Far more animals than previously thought likely have consciousness, top scientists say in a new declaration — including fish, lobsters and octopus.
Bees play by rolling wooden balls — apparently for fun. The cleaner wrasse fish appears to recognize its own visage in an underwater mirror. Octopuses seem to react to anesthetic drugs and will avoid settings where they likely experienced past pain.
All three of these discoveries came in the last five years — indications that the more scientists test animals, the more they find that many species may have inner lives and be sentient. A surprising range of creatures have shown evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.
That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.
Nearly 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment, as a flood of research on animal cognition collides with debates over how various species ought to be treated.
This raises some interesting questions. The premise of these scientists is that consciousness can be quantified empirically. Yet many of the tests described in this article can be passed by machines. Does that mean that the scientists who signed the declaration consider some smart devices to demonstrate consciousness? And what are the implications?
These arguments never make much sense because there’s no broadly accepted philosophical consensus on what sentience is.
I agree with this. I’ve read the statement that the scientists wrote and I honestly could not figure out what they are trying to say. I just don’t see how any of the tests they reference would challenge the idea that we don’t know how to define or test consciousness.
Sentience is not necessarily the same thing but its in a similar place. It may be possible to test depending on the definition.
I’d hazard the guess they don’t, and it’s easy to justify it - our current AIs don’t have the internal aparatus needed to develop counsciousness (yet). They’re way too simple and way too straightforward to be intelligent, whether intelligence is an emergent property or a fundamental structure.
Seems like a strong argument that consciousness cannot be determined by testing behaviors.
True, you can’t test a literal rock and expect the result to be telling of counsciousness. Good thing the researchers aren’t solely determining it by testing behaviour, and instead selected a group in which emergent intelligence is one of the probable phenomena.
Is emergent intelligence the scientific definition of consciousness? The article seems to be describing something else.
Is emergent intelligence the scientific definition of consciousness?
There exists no practical or effective difference.
I’ve always thought this, and thought it strange we assumed other creatures experienced lesser levels of sentience.
Vegans are well aware of this phenomenon.
People will tend to wave away atrocities by saying the victims “can’t feel it” or “don’t know what’s going on.”
We see it all the time in things like the treatment of indigenous people and the mutilation of baby’s genitals.
I think it’s fair to assume they experience a “lesser” level of sentience. People just assume it’s a lot more lesser than it is
Some journalusts are dumb again. Sentient != sapient. Sapient is conscious.
Sentient != sapient. Sapient is conscious.
Sorry, you have it backwards.
Sentient means conscious or able to feel, from the same Latin root as “sensory”.
Sapient means wise or intelligent, from the same Latin root as “sage”.
Sorry, you have it backwards.
Only if opposing conscious to intelligent/able to think. Which most people do not.
Most people do, in fact, make that distinction. One person can be more intelligent than another, but that does not mean they are more capable of feeling. So the two concepts are not the same.
Usually conscious is opposed to feelings.
Feeling as in awareness of the outside world, not as in emotions.
Unconscious people are not aware of the outside world. In fact, you can tell when they return to consciousness because they are once again aware of light, sound, etc.
I dunno about all that, but I used to have an African fish that would always get the zoomies when I’d come home from work. He’d spit water at me or gravel at the glass to get my attention, and loved playing hide and seek and always brushed up on my hands when I was working on his tank. He never reacted this way to visitors, just me.
Exactly this.
And to get to this you need experience, research, and knowledge.
And trying to explain this to humans in general would take several generations in best case scenario (much less actually doing/changing anything with that knowledge).
Usually anything attacking the doctrine of how extra super special & way more unique than other equally unique species are is meet with severe (auto-?)hostility.
Even without our status in question, just the “threat” of something being slightly less/differently inferior to us is immediately attacked by the vast majority.
And once we decide something is inferior to us it takes extra effort to change the popular belief (like racism between humans as well - just designate some human as non-human & they are considered about as much as billions of yeast bacteria as we are baking bread).
I think the autohostility is just hubris. Some people would like to pretend they know everything about everything. So when learning new things they get hostile because, oh no, we found them out.
Especially in today’s environment, I agree, hubris and greed.
