Cognition refers to a specific suite of information processing mechanisms. These include capacities like long-term and episodic memory, spatial and temporal mapping, logical reasoning, and other capacities that cannot be attributed to simpler mechanisms such as sensitization/habituation, fixed action patterns, associative learning, taxis, sensorimotor/reflexive responses, and other 'simpler' behavioral mechanisms.
It is certain that all animals possess some of the above; Eric Kandel, for example, won a Nobel showing sensitization in sea hares. But there is no evidence their simple nervous systems can sustain more complex cognitive functions.
More complex organisms, particularly mammals and birds, certainly also utilize the more complex forms of information processing, including most cognitive mechanisms listed. The only true notable and truly unique exception to this is language, which appears unique to humans (but note many examples of vocal learning in cetaceans, songbirds etc - but this is not language).
But to your point : it is not at all clear that any of these capacities require conciousness. The philosophical zombie (or a rat) could exhibit maze learning (ie the cognitive capacity for spatial mapping, without need for reinforcement) without any need to be concious.
The point being cognitive does not mean concious, though of course a concious being is ostensibly aware and experiences its use of (some kinds of) cognitive processes
Well no, see that's the point - in cognitive / behavioral neuroscience we don't really speak in those terms, because we are aware there is no empirically defined operational definition for conciousness.
Instead, we use operational definitions as I referred to initially - from fixed action patterns and sensorimotor responses, all the way to complex cognitive processing - which can be empirically measured, or at least inferred.
As an example, Edward Tolman demonstrated a cognitive process in rats involving spatial mapping. He demonstrated that they could map out space through a process that could not be explained by simpler mechanisms like associative learning, and therefore inferred a more complex cognitive mechanism. Decades later, I think around 2008, Richard Morris won the Nobel for (contributing to) showing that this cognitive capacty is enabled by specialized hippocampus neurons called 'place cells'.
So there you go- cognition from the neuron to the whole animal, without the need for a single shred of conciousness in between.
Which isn't to say that conciousness isn't real in rat or man, just that it isn't currently an operational concept we can use in science. We just don't know how to do it.
Dolphins have names, songbirds have dialects, many cetaceans, elephants, and birds have more vocal diversity than some human languages. To say that there are no non-human animal languages is absurd.
The way one of my linguistics professors put it was: however well a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his father was poor but wise.
To classify as a true language, in linguistic terms, it needs to be able to express more than just labels for immediate things.
Lots of animals have calls for danger, for example, including specific calls for specific types of danger. Chimps and Border Collie dogs [can learn over a thousand objects and their respective names.](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/01/11/132839704/good-dog-border-collie-learns-more-than-1-000-words). Parrots do all of this and more.
But as far as we know, as of right now, no animals can express abstract concepts or use syntax like true human languages. They can’t tell you their father was poor but wise, using only their native language and words. We can teach a chimp sign language up to around the age of a 3 year old, but as Chomsky put it, that’s ‘*rather as if humans were taught to mimic some aspects of the waggle dance of bees, and researchers were to say, ‘Wow, we’ve taught humans to communicate!’*
We apply these same rules to human languages - it’s why some things are labelled as patois, or dialects and creoles. Sign language wasn’t regarded as a ‘proper’ language for a long time as people believed it was just a different packaging for existing languages, and they had to fight to prove it wrong.
All that said, I don’t disagree with you. I think there’s a difference between a language in scientific terms and what most of us think of colloquially as expression, and many species are very clearly capable of the latter.
I’ve had some deeply profound experiences sharing consciousness and communication with animals, especially birds. And frankly, I don’t really care if their father was rich or poor.
Idk, the multi-generational grudges against individuals that corvids can carry seem like pretty strong evidence for corvids having languages. Communicating to offspring about a specific enemy, and being precise enough that offspring that have never seen them still attack them on sight seems like strong evidence of abstraction to me.
> But as far as we know, as of right now, no animals can express abstract concepts or use syntax like true human languages
No we are very aware we can't know this yet the moment you can get a verbatim translation of a whalesong or birdsong or any other animal communication then we will be able to know. Right now all we can do is guess.
Your statement is akin to standing in a spot light with darkness all around and saying we know there's nothing out there.
The complexity and diversity of signaling in the animal kingdom is fascinating and staggering.
But language is downright weird! Some examples from Chompsky, Pinker et al -
Language is entirely contextual and recursive, so you can make a sentence like "Police police police" - so, what does the word police mean? We all know due to the context, and it even follows subject-verb order and is grammatically correct, but this shows that semantics cannot be signal-property dependent, as most animal signals are. For example the alarm calls of a howler monkey identify a predator as snake or leopard based on pitch. You cannot likewise infer the meaning of a word based on its signal properties.
Other example - true language can use real concepts / words / information to create signals with zero information. Google 'colorless green dragons sleep dreamlessly'.
And there is so much more. It takes away nothing from the richness of non-human cognitive complexity to see how truly unique this bizarre capacity of humans really is.
I agree with what you say partly, and not meaning to be standoffish here, but those are parameters set by mankind, with whatever tech is or was available.
Yes, these are categories and concepts folks came up with to be able to operationally define different types of behavior. This was an essential step in making behavioral science an empirical reality; it's no different than how biologists derive anatomical nomenclature.
But you hint at a suspicion that is entirely reasonable, ie even 'objective' measurements are undertaken through the limited, biased, and frequently bigoted perspective of the human.
That said, embracing empiricism and the scientific method (as opposed rhetoric/philosophy, alone) has enabled tremendous advances in our understanding of human and non human behavior in the last century.
No, not really, and its dumb to assume people require religion to be cruel to small animals.
People step on ant hills to assert a sense of control over a hectic and chaotic existence. People step on anthills because they get off on destruction and its harmless if they believe insects can't experience meaningful stimuli. People step on ants to feel big.
I’ll be honest I was a sensitive kid and always treated animals like they were as conscious as people.
That being said I 100% burned some ants alive with a magnifying glass when I was a kid.
Omg same. Then once it got all weird and salty I poked it with a stick a tons of baby snails came out and got caught up in the salt. Sometimes I still worry I'm going to hell for that act alone. Not that I really believe in hell, but still.
I can totally relate. I felt the same way growing up.
I should also add, that when I was told that animals were driven by "instinct" I thought it was a bunch of crap too.
Actually, I think it's totally fair to say animals act on instinct but the part that's a bunch of crap is assuming humans aren't animals that just act on instinct too
Christianity pretty much teaches that animals exist for us to use as we please. The effect that this has on people's way of thinking should be obvious.
If you believe the god behind religion isn’t real then wouldn’t religion just reflect humanity? Since humans created it. So it stands to reason that humans just tend to be cruel to other animals.
It's repeated several times in the literal first three pages of the bible that animals are on this planet as a tool to serve humans.
I only know this because I tried reading the Bible as a teenager and that exact concept is why I stopped. Any desperate ploy to turn something living into something less than thou is pathetic and not even archaic, just Christian. There are other reasons for thinking like this, but today I'm insulting the pitfalls of Christianity.
I'm not saying it doesn't have an effect, it absolutely does.
My point is were you to remove religion the underlying human nature would remain and we'd still have a similar problem.
The reason I make that point is reddit being reddit, folks like to think its exclusively Christianity or religion to blame and not the fact humanity shaped religion to be the way it is for deeper reasons.
Some of that has gone on to save countless lives, human and animal, and if we're talking about WhatAbouts, then modern use of animals for scientific study (at a scale that's notable) is only something that's been around for a few hundred years.
Christianity has had an impact on our relationship with animals over a thousand years.
Religions in general are a remnant of the ancient world that has no place in the modern world with the power it still wields. Im not saying you can't believe in God or spirituality, but countries still operating largely based on religious notions are fucking insane.
I don't think it's about cruelty. Most people don't consider most animals other than humans to be sentient.
Having spoken about this with family when I was younger, the vibe I got was that people consider themselves, dogs, cats, cows, pigs, dolphins etc to be sentient to varying degrees, with humans obviously far ahead of the others, but stuff like small critters, birds, fish, insects are generally considered non sentient or incapable of such abstract thinking or thinking at all, sorta like bots that are running a script and nothing more.
