Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition!

Dear Friends:

In doing the research for my book "An Exploration of Religion and the Meaning of Life" I came to the conclusion that something we call "God" or "Cosmic Consciousness" resides in all living things (and actually in all living matter) and this is what gives us all awareness, and then by default consciousness to a greater or lessor degree. (Not inorganic matter..... dirt is dirt!)


The Jain religion teaches non-injury to living creatures because it recognizes this fact. (The Jain religion teaches respect to living creatures even though I think that trying not to step on a bug on the sidewalk is going a little bit overboard!)

We have something here by Ross Anderson that is in the March edition of "The Atlantic" magazine as this months feature article and even though it is rather long it might be a good idea to read it all and then have a good long think about it!

I’d come to the bird hospital, and to India, to see firsthand the Jains’ moral system at work in the world. 

Despite millennia spent criticizing the Hindu majority, the Jains have sometimes gained the ear of power. During the 13th century, they converted a Hindu king, and persuaded him to enact the subcontinent’s first animal-welfare laws. There is evidence that the Jains influenced the Buddha himself. And when Gandhi developed his most radical ideas about nonviolence, a Jain friend played philosophical muse.

In the state of Gujarat, where Gandhi grew up, I saw Jain monks walking barefoot in the cool morning hours to avoid car travel, an activity they regard as irredeemably violent, given the damage it inflicts on living organisms, from insects to larger animals. 

The monks refuse to eat root vegetables, lest their removal from the earth disturb delicate subterranean ecosystems. Their white robes are cotton, not silk, which would require the destruction of silkworms. During monsoon season, they forgo travel, to avoid splashing through puddles filled with microbes, whose existence Jains posited well before they appeared under Western microscopes.

 Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe all living things are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy.

This idea that animals, and all living matter for that matter are conscious to a greater or lesser degree was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study cognition.

And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. 

In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not. (Even trees have a certain, but very limited amount of awareness....... but we will concentrate on animals! - Ed.)

 No aspect of our world is as mysterious as consciousness, the state of awareness that animates our every waking moment, the sense of being located in a body that exists within a larger world of color, sound, and touch, all of it filtered through our thoughts and imbued by emotion.

Even in a secular age, consciousness retains a mystical sheen. It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. 

David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical. (God? Cosmic Consciousness? - Ed.)

These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attention—a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it.

 In the West, consciousness was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans. Western philosophers historically conceived of nonhuman animals as unfeeling automatons. Even after Darwin demonstrated our kinship with animals, many scientists believed that the evolution of consciousness was a recent event. They thought the first mind sparked awake sometime after we split from chimps and bonobos. (In his 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes argued that it was later still. He said the development of language led us, like Virgil, into the deep cognitive states capable of constructing experiential worlds.)

This notion that consciousness was of recent vintage began to change in the decades following the Second World War, when more scientists were systematically studying the behaviors and brain states of Earth’s creatures. Now each year brings a raft of new research papers, which, taken together, suggest that a great many animals are conscious.

There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. 

Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.

Apart from Pythagoras and a few others, ancient Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implications—especially the Jains, who have taken animal consciousness seriously as a moral matter for nearly 3,000 years.

Many orthodox Jain beliefs do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The faith does not enjoy privileged access to truth, mystical or otherwise. But as perhaps the world’s first culture to extend mercy to animals, the Jains pioneered a profound expansion of the human moral imagination. The places where they worship and tend to animals seemed like a good place to contemplate the current frontier of animal-consciousness research.

 Crows have an unusually large brain for their size, and their neurons are packed densely relative to other animals’. Neuroscientists can measure the computational complexity of brain activity, but no brain scan has yet revealed a precise neural signature of consciousness. And so it’s difficult to make a knockdown argument that a particular animal is conscious based strictly on its neuroanatomy. It is suggestive, though, when an animal’s brain closely resembles ours, as is the case with primates, the first animals to be knighted with consciousness by something approaching a scientific consensus.

Mammals in general are widely thought to be conscious, because they share our relatively large brain size, and also have a cerebral cortex, the place where our most complex feats of cognition seem to take place. Birds don’t have a cortex. In the 300 million years that have passed since the avian gene pool separated from ours, their brains have evolved different structures. But one of those structures appears to be networked in cortexlike ways, a tantalizing clue that nature may have more than one method of making a conscious brain.

 In 2008, a magpie—a member of crows’ extended family of corvids, or “feathered apes”—became the first non-mammal to pass the “mirror test.” The magpie’s neck was marked with a bright dot in a place that could be seen only in a mirror. When the magpie caught sight of its reflection, it immediately tried to check its neck. (Crows recognize individual human faces. They are known to blare vicious caws at people they dislike, but for favored humans, they sometimes leave gifts—buttons or shiny bits of glass—where the person will be sure to notice, like votive offerings.)

Andrew Barron, a neuroscientist from Macquarie University, in Australia, has spent the past decade identifying fine neural structures in honeybee brains. He thinks structures in the bee brain integrate spatial information in a way that is analogous to processes in the human midbrain. That may sound surprising, given that the honeybee brain contains only 1 million neurons to our brains’ 85 billion, but artificial-intelligence research tells us that complex tasks can sometimes be executed by relatively simple neuronal circuits. Fruit flies have only 250,000 neurons, and they too display complex behaviors. In lab experiments, when faced with dim mating prospects, some seek out alcohol, the consciousness-altering substance that’s available to them in nature in broken-open, fermenting fruit.

Many invertebrate lineages never developed anything beyond a rudimentary nervous system, a network of neurons dispersed evenly through a worm like form. But more than half a billion years ago, natural selection began to shape other squirming blobs into arthropods with distinct appendages and newly specialized sensory organs, which they used to achieve liberation from a drifting life of stimulus and response.

The first animals to direct themselves through three-dimensional space would have encountered a new set of problems whose solution may have been the evolution of consciousness from simple awareness............... and from then on it was "off to the races!" 

The way I see it anyway!