Eli5: What is human consciousness and what other species are thought to possess some form of consciousness?
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Nobody knows. Some people say it’s a certain kind of information which is carried or represented physically in our brains, or a certain kind of interaction between that information, and our physical environment. Some people say that consciousness resides outside our brains and indeed outside of the “physical world” of things that we can see and touch – like a spirit or a soul.
We don’t know how to test for consciousness in animals because we don’t know exactly what we’re looking for or how to recognize it when we see it. Heck, we don’t even really know how to recognize it in other humans. We look at each other and assume that, since other humans show behaviours kind of like our own, since we can exchange ideas and share languages, there must be something going on inside other people, experiencing and interacting with the world, just like we are. But we can’t really know it or prove it. It’s just a leap of faith we take. Philosophers call that “the Problem of Other Minds.”
So if we can’t even really solve this problem with other humans, it’s hard to imagine how we’d approach it for animals whose bodies and brains are much more different from ours.
So “what is consciousness?” Is actually the really difficult part here.
Many people would define consciousness as the ability to think or react to your environment.But that’s not really the case because we have words for thinking and reacting to environments.
In my mind it’s the rare ability to legitimately think about your environment. Humans, dolphins, crows, and some other animals have the a part of the brain that allows us to pull from our memories and simulate new solutions without actually doing the new thing physically.
Bugs for example can’t do that. They don’t have memory, and the other creatures that do have memory can’t simulate new situations. They can’t “think” about things.
Here’s the tricky part though. Bugs can legitimately have preferences. So can fish even though they don’t have that simulation engine in their brain. They actually show emotion, have favorite people, places, and things.
So really it all depends on your definition of consciousness. Is it the ability to show emotion or have memory associated with a personality? Or is it the ability to actually think and consider?
Edited for oxford comma.
All of them. If they can react to there environments. They are aware of there surroundings.
To be conscious is to be able to have some kind of subjective experience or awareness of something. The word “sentience” is sometimes used instead of consciousness. Sentience refers to the ability to have positive and negative experiences caused by external affectations to our body or to sensations within our body.
Every animal on the planet reacts this way. Even insects that communicate with pheromones.
Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
At a basic level, it’s ‘awareness of existence’. Beyond that it’s difficult to come up with really clear definitions which you can use to separate things (like humans vs animals), partly because we can’t communicate well with other species, so it’s hard to tell how they experience consciousness and partly because we don’t fully understand how it works in our own brains.
As far as we can tell consciousness is tied directly to the brain, without a brain you don’t get consciousness. If something happens to a brain it can affect consciousness, for example brain injuries can cause people to loose functions or to change personality.
We can get some general ideas though of how we compare to animals, animals with smaller brains usually show less signs of advanced levels of awareness of existence. Animals with larger brains tend to show more signs of advanced levels of awareness of existence.
So if we compare an ant with an elephant, the ant might show enough awareness of existence to interact with what happens in the world around it, but it wouldn’t recognizably show grief for other dead ants. The elephant can interact with the world around it, but we have also seen behaviors from elephants that look like mourning for other dead elephants, so they have enough awareness to be able to recognise death and loss and what it means for the future.
Monkeys have been seen recognizing unfairness and demanding equality in treatment for each other, which demonstrates a similarity to human consciousness and morality.
Specific definitions and requirements are hard to pin down, and it’s not always just based on size, the areas of the brain which are developed also are important but generally the larger and more advanced the brain is, the more advanced levels of consciousness we see.
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