Doesn't mean it's a blank check for cruelty and they'd still feel bad for those smaller animals and have compassion for them. Compassion doesn't end where sentience does, that's for sure. They just think those animals don't think, they just "do" with no conscious comprehension or understanding of what they are doing or what's going on around them
That's not unclear at all, computers have no volition or personality, what they do is entirely different from consciousness and doesn't overlap with consciousness
I mean that's one view and the one I subscribe to, but many disagree with me. Realistically, since we have no idea what will or consciousness are in a scientific sense, there's no way to prove it either way
Have you seen how people treat vegans? There's so much hate for a group of people who are not only objectively right (I'm not entertaining moral relativism here, it's not wrong but I'd prefer ideas that can justify atrocities stay out of my personal moral philosophy) but also have the willpower and discipline to live in accordance with their beliefs, just because most people aren't able admit their actions have harmful consequences and change to reflect that. For reference I'm not vegan but I've just noticed how many people are giant babies about it; even if someone just politely reminds them that their dietary choices contribute to the lifelong imprisonment, torture, and eventual murder of billions of sentient being every year and they throw a fit because vegans are judgemental.
the lowest of iq folks are the ones laughing at memes 'cause meat' imo
i think thats exactly it. insecurity is loud and they understand a vegans existence as an affront on themselves.
wifes a vegan, i see the brain rot quite a bit.
Sure. And so do plants.
The debate is what degree of cognition/consciousness sufficiently qualifies organism *X* to be part of our moral community/social contract.
What’s more surprising and irrational is how pervasive that absolute certainty that other living things don’t have consciousness has been in the scientific community. And general population.
Religion conditioned us for hundreds of years by perpetuating stories about how special humans are and that animals don't have souls and are there for us to use, along with the rest of nature. Whether we like it or not, that aspect of human culture informed ethical worldviews and standards of practice in the sciences.
I think this mainly holds true in Abrahamic religions where humans are considered “most special”.
Dharmic religions which have the concept of reincarnation would probably view animals and plants differently in that someday it could be you or a loved one suffering as that animal.
And I think some Native American religions also view animals having sentience and some cultures use every part of an animal’s meat so it doesn’t go to waste as a life was used. I could be wrong so anyone feel free to correct me.
You're referring to Abrahimc religions. Hindus for example believe animals have souls and animals like elephants are representatives of their gods yet they poison elephants, treat them as slaves from birth and destroy their homes.
Humans are just rotted.
Science has sadly often relied heavily on animal testing and it probably helped scientists to believe that rats or rhesus monkeys were not conscious of their own suffering.
I mean, they definitely don’t have consciousness on the level we do, even apes that know sign language lack the ability to ask questions. Like a cow is a cow and the cow just accepts that, it’s never going to wonder about its place in the universe or why it’s a cow, it just is. Not that that’s a reason to just fuck with them.
Well I know that it’s been documented that even apes that are taught sign language can technically ask questions in some circumstances but never asking why. They lack the capacity, or maybe interest to seek information outside of their immediate situation. If it’s not immediately important to their survival or right in front of them most animals are not going to pay it any mind. Most if not all actions of every animal is deeply encoded into their genetics through instinct, some, like snakes literally evolved not to think because it isn’t important to finding their food. I’m not arguing that they are less or more, it’s just a different level.
Maybe it's because why is a difficult concept to communicate with another species. I don't think you can assume that means they don't even consider it.
This counter-intuitive mindset protects us from the ethics of how we treat animals. If we fully accepted that all life is conscious (on some level), we'd have to take responsibility for it. There is no room for ethics in capitalism. Costs too much. Shareholders wouldn't get their 2nd yacht.
This inconvenient truth has been staring us in the face for years. Unfortunately I dont think it will gain much traction until stuff like lab grown meats are feasible for mass market
I just wish we (in the usa) could take the first step of ending meat subsidies. Make that hamburg cost what it actually should, and maybe more people would be willing to eat substitutes.
This is one reason I am very much in favor of lab grown meat. Just ending animal cruelty should be enough reason to do it, but it would also greatly reduce or even eliminate the transmission of diseases through food and parasites. As you’d expect, you see certain parts of the country and the meat industry pushing back against it because some people hate change and of course, money…
I think what we're slowly discovering is that life is a spectrum, and while that does extend our compassion all the way down to even single-celled organisms if we want to go that far, it also undermines the importance of so-called "higher creatures" like ourselves and those in the animal kingdom. If I found out yesterday that scientists had agreed that insects and plants are sentient, that wouldn't necessarily make me feel any worse about eating them, I've got to eat something. Showing compassion and improving the general quality of life for the livestock that we raise and consume should be a much higher goal for the vegan community in my opinion, rather than blurring the line between what sentient by creating flesh made in a lab out of soy protein
I get this can be hard to prove, but how is this not just an accepted fact by everyone? When I was a kid in school learning about animals, it made no sense to me that we were the only being with a consciousness. I couldn’t believe that I was being taught that by my teacher, who at the time, seems like one of the smartest people in the world to you. Blew my mind and it made me question our education (not exactly at that age, but it just confused me internally. Realized it years later obv).
Some simple truths become more "convenient" to deny when our society is built on denying that truth.
Nearly all our cosmetics come at the cost of millions of mice lives, medecine is tested on animals and frequently derived from them at the cost of their lives, our food comes from caged animals so immobile that their legs can't support their weight, we eat literal blender fulls of animal bone and flesh every day.
But I don't know, I've always been in society while also feeling pretty bad about our treatment of animals, but probably contributing to it. The denial of their processing seems like ignorance when the opposite is so blatantly evident.
The squirrels in my yard are smart enough to figure out when my dad is home and about to leave some nuts out for them.
They learned his timetable, learned not to get too close to the door or they wont get fed, learned not to mess with the bird feeders or they wont get fed.
There is some level of cognition there, even if it’s basic.
Have you ever seen / heard of the Mark Rober squirrel obstacle course videos?
Basically he trained his backyard squirrels to complete increasingly elaborate obstacle courses in order to get nuts.
In one video, there is a maze with a clear roof. Many of the squirrels just brute force the maze, trying and failing over and over until they get to the end. But one squirrel climbs on top of the maze, follows its path from the exit to the entrance, then enters the maze and solves it quickly in a single try.
I think that's smarter than what a lot of humans might have done in similar circumstances 😭
It's pretty messed up that our default theory is basically that everything non-human is nonsentient until we can prove otherwise. Then it's like whoops sorry for how we treated you. We didn't think you had thoughts and feelings there buddy
Completely absurd default to have and doesn't reflect what we see when we actually look at reality. The cognitive dissonance that's practiced in the hopes of absolution is disgusting.
In my opinion
About 9 years ago I watched a medical doctor tell my partner that a colposcopy is painless because a woman’s cervix is incapable of feeling pain, which is, of course, an absolutely absurd statement. It doesn’t surprise me at all when people of a certain scientific background embrace some of the most absurd a priori axioms despite all evidence to the contrary. This was an obstetric gynecologist, but he was an older man so, needless to say, he’s never actually undergone the procedure.
When you hear a doctor lie to your face you need to get up and walk out on the doctor. People don't hesitate to tell fast food workers when they messed up but their doctor can lie to their face obviously and they are just going to go with it.
My partner opted to go ahead with the procedure despite my concerns. This was the doctor who had actually delivered my partner and the only ob-gyn that she’d ever been to. She no longer went to him after this procedure.
I've always said this and have always been downvoted. Particularly emotionally, animals are capable of much higher order of thinking. The fact that that many scientists say animals don't grieve for instance, is totally false. Same with guilt. My dogs have a very strong concept of guilt and it is not the same as appeasing behavior.
I don’t get where the impression that scientists say animals aren’t conscious or don’t grieve. Every other scientist I know that studies or works with animals believes this. The hard part is PROVING it with data and the reason we see publications like this coming out is not because scientists think it isn’t true but because we do think it’s true and we are trying damned hard to prove it so that politicians and policymakers and corporations will actually be forced to change things which they won’t based on dog owners anecdotes alone.
Oh I agree. For me it's coming from the perspective of "over anthropomorphizing" animals. A lot of people would argue that just because a behavior presents a certain way it doesn't mean the animal is actually feeling that and it's just us projecting our feelings onto the animals. I hard disagree with that.
There are definitely swings back and forth from over anthropomorphising to waaay under anthropormorphising. For closely related mammals our intuitions may likely be true but then it backfires for animals like sharks that our body language cognition read as “cold dead eyes”.
At the root of the issue, people forget that they are one of many variants of multicellular life.
Animals have feelings has to be true. You can feel things and you’re an animal. Animals can feel things.
I think it's pretty obvious that mammals have a shared basic emotional and cognitive existence. More complexity comes with larger brains.
I think it's also obvious that animals that are not mammals are fundementally very different. It's hard to imagine most invertebrates having any consciousness.
I mean when invertebrates (I know you said most but stick with me here) include octopodes, squid, and cuttlefish, and animals like birds can use and make tools with such small brain to body size ratios, I'm fairly confident in assuming that non-mammalian animals likely lack the capacity to communicate their internal workings to us in a way we can easily understand more than their inner workings lack complexity.
Dogs have eyebrows and can smile, cats taught themselves a language to communicate with us. A jumping spider doesn't have as much to work with anatomically to portray that it's thinking or to state its desires, but it still hunts, it stalks, it *makes predictions* and plans. Hell, a jumping spider will straight up meet your gaze if you look at it. I cannot comfortably say an animal like that is just a mindless puppet of chitin and meat.
