- cross-posted to:
- biodiversity@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- biodiversity@mander.xyz
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.
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Will we now treat them as well as other clearly sentient animals like pigs?
You might be thinking of Sapience.
Sentience means capable of logic and reason. Sapience means wise or learned. Pigs are both.
There is no way I’m clicking on that link
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)
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.
Ofc they are sentient.
I fail to understand why do we will push the ‘no expression of the face means no intelligence or emotions bcs most of us communicate that way’.
It always turns out that whatever brain mechanics we think of as our own we later & with minimal research find in other animals as well.
Evolutionary speaking too, same brain centres (with various density and relative size - of which we dont have all that dense brains & and most parts are underdeveloped), it’s absolutely unlikely we would have developed something new in a few millions of years (especially given smol & fragmented populations facing extinctions and smol gene pools - tho that could be interpreted the other way too). It’s just specialisation, some (advantageous) functions grew, other were optimised to the point of non-existence.
Then again, given how intolerant are we to our own species in terms of our emotional response to slight visual differences (I mean vcompletely evolutionary, uncanny valley thing, the next village of humanoids might have been competing for the same resources, which makes different culture/colours/face shapes = danger, etc), how we choose to ignore compassion (like ‘look at that idiot, ofc they have no feelings, not unlike me, the superior being’) … ofc we can’t immediately recognise and understand what and how animals are feeling. It takes a lot of time, effort, & empathy (mechanical empathy, like to fully underhand their environment from their pov, and emotional empathy, how they are processing that environment).
And the bigger the difference and habitats, the harder it is (like any sea animal really). Anything non-mammal seems alien to us, no matter the smarts (eg cuttlefish, that can clearly experience psychological trauma on individual and population/cultural level).
And then there are fungi. After that plants. And whatever we choose bacteria to be (like beings, or just a literal matter of environment we live within). Etc :).
Insects don’t really have brains. The complexity of their ganglia is not really comparable to what we consider a brain and seems rather unlikely that they have anything like our consciousness, just due to the difference in complexity. Does not mean we should treat them like shit, they are living creatures - but also not sure why we need to pretend they are something they are clearly not.
Yes, and if the argument is that, “we must all become vegans,” because animals experience pain or because they’re closer related to humans than plants and deserve more empathy, it fails for insects, and more so in the case of some animals we’re even closer related to, like echinoderms with decentralized nervous systems. In that case it would make more sense to farm both plants and arthropods (and echinoderms?), and while eating insects doesn’t seem appetizing or appealing to me more, I’m sure it would be fine after a few tries and with some quality recipes.
If it’s about animal intelligence, I don’t see any way to decide for or against it or even begin to approach it, since that definition isn’t even locked down for humans.
If it’s about sapience or sentience or consciousness, we can’t even resolve that with people when it comes to how to think of humans who are severely mentally disabled, comatose, braindead, etc. And obviously neither vegans nor omnivores are trying to eat human vegetables.
Even if we could assume we all agreed on a definition of consciousness, humans still don’t agree on how to treat other conscious humans with empathy, as we see day after day across the world.
It would be nice to at least see animal farming improve the approach to minimizing the pain and suffering of food animals that we certainly know have a pain response.
Not sure how your answer is related to my.
Just agreeing that it doesn’t make sense to attribute qualities to insects that they don’t have, and pointing out that even the terms being attributed don’t have clear agreed-on definitions when they’re used for humans.
Thanks for explaining, I somehow didn’t get your point.
I find it hard to express my thoughts concisely, and it often ends up being a wall of gibberish. 🫤
Jumping spiders show some level of consciousness. They’re intelligent predators that heavily use their sight to identify prey. They can recognise different prey types, learn their behaviours and adjust hunting strategies accordingly. A good example is how they are able to recognise when certain prey is acting odd, deduce it’s injured and drop their stealthy approach for a more direct one. They’re also capable of remembering their environment and using indirect and often complex paths to sneak up on prey.
Scientists have even observed them “dreaming”, which is likely when they do the information processing required for such comparatively complex behaviours https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/jumping-spiders-dream-rem-sleep-study-suggests
Bold claim to go from REM in sleep-like state to dreams and consciousness, and the original paper is not making that claim.
A good example is how they are able to recognise when certain prey is acting odd, deduce it’s injured and drop their stealthy approach for a more direct one. They’re also capable of remembering their environment and using indirect and often complex paths to sneak up on prey.
All of this seems rather possible even with basic learning mechanisms on molecular level. Not sure why you would claim that this need consciousness. But if you have a paper on this topic I would be more than interested to read them.
No papers that are actually concrete. Most of it is just speculation.
I’m not a scientist, and for me personally it’s enough to make me spend a bit longer thinking before immediately dismissing all insects as mindless automatons. Most probably are simple biological machines. Jumping spiders are however massive outliers in terms of insect intelligence, and a cursory Google search will provide a wealth of evidence for it.
