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Articles 241 - 270 of 368
Full-Text Articles in Neuroscience and Neurobiology
We Still Need A Theory, Paula Droege
We Still Need A Theory, Paula Droege
Animal Sentience
Woodruff (2017) has compiled a convincing array of data to support his contention that teleost fish feel pain. However, in the absence of an explanatory theory about the nature and function of consciousness, a checklist of criteria is insufficient to allay skeptical concerns. I offer a theory that can explain why features like selective attention and behavioral flexibility indicate consciousness. Consciousness represents the present moment in order to allow dynamic changes in actions or goals in response to situational demands.
Similar Anatomy Does Not Imply Comparable Function, Jay R. Stauffer Jr.
Similar Anatomy Does Not Imply Comparable Function, Jay R. Stauffer Jr.
Animal Sentience
Woodruff concludes that ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii) are sentient and that the pallium contributes to sentience in these fishes. He gives a detailed description of the pallium; however, he assumes that similar structures in fishes and tetrapods support similar behaviors, capabilities, and functions. I reject the premise that similarities in structure imply similarities in function. The fact that a selected species of fish may exhibit behaviors, reactions, and/or anatomy suggestive of sentience does not necessarily generalize to all teleosts.
Dogs Consciously Experience Emotions: The Question Is, Which?, Ralph Adolphs
Dogs Consciously Experience Emotions: The Question Is, Which?, Ralph Adolphs
Animal Sentience
I discuss three themes related to Kujala’s target article. First, the wealth of emerging data on cognitive studies in dogs will surely show that dogs have a very rich repertoire of cognitive processes, for most of which we find homologues in humans. Second, understanding the internal states that mediate social behaviors, such as emotions, requires us to consider both a dog’s behaviors with other dogs, and the emergence of new behavioral patterns in interaction with humans. Third, all of this will certainly narrow the range of justifications for denying that dogs have subjective experiences of emotions.
Direct Perception Of Animal Mind, Paul Morris
Direct Perception Of Animal Mind, Paul Morris
Animal Sentience
Kujala’s (2017) target article is ostensibly focused on how everyday folk (fail to) make sense of canine emotions. However, the theories outlined in the article apply to making sense of all aspects of the mentality of both human and non-human animals. The target article neglects the fundamental arguments surrounding the problem of other minds. I explore the relevant arguments and briefly review approaches suggesting that our everyday-life sense that both human and non-human animals are thinking, feeling, emotional beings has a secure epistemological basis.
Canine Emotions And The Bond Between Humans And Dogs, Robert G. Franklin Jr.
Canine Emotions And The Bond Between Humans And Dogs, Robert G. Franklin Jr.
Animal Sentience
I explore how the findings reviewed by Kujala (2017) influence our understanding of the human-dog bond. The special social cognitive abilities of dogs may be unique among animal species, probably influenced by the circumstances surrounding canine domestication. The bond has influenced animal welfare policies, giving dogs a privileged place among animals. To determine what protections other species should have in a rational animal welfare policy, more research is needed on whether other species have similar social cognitive abilities.
Communicating Canine And Human Emotions, Juliane Bräuer, Karine Silva, Stefan R. Schweinberger
Communicating Canine And Human Emotions, Juliane Bräuer, Karine Silva, Stefan R. Schweinberger
Animal Sentience
Kujala (2017) reviews a topic of major relevance for the understanding of the special dog-human relationship: canine emotions (as seen through human social cognition). This commentary draws attention to the communication of emotions within such a particular social context. It highlights challenges that need to be tackled to further advance research on emotional communication, and it calls for new avenues of research. Efforts to disentangle emotional processes from cognitive functioning might be necessary to better comprehend how they contribute, alone and/or in combination, to the communication of emotions. Also, new research methods need to be developed to account for the …
Studying Dog Emotion Beyond Expression And Without Concern For Feeling, Peter F. Cook
Studying Dog Emotion Beyond Expression And Without Concern For Feeling, Peter F. Cook
Animal Sentience
Studies of dog emotion have focused on the expression of social emotion, either because this is taken to suggest human-like feeling states in dogs or because it has been the most accessible signal of dog emotional processing. I argue for an approach grounded in affective neuroscience, relying on direct measures of physiology across different contexts. This work may be particularly fertile in exploring social emotion in the dog, not because dogs necessarily share human emotional states, but because they are unique in having likely evolved to fit a human social niche.