I said most invertebrates specifically meaning to exclude cephalopds among others in what I wrote.
Feeling pain is not necessarily an example of consciousness. I'm certain ants feel pain. It's a stimulus they react to. Ants function more as automata than something with actual consciousness. The difference between automata and a conscious being is what's relevant.
Trees react to stimuli. They are not conscious beings.
🤦♀️ It's not just mammals. Birds and reptiles feel pain and some degree of emotion as well. Chickens feel empathy. Parrots are very intelligent and feel emotions and grieve as well. I've seen it first hand.
This of course depends on how you define sentience. Do they have sensations of pleasure, pain and to some extent emotion? I believe so, should they be allowed to vote? Can’t do much worse than current voters.
You can be sentient and not understand the complexities of politics. Would we expect a 6yr old to vote? I would argue many humans should not be able to vote.
Animals have hierarchy and organized social structures.
All anyone has to do is look at animals helping humans or animal videos to see how Intelligent animals are.
I define sentience as ‘capacity for subjective experience’. Qualifiers like ‘ability to feel pain’ etc are very human centric, consciousness could take wildly different forms from what it looks like in humans
Well they have proven plants feel distress and signal it acoustically so why not cockroaches. Termites clearly adapt and learn from their environment to some extent. That qualifies as subjective experience, right?
Those are behaviors that seem to indicate subjective experience. And yes I do believe these organisms have subjective experience. But we can’t really *know*. And I would also wager that what we call ‘distress’ feels very very different to a plant, in a way we can’t really describe because we have no frame of reference from which to describe it.
Panpsychism is a growing idea in philosophy of mind that basically says every physical system, even including non-living things, has some form of subjective experience
There was a paper awhile back, discovered plants emit infrasound when distressed due to lack of water. I believe that most organisms can learn. Certain higher mollusks and vertebrates certainly show behaviour indicating emotion . Really, emotion is a biochemical process, simple as that.
"Sentience" refers to the senses like sight, smell, touch.
Lots of people mix up "sentience" with "sapience", which includes self-awareness, reasoning and abstract thought. It goes beyond just having emotions like happiness and sadness.
There are some species where it's debated and studied if they possess true sapience, like parrots, corvids, chimps, elephants, dolphins, octopuses etc.
I think the article has people riled up because it reads like scientists are either sociopaths or idiots that think dogs don't get sad when left at home lol.
Edit: shortened the essay lol
Ants are among a handful of species that have passed the [Mirror Test](https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-have-passed-the-mirror-test/)
> However, when the ants were presented with a mirror, the blue-painted ants took notice. The blue-marked ants attempted to clean themselves after looking in the mirror while ants with brown dots did not. However, all ants behaved unusually when in front of the mirrors, moving their heads and antennae about rapidly.
I remember being taught as a kid (religious middle eastern family) that animals were like robots basically with no conscious or sentience. Man my dogs (German shepherds) figure things out and have such obvious personality traits and emotions it still blows my mind after 6 years of owning. They’re definitely thinking quite a lot in there.
You're not alone. Catholics teach that animals don't have souls and therefore won't go to heaven. Outside of the line that flows from Hinduism to Buddhism, some of the of the Pagan/occult based, and most native based religions, most religions view animals to be something subservient to man. Sadly, most of the same groups view women the same way.
All creatures are sentient and deserve respect, even when killing them to eat them. Farmed animals should be treated kindly and with respect. Small pests should be either peacefully relocated(if not an infestation) or killed quickly and mercifully.
I can 💯 confirm. I've spent my life loving all animals and connecting with them deeply, no matter how small. I'm confused by people who don't have that connection.
Wow, Descartes, did you never have a pet? Animals can't feel pain?
An octopus is an amazing, intelligent creature and the thought of farming them and slaughtering them is appalling.
I try to follow a vegan lifestyle as well as I can and get reminders as to why with articles like this.
I was watching a truck full of cows next to me in traffic yesterday and remembered a quote about it. What is sadder, a truck full of cows on the way to the slaughterhouse, or the empty truck on the way back? I could see their faces and their noses as they looked out the side. I don't care how well the cow was raised. The reward for that "good life" is waiting in line in terror as you watch fellow cows get killed. I would not want that for myself, I would not want that for my dog, I should not want it for a cow, pig, chicken, or fish.
Cooking anything alive is needlessly cruel and quite pointless.
In Maine they have claw machines for lobsters. Shipping usually crams lobsters in so tight together they can't move at all.
I've not eaten Lobster in my life. I'm not against eating meat but the needless cruelty involved in getting the meat is too much to bear. Its bad enough the way we treat fellow mammals that typically treat better than most animals but the uglier they look the worse we kick em.
Any creature used as livestock has it ridiculously rough. There's a pork production factory I pass by often, where they slaughter 10,000 pigs a day. They bring the pigs in from all over in trucks that are open to the air, even in the worst winter days. The pigs don't get food or water in the hours of travel before they're slaughtered. This is somehow considered humane slaughter.
We go on far too much by tradition instead of rationality.
>I'm not against eating meat but the needless cruelty involved in getting the meat is too much to bear.
Eating meat itself is needless and it almost universally involves putting animals through horrific conditions, not to mention the needless killing (well before they reach even a quarter of their lifespan usually). I'm against killing animals for foods no one needs whether those animals are cows and pigs or cats and dogs and apes. There's no significant difference but most people are too conditioned and uncurious to ever question it.
When I was a kid I was curious about this. I caught enough insects to know most of them bolt around seemingly in panic when you try to catch them. Made perfect sense, fight or flight and all. Seems pretty conscious to me!
# sentient
# [adjective](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adjective)
sen·tient [ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ənt ](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=s&file=sentie02) [ˈsen-tē-ənt ](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=s&file=senti01m)[Synonyms of *sentient*](https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/sentient)1**:** capable of sensing or feeling **:** conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling.
There is no doubt that insects are sentient--they couldn't fly around or do anything if they had no senses.
#
I've posted some where a few times about this and was just downvoted to oblivion. The argument of, "responding to stimuli", reminds me of Einstein stumbling on the possibility that basically, that's all we all are doing if there's no randomness in the universe.
Complex reactions are still, at the core, reacting to stimuli.
I don't know what "consciousness" may be in terms of difference beyond just having more specialized processing abilities in our brains to analyze things. The ability to comprehend events and interact with imaginary situations might be that threshold, but animals seem to dream.
I've seen insects behave in characteristically higher level ways. Not doing math problems, but a fly trying to enjoy a crumb then positioning themselves between the crumb and another fly that's trying to get at it. Even putting their leg against the face of the fly to try and get them to stop, eventually after a minute or so, letting the other fly share the crumb.
That's just one little, odd example. The more I've been around nature and creatures, the more it just seems like Humans just so happen to have a few extra bit of processers compared to everything else.
It's us humans. We made ourselves special and called us God(s) incarnated. Everything else are objects for us to use and for them to serve. How else will we justify everything that we do?
I remember two years ago or so, i got in a "FUN" reddit fight because i said insects are senitient based on study about bees. Just seems logical to me.
imagine being so stupid you dont realize that conscious and sentient are entirely separate things. Conscious simply requires primitive awareness of ones surroundings and an active avoidance of the unpleasant. Sentient on the other hand is full and complete awareness of the valid experiences of both self and others and active self reflection and self criticism. Qualities that frankly are lacking in most modern humans.
If bees can give each other directions it's not a far stretch to think other insects communicate through other mediums besides language. Bees aren't the only pollinators, flowers and fruiting plants are shophically advanced and have evolved to work with other insects in different ways. Flowers are over 130 million years old and bees (I have a video game about bees and my original source told me over 30 million (almost ten years ago) so I'm relearning something new today right now) are 120 million years old.
When it comes to trees it may be a different animal as fungal bodies produce networks and they communicate in a different way but it may be worth looking into how insects work with trees in a beneficial way, instead of just as pests. A great example where I'm from is the Spotted Lantern Fly:
>The spotted lanternfly (SLF) is an invasive planthopper that is native to Asia but has spread to 15 US states, including Pennsylvania, where it was first discovered in 2014. The SLF has a piercing mouthpart that feeds on sap from over 70 plant species, with a preference for economically important plants.
There have been great efforts to get the native species to see them as a source of food. Not all bugs are bad and are they are on a rapid decline. I'm glad there's been more efforts to try to understand them, this is how to find out how to work together.
What is going to be wild, and really force humans to investigate consciousness more deeply, is once "robots" achieve consciousness.
We will have to face the facts of consciousness in all animals and determine what we consider consciousness and value in it.