I personally would also go as far as believing that they dream. I just don’t believe there’s a reasonable explanation for the REM like state other than some form of dreaming, even if rudimentary.
I’m not going to state that jumping spiders are fully conscious as 100% fact, there’s not enough proof for that. But they do have a proven ability to learn, and an ability to make somewhat complex plans. And all I’m trying to say is that we need more research before dismissing them so certainly.
Not a scientist my self, but I studies biology and neuroscience more specifically - just left the field. I will look more into jumping spiders, since it’s sounds interesting and I was not really aware that they are that different from other spiders. Now I’m more curious and I definitely agree that we need more research in general.
This doesn’t explain complex behavior seen in many insects like how bumblebees can learn how to solve puzzles from watching other bees performing the solution (this requires a minimal degree of visual recognition of the same species, theory of mind to understand they have a goal and what it is, recognition of their actions and the ability to translate them to copy them, etc).
Having a drastically different structure to their neurons doesn’t mean they can’t think.
“Same” neurons (they don’t have all the neuron types we have but in general one can say it’s the same neurons), just no complex brain structures. You can have very complex behavior completely reliant on pheromone systems, quite well studied in ants. I’m not to familiar with bumblebees so I would need to look into literature, but for example simple learning already happens at molecular level and does not require any thinking at all.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002019
They show evidence of a degree of culture (socially shared knowledge)
Thanks, will check the paper out.
Yes, I agree, in just pointing out how difficult is to understand that. Theoretically, it’s not like a human-level intelligent insect couldn’t exist.
My thinking to challenge myself/ourselves: Then how do whole colonies decide and plan resources? When to gave truce or war with the neighbouring colonies (of same or completely different species?). Their war strategies resemble human wars without technology/weapons. They also cultivate insects, plants, and fungi. Some within colonies plan, deceive, and try to develop a new queen (instead of the queen doing it in purpose/strategy).
Having brains as such imho is part of the problem as it adds a lot of complexity for humans to relate to.
But even our brains don’t work and govern alone, major organs have a complex nervous systems of their own (complex in the sense of not having a centre).
Not as a direct comparison to insect, but eg cephalopod brains are also vastly different, yet clearly highly intelligent.
My thinking to challenge myself/ourselves: Then how do whole colonies decide and plan resources? When to gave truce or war with the neighbouring colonies (of same or completely different species?). Their war strategies resemble human wars without technology/weapons. They also cultivate insects, plants, and fungi. Some within colonies plan, deceive, and try to develop a new queen (instead of the queen doing it in purpose/strategy).
We understand most of your questions quiet well. It’s been a long time since I studied biology and I’m not working in that field anymore so I won’t be able to give you most answers from memory, but if you are interested you will find a lot of research on those topics. It’s mostly really rather automatic responses through pheromone systems with involuntary responses. Especially the wars of ants are quite well understood in that regard.
Cephalopod have different but also rather complex brain structures. Again - insects just completely lack higher brain anatomy. If you into those question I would highly recommend you to take an introductory lecture into neuroscience online. We don’t understand everything but we understand some things quiet well.
The new paradigm is coming
No fucking shit… anyone with half a brain and a minimum of empathy already knows that.
Yes, yes, the scientific method doesn’t discriminate between what is and isn’t obvious, but the headline is, as usual, aimed at people with the intellectual capabilities of a 4 year old.
Sometimes I confuse Sentient and Sapient in sentences but they actually don’t mean the same thing at all.
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.
What was obvious to most of us as kids (and what was attempted to be beaten out of us as kids) is now being accepted by scientists. Love it.
Right, I had no idea scientists were trying to say these animals weren’t sentient. Stupid scientists.
It’s not really that they all thought they didn’t, it’s that there was a lack of evidence to declare it to likely be true. Better testing methodology to exclude other possible explanations have contributed.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Me too. I still eat cheese but no more meats. Regardless of the sentient thing, it’s good for you to not eat meat.
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
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.
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
Rape then? Lots of animals rape and humans do so too. It’s ‘natural’ but barbaric.
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.
Using the word barbaric is barbaric. It just basically means non-Greek/Roman. 😜
I’ve always thought this, and thought it strange we assumed other creatures experienced lesser levels of sentience.
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
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.
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?!
So arrogant are we
Any being that needs a map of the environment is going to have consciousness. Depending on its sense organs it will experience consciousness much differently than other beings.
So yeah that’s a pretty low bar. We’re going to find it everywhere. I suspect even mycelium is a rudimentary consciousness/nervous system. And plants are a lot more active underground than they are above, roots will move around rocks, be aware of if their neighbors are their siblings or not and share nutrients with their siblings by giving them more space, be more competitive with plants that they’re not related to.
Life’s a trip, and we are just some clever apes who have a lot to learn I think.
Slime mold appears intelligent, they used it in Japan to help reconfigure their subways iirc
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.
