Eli5: What is human consciousness and what other species are thought to possess some form of consciousness?
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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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