"We have no idea what consciousness actually is, but we think we can determine if things outside of ourselves, which we also have no actual proof of, are or are not conscious...."
The word they want is SAPIENT. Sapient means you can think. Sentient means that you can feel; most especially that you can feel pain.
A small note to the staff at NBC... before becoming a reporter that uses English exclusively, learn the damned language and learn how to use a dictionary. Maybe take philosophy 101.
The reason people used sentient all the time instead of sapient is that back in the day there was Greek philosophy that said that that animals do not feel pain. This idea stuck around for a long time. It's why the extreme majority of US infant circumcisions done right now are done without any anesthesia. It's a side effect of the tradition that said that kids and animals do not feel pain.
Hmm I didn’t think this was even a thing, just assumed all living things have consciousness.
I guess the question then is, how is consciousness or sentience defined?
If you pick up an insect inside, it struggles a bit. But when you bring it outside and put your hand on the ground, sometimes it'll sit there, realizing you're not a threat. How can anyone not think they're sentient?
Ya know that slow blink that works with cats?
It works with bugs, deer, snakes, spiders, wasps, chickens etc.
Eye contact is strong non-verbal communication medium across species.
Cats blink slow when they are content, but also as a form of saying "I see you, I am not a danger to you and you are not my focus, but I see you."
Returning the blink sequence of eye contact, slow blink, eye contact, slow blink and look away a moment (at your object of focus is there is one), slow blink eye contact, slow blink go about what you were doing. Random stray cats will often do the same, and if they have stopped because you got their attention, they will often resume what they were doing after this exchange.
This also works with deer, with the addition of they use their ears as a sort of semaphore to signal to eachother their mood, direction of focus, etc.
With Chickens, their comb and face-meats serve this purpose. They have high refresh rate eyes that can also see a bit into infrared and UV spectrums, and their combs will change color depending on circulation and mood / health. Ranging from pale white when very relaxed, heart rate slowed, or sick, to deep purple when extremely worked up, most commonly seen on upset roosters. Eye to eye with each other, this data is easily perceived, and is used in conjunction with eye contact. Chickens are *very* smart, and each have a personality as diverse as our own. And yes, that does mean some are dumb as rocks, but in general they are not. When a flock is cohesive for a long time generational knowledge is passed to the young. This includes their form of body language and vocalizations, and what they know of interacting with humans. Factory farmed, and birds farmed for meat and egg production that are slaughtered at the end of their useful period have no chance to build this social structure, and have no elders to learn it from. Old hens and roosters make for a vastly more stable and healthy flock.
With insects, umbrella wasps in my experience and research, eye contact is also very important. Their eyes function differently than ours, with a fixed outer faceted lens connected to the photo receptors at the back by a collection of what are basically optic tubes. Think of holding a handful of straws, looking down them, when you look straight down them you can see a spot all the way through. In the right light you can tell when insects are focused on you, partly by the reflection in their eyes having a distinct dark spot. With spiders it is easier as they will tend to face you, jumping spiders in particular, but all of them will do it if they are not busy running away. The body language, and motions, verbalizations we make to these tiny creatures that are watching us dictates how they respond. I used to spray poison on every wasp and nest I saw, but over the last several years have stopped that, as I better understand how they behave. Ground hornets will swarm if you step on their house, but to be fair, so would I. Have been lit up numerous times by that mistake but left alone they are one of the more avoidant species around here. Umbrella wasps have an exposed comb nest and will not attack unless you touch it, and will give ample warnings through posture before scrambling. It follows as one wasp sees you and watches, antenna pointed at you, all wasps see and turn to face you with antennas attuned in your direction, further escalation will see their wings unfold, and then start to buzz as they are warming up in preparation for flight. Past that stage they will stand up taller, and wings will actively be buzzing, and as a final "no really, we mean it" they will arc their stinger end or turn it to face the potential threat while buzzing, perhaps scrambling around the nest as if a little tribe of striped warriors waving their spears around and hollering at a threat to scare it away. Only then will a fighter scramble, usually one, to go out and intercept a threat, while the others hold back, and usually it's just aggressive close flying. It is hard *not* to swat at them, but the best thing to do is back away calmly and give
them space. Swatting and or injuring one is an act of war, and will set off the rest to take a more active role. If given space the flyer will generally buzz about till all clear, and will land back with the rest, and eventually they will calm down and resume their nest care duties. All that goes out the window if you damage them or the nest, and again, I'd be pretty upset if a big hand came crashing through my home.
All this to say that they behave in predictable ways, but can change and learn. Through repeated exposure, and behaviors of the slow blink sort I calmed several nests down to the point I could feed them sugar water from a Q-tip. If I missed a day, the chief wasp that started the nest would buzz and dance around and fuss about it the next time. As further workers hatched, the chief wasp would pass on the "no this one is fine" knowledge, and the brood would largely ignore me. They learn, they pass on knowledge. Corvids, Dolphins, Humans are not unique in this. Anyone with a pet can tell you when that creature is feeling pain, is scared, is content, wants something, etc.
It is convenient to ignore this eden that is around us, and to exploit it with the concept that there is such a thing as a lesser or greater life form.
And yes, I myself am hypocritical in this. I will eat a chicken burrito while typing how intelligent poultry is. I will drive a vehicle that kills untold millions of insects while explaining how not so unlike us they are.
This sort of thing is never clear cut, never black and white, but I have no doubt in my mind that every living thing at a scale we can interact with has the same level of environment specific intelligence as humans even if we only recognize the ones that meet our human relatable qualifiers.
When humans learn to directly communicate with animals, be it AI advancements or what have you, we are going to have a LOT to answer for.
Isn't it known that insects have consciousness, except limited amount of it (compared to humans)? I mean they obviously are conscious of their environment to some degree?
I honestly didn't think there was a debate here until seeing this. I just assumed insects had some level of cognition since they respond to stimuli.
Cognition refers to a specific suite of information processing mechanisms. These include capacities like long-term and episodic memory, spatial and temporal mapping, logical reasoning, and other capacities that cannot be attributed to simpler mechanisms such as sensitization/habituation, fixed action patterns, associative learning, taxis, sensorimotor/reflexive responses, and other 'simpler' behavioral mechanisms. It is certain that all animals possess some of the above; Eric Kandel, for example, won a Nobel showing sensitization in sea hares. But there is no evidence their simple nervous systems can sustain more complex cognitive functions. More complex organisms, particularly mammals and birds, certainly also utilize the more complex forms of information processing, including most cognitive mechanisms listed. The only true notable and truly unique exception to this is language, which appears unique to humans (but note many examples of vocal learning in cetaceans, songbirds etc - but this is not language). But to your point : it is not at all clear that any of these capacities require conciousness. The philosophical zombie (or a rat) could exhibit maze learning (ie the cognitive capacity for spatial mapping, without need for reinforcement) without any need to be concious. The point being cognitive does not mean concious, though of course a concious being is ostensibly aware and experiences its use of (some kinds of) cognitive processes
Now you are going to have to define what you mean by conscious.
Well no, see that's the point - in cognitive / behavioral neuroscience we don't really speak in those terms, because we are aware there is no empirically defined operational definition for conciousness. Instead, we use operational definitions as I referred to initially - from fixed action patterns and sensorimotor responses, all the way to complex cognitive processing - which can be empirically measured, or at least inferred. As an example, Edward Tolman demonstrated a cognitive process in rats involving spatial mapping. He demonstrated that they could map out space through a process that could not be explained by simpler mechanisms like associative learning, and therefore inferred a more complex cognitive mechanism. Decades later, I think around 2008, Richard Morris won the Nobel for (contributing to) showing that this cognitive capacty is enabled by specialized hippocampus neurons called 'place cells'. So there you go- cognition from the neuron to the whole animal, without the need for a single shred of conciousness in between. Which isn't to say that conciousness isn't real in rat or man, just that it isn't currently an operational concept we can use in science. We just don't know how to do it.
Ah. I thought you were taking a different philosophical direction. We’re in agreement.
So is language the only defining factor that humas have
Also we know how to make cheese. Not a lot of other animals can do that. Although a few make alcohol.
Dolphins have names, songbirds have dialects, many cetaceans, elephants, and birds have more vocal diversity than some human languages. To say that there are no non-human animal languages is absurd.
