence of consciousness, thereby providing a cohesive picture of how consciousness varies and evolves across species.
Rationale on timeliness/importance
The urgency for advancing our understanding of consciousness in nonhuman animals is underscored by both welfare and ethical considerations. As society increasingly recognizes the cognitive and emotional capacities of various species, addressing the quality and distribution of consciousness becomes imperative for developing appropriate welfare standards. By discussing the foundations or minimal instantiations of consciousness across diverse animal species, this symposium provides essential insights that can inform ethical frameworks, ultimately guiding policies that ensure the humane treatment of sentient beings. Moreover, the recent surge in research on artificial intelligence has amplified the call for markers or indicators of consciousness. As AI systems become more sophisticated, debates surrounding their potential conscious experiences challenge our existing paradigms and encourage a reevaluation of what constitutes consciousness. This intersection of animal cognition and AI prompts vital questions about non-anthropocentric approaches to consciousness and awareness, raising the possibility that different forms or gradations of consciousness may exist beyond traditional human and mammalian frameworks. By focusing on the origins and manifestations of consciousness across a wide array of species, this symposium aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of sentience and its ethical implications. It emphasises the need for comparative research to bridge the gaps in our knowledge, facilitating more informed discussions about consciousness.
Rationale on panel inclusivity
Our panel consists of scholars representing various fields, including philosophy of mind, neurophilosophy, cognitive science, psychology and comparative cognition. There is also diversity in the participants’ career stages and socio-cultural backgrounds, including an early career PhD student who is a first-generation academic, a postdoctoral researcher, and two established professors. The panel embodies an international perspective in that participants originate from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Mexico and are employed in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The underrepresentation of women in the field of consciousness studies is addressed in that three of our four participants are women. Moreover, two of our four participants were born and raised in Latin-America, thus representing yet another minority group in consciousness research.
Presentations of the Symposium
Integrated Information Theory for Corvids and Cephalopods
Azenet Lopez
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich
The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) claims that informational integration is a universal indicator of presence and degree of consciousness. With its aid, it is argued, one could in principle understand what the experiences of any conscious organism are like, thus surmounting the ultimate obstacle for a science of consciousness. However, when it comes to assessing consciousness in non-human animals, an immediate stumbling block for IIT are organisms with highly disintegrated neural and perceptual architectures, such as corvids and cephalopods. On the face of it, IIT dictates that these animals are endowed with a lesser degree of consciousness than organisms with more unified systems, but such claim seems at odds with the evolutionary advantages that their compartmentalised and distributed perceptual architectures have for these animals. IIT also rules out the possibility of disunified or partially unified consciousnesses, which on the other hand seem the most appropriate accounts of what conscious perception is like for corvids and cephalopods. This talk outlines some revisions that IIT might require in order to accommodate corvid and cephalopod consciousness, with emphasis on two aspects: the need to connect the theory with a multidimensional view of consciousness, and the need to rethink the role of the axiom of integration.
Studying Corvid and Cephalopod Mental Time Travel: Implications for the Evolution of Cognition
Nicola Clayton
University of Cambridge
In this talk I will review some of the recent work on the cognitive capacities of corvids (members of the crow family including jays, rooks and ravens) and the soft-bodied coleoid cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish and squid), particularly within the realm of mental time travel, the ability to reminisce when re-experiencing about the past and plan when pre-experiencing the future, and associated counter parts of executive function such as self- control. These findings will be discussed in terms of an evolutionary framework of why these animals, both so distantly related to our primate cousins, have evolved such cognitive capacities and the implications for our understanding of the evolution of cognition in general and its implications for consciousness in humans and in other living creatures with whom we share the planet.
Beyond Consciousness: Mapping Animal Awareness in a Multidimensional Framework
Nadine Meertens
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich
Understanding nonhuman animal behaviour presents numerous challenges, particularly when it comes to accurately interpreting their behaviour and abilities without falling into anthropomorphism, or overlooking alternative explanations. The study of animal awareness and consciousness is often hampered by underdetermination, where competing hypotheses can make it difficult to ascertain what is sufficient evidence of consciousness in various species, whilst acknowledging multiple realisability and the variation that exists between them. To address these challenges, I propose shifting the focus from extrapolating from subjective reports on human consciousness to a more comparative approach that emphasises mapping the action-perception abilities of diverse organisms, specifically ones with different neural or bodily architectures. In this talk, I aim to explore the distinction between awareness and consciousness, arguing that separating these two concepts offers valuable insights for the field of consciousness studies. I will introduce a new concept of awareness that emphasises the situatedness of animals within a multidimensional space of action-perception abilities. This perspective allows for a more neutral understanding of animal cognition and behaviour, highlighting how awareness can facilitate an organism's ability to cope with complexity and adaptively navigate its world. By employing this framework, I will illustrate how a more comprehensive mapping of animal abilities - grounded in comparative studies across a broad range of species, beyond the traditional focus on mammals, - can contribute to a better empirical understanding of consciousness. Such an approach can enhance our capacity to identify meaningful behavioural markers of consciousness in nonhuman animals.
Navigating Minds: Consciousness, Attention, and Socialization in Insects, Mammals, and Humans
Carlos Montemayor
San Francisco State University
My talk will focus on the kinds of navigational and social skills displayed by insects and mammals, and the implications of this comparison for our understanding of similar capacities in humans. The main claim of my presentation is that the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and attention is critical to properly understand key differences between the social and navigational capabilities of insects and mammals, and that this has important implications for human psychology. Drawing on work on the evolution of attention, broader implications will be highlighted, including the role and scope of non-linguistic communication in animals, and how this discussion should inform our understanding of human capacities for socialisation in relation to the role that phenomenal consciousness plays in our cognition. A test case for how these different navigational and socialisation capacities shape human cognition is memory. I argue that while we share many features of episodic memory with animals, our capacities for long-term memory and planning are significantly different. However, an important point to make is that we should not exaggerate the role of language in human navigational capacities. Since the Whorfian hypothesis was introduced, we have favoured language as the main format for human communication and socialisation. I shall argue that this is incorrect, and that an attention framework is more adequate to explain a variety of forms of communication, some of which rely on language and some which rely on phenomenal consciousness.
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