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