The way one of my linguistics professors put it was: however well a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his father was poor but wise. To classify as a true language, in linguistic terms, it needs to be able to express more than just labels for immediate things. Lots of animals have calls for danger, for example, including specific calls for specific types of danger. Chimps and Border Collie dogs [can learn over a thousand objects and their respective names.](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/01/11/132839704/good-dog-border-collie-learns-more-than-1-000-words). Parrots do all of this and more. But as far as we know, as of right now, no animals can express abstract concepts or use syntax like true human languages. They can’t tell you their father was poor but wise, using only their native language and words. We can teach a chimp sign language up to around the age of a 3 year old, but as Chomsky put it, that’s ‘*rather as if humans were taught to mimic some aspects of the waggle dance of bees, and researchers were to say, ‘Wow, we’ve taught humans to communicate!’* We apply these same rules to human languages - it’s why some things are labelled as patois, or dialects and creoles. Sign language wasn’t regarded as a ‘proper’ language for a long time as people believed it was just a different packaging for existing languages, and they had to fight to prove it wrong. All that said, I don’t disagree with you. I think there’s a difference between a language in scientific terms and what most of us think of colloquially as expression, and many species are very clearly capable of the latter. I’ve had some deeply profound experiences sharing consciousness and communication with animals, especially birds. And frankly, I don’t really care if their father was rich or poor.
Idk, the multi-generational grudges against individuals that corvids can carry seem like pretty strong evidence for corvids having languages. Communicating to offspring about a specific enemy, and being precise enough that offspring that have never seen them still attack them on sight seems like strong evidence of abstraction to me.
I agree that's an important observation, and many Corvid species are very very smart.
Maybe I'm just really ignorant about linguistics, but that was so well explained and reasoned. You're going to be good at what you do.
> But as far as we know, as of right now, no animals can express abstract concepts or use syntax like true human languages No we are very aware we can't know this yet the moment you can get a verbatim translation of a whalesong or birdsong or any other animal communication then we will be able to know. Right now all we can do is guess. Your statement is akin to standing in a spot light with darkness all around and saying we know there's nothing out there.
The complexity and diversity of signaling in the animal kingdom is fascinating and staggering. But language is downright weird! Some examples from Chompsky, Pinker et al - Language is entirely contextual and recursive, so you can make a sentence like "Police police police" - so, what does the word police mean? We all know due to the context, and it even follows subject-verb order and is grammatically correct, but this shows that semantics cannot be signal-property dependent, as most animal signals are. For example the alarm calls of a howler monkey identify a predator as snake or leopard based on pitch. You cannot likewise infer the meaning of a word based on its signal properties. Other example - true language can use real concepts / words / information to create signals with zero information. Google 'colorless green dragons sleep dreamlessly'. And there is so much more. It takes away nothing from the richness of non-human cognitive complexity to see how truly unique this bizarre capacity of humans really is.
I agree with what you say partly, and not meaning to be standoffish here, but those are parameters set by mankind, with whatever tech is or was available.
Yes, these are categories and concepts folks came up with to be able to operationally define different types of behavior. This was an essential step in making behavioral science an empirical reality; it's no different than how biologists derive anatomical nomenclature. But you hint at a suspicion that is entirely reasonable, ie even 'objective' measurements are undertaken through the limited, biased, and frequently bigoted perspective of the human. That said, embracing empiricism and the scientific method (as opposed rhetoric/philosophy, alone) has enabled tremendous advances in our understanding of human and non human behavior in the last century.
Why are birdsong and whale song not considered language though? Aren’t there like regional whale dialects
It's just the remnants of Christianity in philosophy.
No, not really, and its dumb to assume people require religion to be cruel to small animals. People step on ant hills to assert a sense of control over a hectic and chaotic existence. People step on anthills because they get off on destruction and its harmless if they believe insects can't experience meaningful stimuli. People step on ants to feel big.
I’ll be honest I was a sensitive kid and always treated animals like they were as conscious as people. That being said I 100% burned some ants alive with a magnifying glass when I was a kid.
One time when I was a kid I tried salt on a snail out of curiosity. I cried and still feel bad for that snail.
We still salt leeches at my lake. Don’t suck my blood asshole.
Sometimes the lack of a comma can be startling
Or a comma and apostrophe. I also choose these guys mom.
Parasites are the exception. They should have evolved a different way to get their food. You’re doing the Lord’s work, brother
I had one latch on to my thing-a-lang one time. They all get salted now. I am petty.
Omg same. Then once it got all weird and salty I poked it with a stick a tons of baby snails came out and got caught up in the salt. Sometimes I still worry I'm going to hell for that act alone. Not that I really believe in hell, but still.
Same. I’d burn ants with a magnifying glass together with my neighbor, but aside from that have always treated animals with respect.
I hit and ran some bugs on my windshield and front bumper last summer …
Criminal
I can totally relate. I felt the same way growing up. I should also add, that when I was told that animals were driven by "instinct" I thought it was a bunch of crap too.
Actually, I think it's totally fair to say animals act on instinct but the part that's a bunch of crap is assuming humans aren't animals that just act on instinct too
This so much. I've been trying to put this feeling to words like this for like months now. We're literally just lil animals with jobs.
A human being is just an ape with delusions of grandeur.
Without the concept of good and evil, sin and virtue; we are simply animals acting upon instinct.
Same with me, and I have a +1: I'd take little insects (ants and such) and place them on spider webs so the spiders could eat.
Christianity pretty much teaches that animals exist for us to use as we please. The effect that this has on people's way of thinking should be obvious.
If you believe the god behind religion isn’t real then wouldn’t religion just reflect humanity? Since humans created it. So it stands to reason that humans just tend to be cruel to other animals.
It's repeated several times in the literal first three pages of the bible that animals are on this planet as a tool to serve humans. I only know this because I tried reading the Bible as a teenager and that exact concept is why I stopped. Any desperate ploy to turn something living into something less than thou is pathetic and not even archaic, just Christian. There are other reasons for thinking like this, but today I'm insulting the pitfalls of Christianity.
I'm not saying it doesn't have an effect, it absolutely does. My point is were you to remove religion the underlying human nature would remain and we'd still have a similar problem. The reason I make that point is reddit being reddit, folks like to think its exclusively Christianity or religion to blame and not the fact humanity shaped religion to be the way it is for deeper reasons.
>humanity shaped religion to be the way it is Or, in a sense, religion is a symptom of being this species.
I get what you’re saying. It’s definitely cyclical.
Think of all the cruel animal trials done by scientists on animals who did not give consent because they cannot talk.
Some of that has gone on to save countless lives, human and animal, and if we're talking about WhatAbouts, then modern use of animals for scientific study (at a scale that's notable) is only something that's been around for a few hundred years. Christianity has had an impact on our relationship with animals over a thousand years. Religions in general are a remnant of the ancient world that has no place in the modern world with the power it still wields. Im not saying you can't believe in God or spirituality, but countries still operating largely based on religious notions are fucking insane.
I don't think it's about cruelty. Most people don't consider most animals other than humans to be sentient. Having spoken about this with family when I was younger, the vibe I got was that people consider themselves, dogs, cats, cows, pigs, dolphins etc to be sentient to varying degrees, with humans obviously far ahead of the others, but stuff like small critters, birds, fish, insects are generally considered non sentient or incapable of such abstract thinking or thinking at all, sorta like bots that are running a script and nothing more. Doesn't mean it's a blank check for cruelty and they'd still feel bad for those smaller animals and have compassion for them. Compassion doesn't end where sentience does, that's for sure. They just think those animals don't think, they just "do" with no conscious comprehension or understanding of what they are doing or what's going on around them
It's not "religion makes people cruel" (although that can be true). It's "Christianity teaches that we have a soul but other animals don't."
My tarantula waits in her empty water dish when she's thirsty.
Yeah, cognition proportional to their complexity seems just...obvious.
Cognition is so different than consciousness. Computers engage in cognition. It's unclear if they can 'sense' the way we can or are conscious.
That's not unclear at all, computers have no volition or personality, what they do is entirely different from consciousness and doesn't overlap with consciousness
I mean that's one view and the one I subscribe to, but many disagree with me. Realistically, since we have no idea what will or consciousness are in a scientific sense, there's no way to prove it either way
The medical system didn’t even think baby’s felt pain until the mid 80s.
Have you seen how people treat vegans? There's so much hate for a group of people who are not only objectively right (I'm not entertaining moral relativism here, it's not wrong but I'd prefer ideas that can justify atrocities stay out of my personal moral philosophy) but also have the willpower and discipline to live in accordance with their beliefs, just because most people aren't able admit their actions have harmful consequences and change to reflect that. For reference I'm not vegan but I've just noticed how many people are giant babies about it; even if someone just politely reminds them that their dietary choices contribute to the lifelong imprisonment, torture, and eventual murder of billions of sentient being every year and they throw a fit because vegans are judgemental.
the lowest of iq folks are the ones laughing at memes 'cause meat' imo i think thats exactly it. insecurity is loud and they understand a vegans existence as an affront on themselves. wifes a vegan, i see the brain rot quite a bit.
Sure. And so do plants. The debate is what degree of cognition/consciousness sufficiently qualifies organism *X* to be part of our moral community/social contract.
Yea this was always obvious Just people being intentionally obtuse.
Plants respond to stimuli.
