Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences

Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences Martin Schönfeld University of South Florida This paper is a review of the breakthroughs in the empirical study of animals. Over the past ªve years, a change in basic assumptions about animals and their inner lives has occurred. (For a recent illustration of this paradigm change in the news, see van Schaik 2006.) Old-school scientists proceeded by and large as if animals were merely highly complex machines. Behaviorism was admired for its consistently rigorous methodol- ogy, mirroring classical physics in its focus on quantiªable observation. In the old analytic climate, claims that animals are sentient raised method- ological and ideological problems and seemed debatable at best. Bolder claims, that animals are intelligent, or even self-aware in a way that is for all practical purposes human, were regarded as unfounded. Empirical trials to substantiate such claims were nipped in the bud, since it appeared that such inquiries would unduly humanize nonhuman beings. Scientists are not supposed to project their own intuitions, feelings, or thoughts on ob- jects of their investigation. Studying the afªnities of humans and animals would appear to violate this well-established rule, and would risk sliding down the slippery slope from fawns to Bambi, from rabbits to Thumper, and from science to myth. The task of science in the past four centuries had been to demythologize the past. Erasing myths had been the hallmark of progress; it turned astrology into astronomy, alchemy into chemistry, and natural philosophy into natural science. Naturalists, ªeld workers, and experimenters who disagreed or who resisted the reduction of life to The author wishes to thank John Voelpel, for his invaluable assistance and research at the Environmental Archive of the Philosophy Department, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA, as well as Frans de Waal (Emory University), Thomas Duddy (National Uni- versity of Ireland), Robin Wang (Beijing University; Loyola Marymount University, L.A.), Masami Yamada (Osaka), and three anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments to earlier drafts of this paper. Perspectives on Science 2006, vol. 14, no. 3 ©2006 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology 354 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2006.14.3.354 by guest on 27 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 355 quantiªable machines could be ignored. They seemed to commit the fal- lacy of anthropomorphizing nonhuman beings. Dutch, Germans, or Aus- trians scientists with doubts must have read too much Brothers Grimm; Japanese scientists feeding these doubts must have been misled by their own Shinto heritage. Thus foreign critiques were downplayed by the ‘real’ scientists in the English-speaking academy. It turns out that the dissent was justiªed. Anglophone reexamination of the Eurasian studies con- ªrmed their earlier results and produced an avalanche of new information. As a result, the ‘tough-minded’ behaviorist view was thrown out and is now being replaced by a better paradigm. I shall describe the paradigm change, summarize highlights of recent animal research, and suggest a philosophical interpretation of these ªnd- ings. Anyone interested in this scientiªc revolution would have to wonder whether “consciousness” is used appropriately when describing animals. Section 1 contains a conceptual clariªcation based on a simple linguistic analysis, and a naturalistic argument for the evolution of nonhuman minds. How the paradigm change occurred is the question that will have to be addressed next. Section 2 contains a sketch of the events, ªgures, and ªndings that triggered the paradigm change, and a historical argument for the wider cultural and geographic patterns that informed regionally prevailing ideas on mind. Sections 3–5 are summaries of the scientiªc breakthroughs over the past ªve years. The summaries concern primates and monkeys. A large amount of revolutionary work has also been done on many other mammals as well as on birds—not to mention hive intelli- gences such as ants—but their appraisal should properly be the topic of future papers. For the purpose of identifying the paradigm change, it sufªces to look at primates and monkeys, since they show the properties formerly identiªed with humans most clearly. Section 3 is an overview of ªndings of animal culture, tool making and use. Section 4 is an account of the recent experimental identiªcation of exact animal thought-contents. Section 5 is a summary of work on animal morality and a proposal of its naturalistic interpretation. The conclusion of the paper will make a sketch of an ontological model that ªts these discoveries better than the classic mainstream and that integrates them into a new metaphysics of nature. 1. Determining the Meanings of Consciousness The word “consciousness” evokes multidisciplinary associations, and its core meaning is obscured by an abundance of theories and perspectives. Consciousness involves a bundle of properties, some of which are pro- foundly intricate. Despite a wealth of information, the nature of consciousness is not fully understood. But the mysteries, problems, and puz- zles notwithstanding, some deªning traits of consciousness are obvious Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2006.14.3.354 by guest on 27 September 2021 356 Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences already by introspection and to observation. Consciousness is a state of awareness; this state of awareness involves an experiencing subject, and the experiencing subject is aware of itself as well as of its environment. The ways of being so aware involve sensations, emotions, memories, im- ages, ideas, thoughts, logic, value, and plans. Next to how states of awareness play out internally, there are traits of consciousness permitting its identiªcation by outside observers. Such external manifestations of consciousness are communication, tools, learning, and the defense or enforce- ment of values. Generally, consciousness involves an experiencing subject and its cognitive processes, and although this description does not exhaust the phenomenon, it should be unproblematic that two quintessential markers of consciousness are an inner life, or thought, and an external or- ganization, or culture. Whether nonhuman animals can properly be said to have consciousness is a complex question. If one assumes that consciousness is a static entity, similar to a Christian soul (which is supposed to exist either fully or not at all), then the differences between humans and animals will invite the conclusion that animals lack consciousness. But such an assumption is at odds with the observation that consciousness is a dynamic entity, as human de- velopment shows. Human life, if not cut short, follows a curve of transient levels of consciousness, from simple neonate beginnings to complex ma- ture operations to simple senescent endings. Seen in time, consciousness rises and falls, and the height of its healthy states depends on age. This trivial fact puts the properties of consciousness in a dynamic context. Thought and culture are markers, but they vary in simplicity or complex- ity with the steps of organic progression. The dynamic nature of consciousness makes its ascription to nonhuman animals less mystifying than it would otherwise seem. We can properly and literally speak of animal consciousness, without needing to qualify “consciousness” as such. We can still deªne it by internal properties, such as emotions, thoughts, or values, and by external properties, such as tools, culture, or rules. All that needs to be understood is that the levels of consciousness vary not only in indi- viduals but also in species. The paradigm shift in the study of animal minds concerns the investigation of the listed external and internal markers of consciousness, such as culture (section 3), thought (section 4), and value (section 5). Behaviorists used to be skeptical about the existence of such markers, and this skepti- cism was integral to the standard model of animals in the past century. Recent research has successfully identiªed the presence of these markers, which has refuted the behaviorist stance and replaced the old dualism of animal machines and human minds with a more anthropomorphic interpretation of nonhumans, as sharing traits of consciousness. This recent Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc.2006.14.3.354 by guest on 27 September 2021 Perspectives on Science 357 fundamental reversal in the interpretation of data is the paradigm shift at issue here. But the story of this paradigm shift is not as simple as this outline sug- gests. A human problem with the structure of scientiªc revolutions is that research is never quite free of bias. Kuhn famously identiªed one irrational element of paradigm shifts in subjective preferences for certain research questions, attractive to some but not necessarily to others. Another unwit- ting irrational element, however, concerns the collective intelligibility of certain research topics, and the revolution over animal consciousness re- veals this unavoidable bias like no other shift before. As science has grown into a genuinely worldwide endeavor, linguistic backgrounds of different scientiªc communities inevitably color the perceived plausibility of heuristic assumptions. What “consciousness” may or may not mean, and which of its connotations and references are lucid or obscure, depends also

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