The new paradigm is coming
I always instinctively knew it and that’s why i love animals so much. My son was born just like me, with a love and respect of all creatures, even insects (Beside mosquitoes and flies because these can really eat all my electric tapper)
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Slime mold appears intelligent, they used it in Japan to help reconfigure their subways iirc
So arrogant are we
IS veganism the real solution here, or is the real solution the all-artificial, all-synthetic diet? Me personally, I’m going to down this jug of red 40, and then I think I’ll get back to you
Veganism is the solution, yes.
Future generations will look back on us like we were crazy and barbaric for eating meat.
Nah, synthetic food (and eventually discarding our gross meat shells for silicon and metal bodies) is the rightful path. On the way there, veganism is a nice stop-gap for most people.
I agree that veganism is/could be a good solution moving forward. I strongly disagree that eating meat can be considered barbaric, as it is completely natural and present in every corner of the animal kingdom. Now, how we treat the animals we get that meat from is absolutely barbaric and should be considered so, but I don’t think meat eating itself should be villainized, at least in a retrospective sense.
Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it isn’t barbaric. Male lions will regularly kill cubs to make the mother ready for sex - that’s natural but we’d never accept (correctly) a human doing that.
Using the word barbaric is barbaric. It just basically means non-Greek/Roman. 😜
I understand your point but I dont think that the male lion’s proclivity for infanticide is equivalent to human life simply because that is not a typical (i.e. natural) aspect of human society
Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Pre-Islamic Arabia, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans.
Well, it is always possible that I am under informed so I guess my argument may not stand, at least not on the grounds I have claimed. Thank you for the link, I will read about this.
Rape then? Lots of animals rape and humans do so too. It’s ‘natural’ but barbaric.
If it ever comes out that plants are sentient and feel pain my moral compass is going to have a bad day.
I’m not even a vegetarian … but I have tried to eat less meat in recent years, in part because of the cruelty.
We can always go the way of only eating fruits (and fruit-like growths), as they’re specifically meant for being eaten.
The same is true of milk.
Well, no. Milk is naturally produced for a limited period so a mammal can feed its young. Fruits are produced year-round every year so a plant can spread its seeds as far as possible.
Milk and fruit are both only produced for a limited time.
For instance, many tomato plants only produce tomatoes for a few months of the year, and then they die.
Milk and fruit are both only produced for a limited time.
By each individual plant, sure. But for diverse farming, you can easily get a permanent rotation of fruits going.
You’re also completely ignoring the most importat fact - that milk is produced to feed newborns and fruit is produced to attract (and by extension feed) literally whichever species is around.
No, fruit is produced to be eaten by animals who will ingest the seeds and defecate them somewhere suitable for growth. It is not meant to be eaten by animals who defecate in a toilet.
Regardless, animals and plants used in agriculture have been modified by selective breeding to suit human needs, so the milk and fruit they produce are now meant for humans. And human agricultural practices ensure a constant supply of both fruit and milk.
Plants are autotrophs in that they create their own energy from the sun with the help of microbes in soils to supply nutrients to enable plants to do so.
Imo, the closer we can descend on the food chain to autotrophic nutrition, the better for all.
Of course, all of this has to be taken in balance. There needs to be a healthy discussion between domesticated and wilded lands.
But much research has been published showing that if the world moved to primarily plant-based/vegan/herbivore/autotrophic diets, then we’d quickly move to living inside of our planet’s boundaries which we aren’t now. Think about rewilding corn fields or wheat fields or soy fields and still having enough food left over to feed the entire population.
#govegan
Welllllll… What if you found out that every time you cut into a plant, it let out a high pitched scream that humans can’t hear?
https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-loud-we-just-never-heard-it-until-now
Yeah the fresh cut grass smell is actually a call to aid. They “think” the damage is caused by herbivorous insects, so they release chemicals to attract carnivorous insects to come and kill the other insects.
Plants probably qualify for a separate category of low sentience. If you’ve grown plants you know they’ll turn towards the sun, and you need to move them around a bit to make sure they don’t end up with a prominent lean. Some plants will use their tendrils to wrap around a trellis for extra support.