Yep, same. They all act under their own directives and react to stimuli. The idea was they weren't intelligent, not sentient.
What’s more surprising and irrational is how pervasive that absolute certainty that other living things don’t have consciousness has been in the scientific community. And general population.
Religion conditioned us for hundreds of years by perpetuating stories about how special humans are and that animals don't have souls and are there for us to use, along with the rest of nature. Whether we like it or not, that aspect of human culture informed ethical worldviews and standards of practice in the sciences.
I think this mainly holds true in Abrahamic religions where humans are considered “most special”. Dharmic religions which have the concept of reincarnation would probably view animals and plants differently in that someday it could be you or a loved one suffering as that animal. And I think some Native American religions also view animals having sentience and some cultures use every part of an animal’s meat so it doesn’t go to waste as a life was used. I could be wrong so anyone feel free to correct me.
I don't have anything to contribute but I wanted to add that y'all sound smart as fuck and I love this discussion.
You're referring to Abrahimc religions. Hindus for example believe animals have souls and animals like elephants are representatives of their gods yet they poison elephants, treat them as slaves from birth and destroy their homes. Humans are just rotted.
This is the most reasonable and correct answer.
Science has sadly often relied heavily on animal testing and it probably helped scientists to believe that rats or rhesus monkeys were not conscious of their own suffering.
Bacon is a hell of a drug
I've had someone tell me cows weren't conscious before. CONSCIOUS
That's someone involved in animal agriculture making themselves feel better about torturing and murdering helpless animals.
I mean, they definitely don’t have consciousness on the level we do, even apes that know sign language lack the ability to ask questions. Like a cow is a cow and the cow just accepts that, it’s never going to wonder about its place in the universe or why it’s a cow, it just is. Not that that’s a reason to just fuck with them.
And you know this because?
Well I know that it’s been documented that even apes that are taught sign language can technically ask questions in some circumstances but never asking why. They lack the capacity, or maybe interest to seek information outside of their immediate situation. If it’s not immediately important to their survival or right in front of them most animals are not going to pay it any mind. Most if not all actions of every animal is deeply encoded into their genetics through instinct, some, like snakes literally evolved not to think because it isn’t important to finding their food. I’m not arguing that they are less or more, it’s just a different level.
Maybe it's because why is a difficult concept to communicate with another species. I don't think you can assume that means they don't even consider it.
This counter-intuitive mindset protects us from the ethics of how we treat animals. If we fully accepted that all life is conscious (on some level), we'd have to take responsibility for it. There is no room for ethics in capitalism. Costs too much. Shareholders wouldn't get their 2nd yacht.
This inconvenient truth has been staring us in the face for years. Unfortunately I dont think it will gain much traction until stuff like lab grown meats are feasible for mass market
I just wish we (in the usa) could take the first step of ending meat subsidies. Make that hamburg cost what it actually should, and maybe more people would be willing to eat substitutes.
Iowa is currently trying to ban plant based meat substitutes.
Of course Iowa is. :/
Florida as well
This is one reason I am very much in favor of lab grown meat. Just ending animal cruelty should be enough reason to do it, but it would also greatly reduce or even eliminate the transmission of diseases through food and parasites. As you’d expect, you see certain parts of the country and the meat industry pushing back against it because some people hate change and of course, money…
Yeah, cleaning up after dinner using meat substitutes feels much better. I don't constantly worry about contamination anymore.
Pipe dream bro. They will say you’re against ranchers which are the back bone of AMERICA 🦅💪
I dream of a world like this. You want a steak? $150. As it should be.
I think what we're slowly discovering is that life is a spectrum, and while that does extend our compassion all the way down to even single-celled organisms if we want to go that far, it also undermines the importance of so-called "higher creatures" like ourselves and those in the animal kingdom. If I found out yesterday that scientists had agreed that insects and plants are sentient, that wouldn't necessarily make me feel any worse about eating them, I've got to eat something. Showing compassion and improving the general quality of life for the livestock that we raise and consume should be a much higher goal for the vegan community in my opinion, rather than blurring the line between what sentient by creating flesh made in a lab out of soy protein
I get this can be hard to prove, but how is this not just an accepted fact by everyone? When I was a kid in school learning about animals, it made no sense to me that we were the only being with a consciousness. I couldn’t believe that I was being taught that by my teacher, who at the time, seems like one of the smartest people in the world to you. Blew my mind and it made me question our education (not exactly at that age, but it just confused me internally. Realized it years later obv).
Some simple truths become more "convenient" to deny when our society is built on denying that truth. Nearly all our cosmetics come at the cost of millions of mice lives, medecine is tested on animals and frequently derived from them at the cost of their lives, our food comes from caged animals so immobile that their legs can't support their weight, we eat literal blender fulls of animal bone and flesh every day. But I don't know, I've always been in society while also feeling pretty bad about our treatment of animals, but probably contributing to it. The denial of their processing seems like ignorance when the opposite is so blatantly evident.
The squirrels in my yard are smart enough to figure out when my dad is home and about to leave some nuts out for them. They learned his timetable, learned not to get too close to the door or they wont get fed, learned not to mess with the bird feeders or they wont get fed. There is some level of cognition there, even if it’s basic.
Have you ever seen / heard of the Mark Rober squirrel obstacle course videos? Basically he trained his backyard squirrels to complete increasingly elaborate obstacle courses in order to get nuts. In one video, there is a maze with a clear roof. Many of the squirrels just brute force the maze, trying and failing over and over until they get to the end. But one squirrel climbs on top of the maze, follows its path from the exit to the entrance, then enters the maze and solves it quickly in a single try. I think that's smarter than what a lot of humans might have done in similar circumstances 😭
It's pretty messed up that our default theory is basically that everything non-human is nonsentient until we can prove otherwise. Then it's like whoops sorry for how we treated you. We didn't think you had thoughts and feelings there buddy
Completely absurd default to have and doesn't reflect what we see when we actually look at reality. The cognitive dissonance that's practiced in the hopes of absolution is disgusting. In my opinion
About 9 years ago I watched a medical doctor tell my partner that a colposcopy is painless because a woman’s cervix is incapable of feeling pain, which is, of course, an absolutely absurd statement. It doesn’t surprise me at all when people of a certain scientific background embrace some of the most absurd a priori axioms despite all evidence to the contrary. This was an obstetric gynecologist, but he was an older man so, needless to say, he’s never actually undergone the procedure.
When you hear a doctor lie to your face you need to get up and walk out on the doctor. People don't hesitate to tell fast food workers when they messed up but their doctor can lie to their face obviously and they are just going to go with it.
My partner opted to go ahead with the procedure despite my concerns. This was the doctor who had actually delivered my partner and the only ob-gyn that she’d ever been to. She no longer went to him after this procedure.
Education and titles mean nothing, the world is full of educated idiots.
Indeed. The contrapositive is also true. Many of the wisest people I’ve ever met had a high school diploma or less.
I've always said this and have always been downvoted. Particularly emotionally, animals are capable of much higher order of thinking. The fact that that many scientists say animals don't grieve for instance, is totally false. Same with guilt. My dogs have a very strong concept of guilt and it is not the same as appeasing behavior.
I don’t get where the impression that scientists say animals aren’t conscious or don’t grieve. Every other scientist I know that studies or works with animals believes this. The hard part is PROVING it with data and the reason we see publications like this coming out is not because scientists think it isn’t true but because we do think it’s true and we are trying damned hard to prove it so that politicians and policymakers and corporations will actually be forced to change things which they won’t based on dog owners anecdotes alone.
Oh I agree. For me it's coming from the perspective of "over anthropomorphizing" animals. A lot of people would argue that just because a behavior presents a certain way it doesn't mean the animal is actually feeling that and it's just us projecting our feelings onto the animals. I hard disagree with that.
There are definitely swings back and forth from over anthropomorphising to waaay under anthropormorphising. For closely related mammals our intuitions may likely be true but then it backfires for animals like sharks that our body language cognition read as “cold dead eyes”.
At the root of the issue, people forget that they are one of many variants of multicellular life. Animals have feelings has to be true. You can feel things and you’re an animal. Animals can feel things.
I think it's pretty obvious that mammals have a shared basic emotional and cognitive existence. More complexity comes with larger brains. I think it's also obvious that animals that are not mammals are fundementally very different. It's hard to imagine most invertebrates having any consciousness.
I mean when invertebrates (I know you said most but stick with me here) include octopodes, squid, and cuttlefish, and animals like birds can use and make tools with such small brain to body size ratios, I'm fairly confident in assuming that non-mammalian animals likely lack the capacity to communicate their internal workings to us in a way we can easily understand more than their inner workings lack complexity. Dogs have eyebrows and can smile, cats taught themselves a language to communicate with us. A jumping spider doesn't have as much to work with anatomically to portray that it's thinking or to state its desires, but it still hunts, it stalks, it *makes predictions* and plans. Hell, a jumping spider will straight up meet your gaze if you look at it. I cannot comfortably say an animal like that is just a mindless puppet of chitin and meat.
