Why you should assume that even the simplest animals are conscious

Are dogs aware, with their own thoughts and feelings? What about pigeons? Bees? Earthworms? Jellyfish? The way you answer will probably reflect the human tendency to attribute consciousness to pets and supposedly “higher”, while doubting that it extends to those “simpler”, like invertebrates.

In fact, we can never be certain if another being is aware. “The subjective nature of experience means that you cannot be completely sure – you cannot even be 100% sure of other humans,” said Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics, author of The edge of sensitivity.

However, we can collect evidence. But first, we must decide what we mean by conscience. Here, says Birch, it is useful to follow the thought of the philosopher Herbert Feigl and to divide consciousness into three layers.

The most fundamental is the sensitivity, the raw sensation of the present moment, including the sensations of the outside world and more interior feelings such as pain, pleasure, excitement and boredom. In addition to this is sapience, the ability to think about our experiences – to think, for example: “This pain is the worst pain that I have ever had.” The final layer, individuality, is a feeling of ourselves as being with a past, a future and a life to us.

Studies on animal consciousness tend to focus on sensitivity. “A large part of this research has been raised, although people also turn to positive emotions like joy,” said Kristin Andrews at York University in Toronto. For example, the suffering fish can swim towards a part of their reservoir which has a dissolved analgesic in the water.

A second type of proof of sensitivity comes from social behavior. “Animals socially learn a large part of their knowledge and skills,” says Andrews. Even insects do it. Fruit flies, for example, learn with whom to have sex by watching other fruit flies relate.

The extent to which some animals are aware of their cultural context are revealed in certain extraordinary discoveries, including the recent discovery that mice apparently gives “first aid” to unconscious companions. The researchers also sought episodic memory, which is the ability to relive past experiences – suggesting individuality – and found it in various mammals, including rats and chimpanzees, as well as in birds like brush.

Although evidence of a widespread sensitivity increases, we still do not understand the neurobiological requirements of consciousness. There are studies on mammals that indicate the regions of the brain that are involved, explains Andrews, “but we cannot generalize to other species which have very different neural structures”. For example, insects have nothing like a human brain, and yet there is good proof that they can feel pain – and are therefore sensitive.

Nevertheless, last year, Andrews, Birch and their colleagues published the New York Declaration on animal conscience, which indicates that there is “a realistic possibility of conscious experience” even in many invertebrates. Andrews goes further, arguing that we must start by assuming that all animals are aware.

This upsets the current hypotheses held by most biologists, but it may not be such a section for the rest of us. The idea that animals are insensitive automata is “an aberration of Western science”, explains Birch. “Non -Western cultures, and in fact many people in the West, outside the Academy, have always considered animals as sensitive beings.”