I don’t think we can qualify these actions on the same level of sentience as animals, but there is certainly something there. All living things probably have some degree of this, since they react to stimulus with chemical signaling. That’s not terribly different from what we do.
Me too. I still eat cheese but no more meats. Regardless of the sentient thing, it’s good for you to not eat meat.
Considering how pain is a trigger for an animal’s fight or flight response, and considering plants can neither fight nor flee, it would seem like a cruel cosmic joke for plants to feel pain. What purpose would it serve, evolutionary speaking?
No idea; though I think a consciousness could be independent of whether or not something feels pain. For instance, there are people that don’t feel pain but they’re very much conscious and killing them wouldn’t be any more just simply because they don’t feel pain.
I’d say eating plants would still be the lesser of two evils in that case. Animals we kill for food also eat plants, so from a pure quantity of suffering, it’s better to not have the middleman there.
But some animals we eat are carnivores, like most wild-caught fish. In which case, killing them reduces the total amount of suffering. Same reasoning as the trolley problem.
We, as omnivores, have a choice. The carnivores do not. I’d rather not cause more suffering than I have to (since I have that choice) even if there was the potential that it could possibly decrease overall suffering.
I will not go into other problems with fish specifically since it’s not on-topic.
Whereas I choose to cause suffering if I expect it will reduce greater suffering, including killing animals if necessary.
Everyone has their own approach to the trolley problem.
Do note that this whole thing is based on the hypothetical of plants being capable of experiencing pain. In reality, they do not possess a nervous system to enable that.
Of course I’d choose to kill an animal if the alternative was getting injured or killed (or starving in some extreme survival situation), but in day-to-day life, I do not see the need to do that.
If the only way to stop a school shooter were to kill them, I think most people would do so even if they were not personally threatened.
And many people, including myself, think it is moral to kill even an innocent person if necessary to prevent the death of a greater number of people. That’s the trolley problem in a nutshell.
But if I’m willing to kill a person in order to prevent them from killing other people, then I should also be willing to kill a fish in order to prevent it from killing other fish.
Finally, the argument for nonhuman sentience does not turn on the presence or absence of neurons. That would just be a cellular version of speciesism, and it inexplicably eliminates the possibility of sentience in extraterrestrials or machines.
The argument in the OP is based on behaviors, like recognizing self vs nonself, avoiding noxious stimuli, creative problem-solving, etc. Plants do many of these things too, just on longer timescales.
Even that’s a bit more complex, without predators many species massively overbreed, leading to mass starvation
That wouldn’t apply to ecosystems where the predator is invasive, for example the lionfish in the Caribbean (which happens to be delicious).
Furthermore, if there is concern for a population explosion then one could also kill and eat the predator’s prey, provided you eat fewer than the predator would have eaten.
Im pretty sure i have read articles about study finding that show certain trees can communicate distress via pheromones or something when under attack by insects that strip their leaves and some plants give off a very faint ‘noise’ when they are dehydrated or distressed.
Sometimes I confuse Sentient and Sapient in sentences but they actually don’t mean the same thing at all.
Wasn’t this already obvious?
Well, maybe, but it sure as he’ll isn’t convenient.
Al Gore marvel movie quip
An Inconvenient Sentience
My first, second, third and fourth thought. I didn’t have a fifth.
Denying such things in other animals has been part of a long-standing, mainly Western, push for human exceptionalism
I mean people have been pushing for recognition of this for at least a few thousand years so I’d say yes.
The lengths people are willing to go in self delusion for a burger are astounding though.
Some people are just straight up fine eating beef because they don’t care. Like, we won the food chain, and that’s enough for them
You really said “we won the food chain” like you wouldn’t run screaming from a slightly pissed off badger haha.
What a fucking absurd stance, the school of “if I can do it: it must be fine to do” ethics.
I didn’t say it’s my opinion, you silly goose.
The lack of critical thinking here is insane
Edit: the whole way we won the food chain isnt about standing toe to toe with any animal, we productionized their whole existence.
Beyond that I don’t know how you could know what animals I am or am not afraid of, that’s a pretty silly assumption
Uh huh, I believe you. You’re so tough and smart and strong, bravely debating and owning the libs, casually fighting badgers armed with nothing but your Jordan Peterson body pillow.