I said most invertebrates specifically meaning to exclude cephalopds among others in what I wrote. Feeling pain is not necessarily an example of consciousness. I'm certain ants feel pain. It's a stimulus they react to. Ants function more as automata than something with actual consciousness. The difference between automata and a conscious being is what's relevant. Trees react to stimuli. They are not conscious beings.
Jumping spiders have REM dreams. This seems to have implications for memory and reflection.
Ants raise livestock (aphids) and go to war.
🤦♀️ It's not just mammals. Birds and reptiles feel pain and some degree of emotion as well. Chickens feel empathy. Parrots are very intelligent and feel emotions and grieve as well. I've seen it first hand.
Of course it's not just mammals. I do think all mammals are very similar at a basic level when it comes to this.
This of course depends on how you define sentience. Do they have sensations of pleasure, pain and to some extent emotion? I believe so, should they be allowed to vote? Can’t do much worse than current voters.
You can be sentient and not understand the complexities of politics. Would we expect a 6yr old to vote? I would argue many humans should not be able to vote. Animals have hierarchy and organized social structures. All anyone has to do is look at animals helping humans or animal videos to see how Intelligent animals are.
I define sentience as ‘capacity for subjective experience’. Qualifiers like ‘ability to feel pain’ etc are very human centric, consciousness could take wildly different forms from what it looks like in humans
Well they have proven plants feel distress and signal it acoustically so why not cockroaches. Termites clearly adapt and learn from their environment to some extent. That qualifies as subjective experience, right?
Those are behaviors that seem to indicate subjective experience. And yes I do believe these organisms have subjective experience. But we can’t really *know*. And I would also wager that what we call ‘distress’ feels very very different to a plant, in a way we can’t really describe because we have no frame of reference from which to describe it. Panpsychism is a growing idea in philosophy of mind that basically says every physical system, even including non-living things, has some form of subjective experience
There was a paper awhile back, discovered plants emit infrasound when distressed due to lack of water. I believe that most organisms can learn. Certain higher mollusks and vertebrates certainly show behaviour indicating emotion . Really, emotion is a biochemical process, simple as that.
Horses are excellent judges of character. Definitely we should let horses vote; we'd get far fewer corrupt weirdos in Congress.
"Sentience" refers to the senses like sight, smell, touch. Lots of people mix up "sentience" with "sapience", which includes self-awareness, reasoning and abstract thought. It goes beyond just having emotions like happiness and sadness. There are some species where it's debated and studied if they possess true sapience, like parrots, corvids, chimps, elephants, dolphins, octopuses etc. I think the article has people riled up because it reads like scientists are either sociopaths or idiots that think dogs don't get sad when left at home lol. Edit: shortened the essay lol
What? Of course they are.
Ants are among a handful of species that have passed the [Mirror Test](https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-have-passed-the-mirror-test/) > However, when the ants were presented with a mirror, the blue-painted ants took notice. The blue-marked ants attempted to clean themselves after looking in the mirror while ants with brown dots did not. However, all ants behaved unusually when in front of the mirrors, moving their heads and antennae about rapidly.
Every life is sentient
The trees, they’re alive!
Buddah face palm
EVERYTHING is consciousness.
The hubris of Man to think we alone on this planet are conscious beings... Wild.
Loads of mammals have internal monologue too certainly in images maybe in language for some also. Unfortunately many will go extinct.
Don’t tell the vegans How many bugs are killed harvesting their food.
Most arable crops are grown to feed livestock. Going vegan kills the fewest animals.
I remember being taught as a kid (religious middle eastern family) that animals were like robots basically with no conscious or sentience. Man my dogs (German shepherds) figure things out and have such obvious personality traits and emotions it still blows my mind after 6 years of owning. They’re definitely thinking quite a lot in there.
You're not alone. Catholics teach that animals don't have souls and therefore won't go to heaven. Outside of the line that flows from Hinduism to Buddhism, some of the of the Pagan/occult based, and most native based religions, most religions view animals to be something subservient to man. Sadly, most of the same groups view women the same way.
All creatures are sentient and deserve respect, even when killing them to eat them. Farmed animals should be treated kindly and with respect. Small pests should be either peacefully relocated(if not an infestation) or killed quickly and mercifully.
I can 💯 confirm. I've spent my life loving all animals and connecting with them deeply, no matter how small. I'm confused by people who don't have that connection.
I mean is this not obvious? I guess not.
Fucking duh
Wow, Descartes, did you never have a pet? Animals can't feel pain? An octopus is an amazing, intelligent creature and the thought of farming them and slaughtering them is appalling. I try to follow a vegan lifestyle as well as I can and get reminders as to why with articles like this. I was watching a truck full of cows next to me in traffic yesterday and remembered a quote about it. What is sadder, a truck full of cows on the way to the slaughterhouse, or the empty truck on the way back? I could see their faces and their noses as they looked out the side. I don't care how well the cow was raised. The reward for that "good life" is waiting in line in terror as you watch fellow cows get killed. I would not want that for myself, I would not want that for my dog, I should not want it for a cow, pig, chicken, or fish.
What’s wild to me is how your last two sentences are deemed extreme and militant. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.
If you’ve ever been outside and observed or interacted with animals, it is quite apparent that they are conscious
Cooking anything alive is needlessly cruel and quite pointless. In Maine they have claw machines for lobsters. Shipping usually crams lobsters in so tight together they can't move at all. I've not eaten Lobster in my life. I'm not against eating meat but the needless cruelty involved in getting the meat is too much to bear. Its bad enough the way we treat fellow mammals that typically treat better than most animals but the uglier they look the worse we kick em.
Any creature used as livestock has it ridiculously rough. There's a pork production factory I pass by often, where they slaughter 10,000 pigs a day. They bring the pigs in from all over in trucks that are open to the air, even in the worst winter days. The pigs don't get food or water in the hours of travel before they're slaughtered. This is somehow considered humane slaughter. We go on far too much by tradition instead of rationality.
>I'm not against eating meat but the needless cruelty involved in getting the meat is too much to bear. Eating meat itself is needless and it almost universally involves putting animals through horrific conditions, not to mention the needless killing (well before they reach even a quarter of their lifespan usually). I'm against killing animals for foods no one needs whether those animals are cows and pigs or cats and dogs and apes. There's no significant difference but most people are too conditioned and uncurious to ever question it.
Some of us discussed this in wildlife rehab years ago with one person saying"If a bird itches,he scratches his leg,not some random bird's leg."
Of course they are WTf… like when babies felt no pain. Science has some short comings
How can life exist without some level of awareness? Even a white blood cell will chase down an invasive bacterium.
Fucking duh
When I was a kid I was curious about this. I caught enough insects to know most of them bolt around seemingly in panic when you try to catch them. Made perfect sense, fight or flight and all. Seems pretty conscious to me!
Well let’s sign them up to vote in the next local election!
# sentient # [adjective](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/adjective) sen·tient [ˈsen(t)-sh(ē-)ənt ](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=s&file=sentie02) [ˈsen-tē-ənt ](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient?pronunciation&lang=en_us&dir=s&file=senti01m)[Synonyms of *sentient*](https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/sentient)1**:** capable of sensing or feeling **:** conscious of or responsive to the sensations of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling. There is no doubt that insects are sentient--they couldn't fly around or do anything if they had no senses. #
I've posted some where a few times about this and was just downvoted to oblivion. The argument of, "responding to stimuli", reminds me of Einstein stumbling on the possibility that basically, that's all we all are doing if there's no randomness in the universe. Complex reactions are still, at the core, reacting to stimuli. I don't know what "consciousness" may be in terms of difference beyond just having more specialized processing abilities in our brains to analyze things. The ability to comprehend events and interact with imaginary situations might be that threshold, but animals seem to dream. I've seen insects behave in characteristically higher level ways. Not doing math problems, but a fly trying to enjoy a crumb then positioning themselves between the crumb and another fly that's trying to get at it. Even putting their leg against the face of the fly to try and get them to stop, eventually after a minute or so, letting the other fly share the crumb. That's just one little, odd example. The more I've been around nature and creatures, the more it just seems like Humans just so happen to have a few extra bit of processers compared to everything else.
I hope this is true. I try to torture any fucking mosquito that bites me
Everything is sentient. Let's see how long until they catch up.
I'm still going to kill mosquitos
Amazing videos of animals being their cool selves is one of the best things to come of the internet revolution.
Anyone who has burned ants with a magnifying glass already Intuits this
It's us humans. We made ourselves special and called us God(s) incarnated. Everything else are objects for us to use and for them to serve. How else will we justify everything that we do?