To think that Aldous Huxley was known as the last Renaissance man when you were among us all along.
Ok not sure what I’m debating here, is it really a point of argument that some folks are fine with consuming meat? Is it really a point of argument that humans are at the top of the global food chain?
Edit are you just 3 badgers in a trench coat?
the school of “if I can do it: it must be fine to do” ethics
Some people would call this the “law of the jungle”, or the natural state of things.
It’s also not reasonable to assume any one person would run screaming from a badger. People wrestle crocodiles and mountain lions and win.
If anyone thinks that I hope they get hunted by a sadist, are kept as their plaything, and live a long life begging for death.
It’s a completely asinine opinion that absolutely nobody worth giving a modicum of time or respect to maintains. There’s not even any point talking about, it’s like chiming in with the fact that some people think smearing shit on toilet walls is the correct thing to do when discussing how to grow food.
Also anyone who gets defensive about the idea they would run screaming from a moderately pissed off badger has never interacted with a badger and would absolutely run screaming from one.
Not to people indoctrinated by Abrahamic religions.
Yes.
We don’t even know what sentience/sapience/whatever is. We have some thoughts, people argue about the definitions, and stuff; but really… it all comes down to… “are they like us”… but we don’t even really know what that means.
So no. It’s not obvious. (Particularly because humans are surprisingly stupid.)
To put it another way, humans just aren’t that special. We started from the assumption that we are somehow fundamentally different
We keep finding out that all sorts of animals have language and culture, and it blows my mind that apparently, just about everything seems to have something akin to a name
To people who spend a lot of time around animals or even sea creatures, it may be obvious that they’re more like us than most would assume.
The thing that makes the most sense to me is some combination of like animism and panpsychism. Then it doesn’t matter what may or may not be conscious, basically treat anything like it might be to the most practical level. Though I realize this is crazy talk to most people.
For example, don’t destroy stuff and cause what might be harm just for the hell of it.
- Don’t kill a plant because someone called it a “weed”
- A person using the wood of a tree for warmth, cooking, survival is part of the cycles of the planet. A corporation destroying forests so those in charge of it can skim profits is not.
- Thank the plants and animals that gave their lives for your food, shelter, and things, and don’t waste their lives.
- Maybe you have a piece of furniture that has history and has been in the family. Maybe it has some sort of spirit we can only partially understand. Maybe spirits come into being sometimes, when an object is built with love, such a a baby is made, or when someone builds a nice table. Destroying that table is more than simply the breaking of wood, it’s the loss of a history, a being. A materialist view of the world is so limiting.
You had me up until furniture souls.
Yeah, leaving it at don’t casually throw away stuff that cost a plant or animal life would have been fine 😂
The mentioning of panpsychism didn’t make you stop?!
Go. Vegan.
Or just enjoy being at the top of the food chain, just don’t morally waffle about it, own it. Be into suffering
The idea that humans are at the top of the food chain is largely disputed. On a global level we are at about the same trophic level as anchovies.
Colloquial usage, as I am here, refers to dominance on an ecosystem, and freedom of menu.
In that way there is nothing close to humans. You.csn eat nearly any creature on the planet, ordered over the internet. Next day if you’re in a rush.
Humans have no widespread predators.
Or find a balance and don’t be edgy for the sake of pissing off vegans
I’m closer to vegan than not, I am targeting people who dance around their actions.
If you eat meat you are complicit in suffering. Don’t hide from that.
but consciousness is so tasty
Give it up. I’m not eating bugs. Intentionally.
Shrimp is bugs though
Yup. Species is an insane line to justify killing over. It’s not who can breed with whom, or how somebody looks that matters, it’s is there a ‘them’.
This is self evident to any animal lover
This reads like “scientists find that women have emotions and feeling and can feel pain”
It’s self evident to anyone not plagued by speciesism, regardless of their feelings about animals; I don’t think we ought to allow that much latitude to opt-out of the obvious moral consequences of this truth.
not surprising, I remember watching spider move when I was a kid and thinking they were obviously intelligent. sure they creep me out but I hate killing them for no reason, same with literally any other living thing
That’s true, spider man was pretty sentient in his movie