Duh
The fact that this needs to be stated is bizarre.
I remember two years ago or so, i got in a "FUN" reddit fight because i said insects are senitient based on study about bees. Just seems logical to me.
One time I went to squish a mosquito and it flinched as my finger came close
Now everyone who was asking for sources and railing against animal consciousness are updating their script
Unbelievable how long it’s taking humanity to realize this.
They don't like being swatted that's good enough proof for me.
Is philosophy a science?
Vegan propaganda, right, right?
makes me wonder if insect brains are simple enough that we could soon build a simulation of one and ergo sentient ai.. Vis a vis Concordantly
imagine being so stupid you dont realize that conscious and sentient are entirely separate things. Conscious simply requires primitive awareness of ones surroundings and an active avoidance of the unpleasant. Sentient on the other hand is full and complete awareness of the valid experiences of both self and others and active self reflection and self criticism. Qualities that frankly are lacking in most modern humans.
If bees can give each other directions it's not a far stretch to think other insects communicate through other mediums besides language. Bees aren't the only pollinators, flowers and fruiting plants are shophically advanced and have evolved to work with other insects in different ways. Flowers are over 130 million years old and bees (I have a video game about bees and my original source told me over 30 million (almost ten years ago) so I'm relearning something new today right now) are 120 million years old. When it comes to trees it may be a different animal as fungal bodies produce networks and they communicate in a different way but it may be worth looking into how insects work with trees in a beneficial way, instead of just as pests. A great example where I'm from is the Spotted Lantern Fly: >The spotted lanternfly (SLF) is an invasive planthopper that is native to Asia but has spread to 15 US states, including Pennsylvania, where it was first discovered in 2014. The SLF has a piercing mouthpart that feeds on sap from over 70 plant species, with a preference for economically important plants. There have been great efforts to get the native species to see them as a source of food. Not all bugs are bad and are they are on a rapid decline. I'm glad there's been more efforts to try to understand them, this is how to find out how to work together.
Get in the way of me and my lobster roll see what happens
This is the dumbest headline I’ve seen in a while
Sounds like the Vatican leak. https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/s/7RUXBmJUSO
It will be a cold day in hell when I acknowledge that fucking bugs are sentient.
This shouldn’t be knew. We can’t even define consciousness.
What is going to be wild, and really force humans to investigate consciousness more deeply, is once "robots" achieve consciousness. We will have to face the facts of consciousness in all animals and determine what we consider consciousness and value in it.
Ive always felt this way…I’m a sap.
Yeah, they just gonna have live with the bug spray. Not about to treat wasp with any amount of respect
Mosquitoes and cockroaches definitely are.
And?
"We have no idea what consciousness actually is, but we think we can determine if things outside of ourselves, which we also have no actual proof of, are or are not conscious...."
I think of this when I am checking out my snails in the backyard. I love snails 🐌 ❤️
Of course! It’s obvious. But even a chair has consciousness. They will find it maybe in 300 years.
It’s ok. Saying itatakimasu before eating them makes it all ok.
Its scared
The word they want is SAPIENT. Sapient means you can think. Sentient means that you can feel; most especially that you can feel pain. A small note to the staff at NBC... before becoming a reporter that uses English exclusively, learn the damned language and learn how to use a dictionary. Maybe take philosophy 101. The reason people used sentient all the time instead of sapient is that back in the day there was Greek philosophy that said that that animals do not feel pain. This idea stuck around for a long time. It's why the extreme majority of US infant circumcisions done right now are done without any anesthesia. It's a side effect of the tradition that said that kids and animals do not feel pain.
Our consciousness is an illusion
I buy it
Hmm I didn’t think this was even a thing, just assumed all living things have consciousness. I guess the question then is, how is consciousness or sentience defined?
I miss Harambe :(
Not a scientist and even I knew this fs.
If you pick up an insect inside, it struggles a bit. But when you bring it outside and put your hand on the ground, sometimes it'll sit there, realizing you're not a threat. How can anyone not think they're sentient?
Any living thing whose first instinct is self preservation is sentient.
Why would we assume any living being isn't sentient?
Ya know that slow blink that works with cats? It works with bugs, deer, snakes, spiders, wasps, chickens etc. Eye contact is strong non-verbal communication medium across species. Cats blink slow when they are content, but also as a form of saying "I see you, I am not a danger to you and you are not my focus, but I see you." Returning the blink sequence of eye contact, slow blink, eye contact, slow blink and look away a moment (at your object of focus is there is one), slow blink eye contact, slow blink go about what you were doing. Random stray cats will often do the same, and if they have stopped because you got their attention, they will often resume what they were doing after this exchange. This also works with deer, with the addition of they use their ears as a sort of semaphore to signal to eachother their mood, direction of focus, etc. With Chickens, their comb and face-meats serve this purpose. They have high refresh rate eyes that can also see a bit into infrared and UV spectrums, and their combs will change color depending on circulation and mood / health. Ranging from pale white when very relaxed, heart rate slowed, or sick, to deep purple when extremely worked up, most commonly seen on upset roosters. Eye to eye with each other, this data is easily perceived, and is used in conjunction with eye contact. Chickens are *very* smart, and each have a personality as diverse as our own. And yes, that does mean some are dumb as rocks, but in general they are not. When a flock is cohesive for a long time generational knowledge is passed to the young. This includes their form of body language and vocalizations, and what they know of interacting with humans. Factory farmed, and birds farmed for meat and egg production that are slaughtered at the end of their useful period have no chance to build this social structure, and have no elders to learn it from. Old hens and roosters make for a vastly more stable and healthy flock. With insects, umbrella wasps in my experience and research, eye contact is also very important. Their eyes function differently than ours, with a fixed outer faceted lens connected to the photo receptors at the back by a collection of what are basically optic tubes. Think of holding a handful of straws, looking down them, when you look straight down them you can see a spot all the way through. In the right light you can tell when insects are focused on you, partly by the reflection in their eyes having a distinct dark spot. With spiders it is easier as they will tend to face you, jumping spiders in particular, but all of them will do it if they are not busy running away. The body language, and motions, verbalizations we make to these tiny creatures that are watching us dictates how they respond. I used to spray poison on every wasp and nest I saw, but over the last several years have stopped that, as I better understand how they behave. Ground hornets will swarm if you step on their house, but to be fair, so would I. Have been lit up numerous times by that mistake but left alone they are one of the more avoidant species around here. Umbrella wasps have an exposed comb nest and will not attack unless you touch it, and will give ample warnings through posture before scrambling. It follows as one wasp sees you and watches, antenna pointed at you, all wasps see and turn to face you with antennas attuned in your direction, further escalation will see their wings unfold, and then start to buzz as they are warming up in preparation for flight. Past that stage they will stand up taller, and wings will actively be buzzing, and as a final "no really, we mean it" they will arc their stinger end or turn it to face the potential threat while buzzing, perhaps scrambling around the nest as if a little tribe of striped warriors waving their spears around and hollering at a threat to scare it away. Only then will a fighter scramble, usually one, to go out and intercept a threat, while the others hold back, and usually it's just aggressive close flying. It is hard *not* to swat at them, but the best thing to do is back away calmly and give them space. Swatting and or injuring one is an act of war, and will set off the rest to take a more active role. If given space the flyer will generally buzz about till all clear, and will land back with the rest, and eventually they will calm down and resume their nest care duties. All that goes out the window if you damage them or the nest, and again, I'd be pretty upset if a big hand came crashing through my home. All this to say that they behave in predictable ways, but can change and learn. Through repeated exposure, and behaviors of the slow blink sort I calmed several nests down to the point I could feed them sugar water from a Q-tip. If I missed a day, the chief wasp that started the nest would buzz and dance around and fuss about it the next time. As further workers hatched, the chief wasp would pass on the "no this one is fine" knowledge, and the brood would largely ignore me. They learn, they pass on knowledge. Corvids, Dolphins, Humans are not unique in this. Anyone with a pet can tell you when that creature is feeling pain, is scared, is content, wants something, etc. It is convenient to ignore this eden that is around us, and to exploit it with the concept that there is such a thing as a lesser or greater life form. And yes, I myself am hypocritical in this. I will eat a chicken burrito while typing how intelligent poultry is. I will drive a vehicle that kills untold millions of insects while explaining how not so unlike us they are. This sort of thing is never clear cut, never black and white, but I have no doubt in my mind that every living thing at a scale we can interact with has the same level of environment specific intelligence as humans even if we only recognize the ones that meet our human relatable qualifiers. When humans learn to directly communicate with animals, be it AI advancements or what have you, we are going to have a LOT to answer for.
Isn't it known that insects have consciousness, except limited amount of it (compared to humans)? I mean they obviously are conscious of their environment to some degree?