Inferring Emotion Without Language: Comparing Canines And Prelinguistic Infants, Stefanie Hoehl
Inferring Emotion Without Language: Comparing Canines And Prelinguistic Infants, Stefanie Hoehl
Animal Sentience
Research on canine emotions has to deal with challenges quite similar to psychological research on social and emotional development in human infants. In both cases, verbal reports are unattainable, and behavioral and physiological methods have to be adjusted to the specific population. I will argue that both regarding empirical approaches and conceptual work, advances in research on social-cognitive development in human infants can inform the study of canine emotions.
Positive Emotions And Quality Of Life In Dogs, Patrizia Piotti
Positive Emotions And Quality Of Life In Dogs, Patrizia Piotti
Animal Sentience
Positive affect is fundamental to ensuring good animal welfare. Discrete and dimensional theories of emotion have recently been used to explore the relation between cognition and affect and to develop cognitive measures of positive affect. Human quality-of-life assessment focuses on positive affect, which is difficult to measure objectively in dogs. Expanding on Kujala’s (2017) discussion of positive emotions and cognitive measures of affect, I suggest how these are relevant to assessing canine quality of life.
Reef Society And The Tyranny Of Data, Robert Wintner
Reef Society And The Tyranny Of Data, Robert Wintner
Animal Sentience
Modern science now approaches divergent processes in many areas, including health assessments of marine eco-systems and social aspects of marine species. Scientific data have long enjoyed a reputation for objectivity but incidents of science-for-hire, data spinning/skewing and political jading are more frequent than ever. In the field of reef creature sensitivity, technical treatises can “logically” explain away what a person of average education can clearly observe on any given reef. Western medicine discounted anecdotal evidence of any cure outside the 4% margin of error until those cures demanded attention and in some cases application. Modern science must now enter an …
Still Wondering How Flesh Can Feel, Gwen J. Broude
Still Wondering How Flesh Can Feel, Gwen J. Broude
Animal Sentience
Reber believes he has simplified Chalmers’s “hard problem” of consciousness by arguing that subjectivity is an inherent feature of biological forms. His argument rests on the related notions of continuity of mind and gradual accretion of capacities across evolutionary time. These notions need to be defended, not just asserted. Because Reber minimizes the differences in mental faculties among species across evolutionary time, it becomes easier to assert, and perhaps believe, that sentience is already present in early biological forms. The more explicit we are about the differences among these mental faculties and the differences across species, the less persuasive is …
Animals Aren’T Persons, But Is It Time For A Neologism?, Helen Steward
Animals Aren’T Persons, But Is It Time For A Neologism?, Helen Steward
Animal Sentience
Mark Rowlands argues that at least some animals are persons, based on the idea that (i) many animals have a property he calls “pre-reflective awareness,” (ii) the capacity for pre-reflective awareness is sufficient to satisfy the traditional Lockean definition of personhood, and (iii) satisfaction of the traditional Lockean definition of personhood is sufficient for being a person. I agree with (i) and can see that there is a persuasive case for (ii), but I think the case against (iii) blocks the conclusion that animals are persons. I suggest that we may need instead to coin a neologism in order to …
Reber’S Caterpillar Offers No Help, Carl Safina
Reber’S Caterpillar Offers No Help, Carl Safina
Animal Sentience
Reber’s target article “Caterpillars, consciousness and the origins of mind” seems only to shift but not to address the question of where the mind is and how minds occur.
Insect Consciousness: Commitments, Conflicts And Consequences, Colin Klein, Andrew B. Barron
Insect Consciousness: Commitments, Conflicts And Consequences, Colin Klein, Andrew B. Barron
Animal Sentience
Our target article, “Insects have the capacity for subjective experience,” has provoked a diverse range of commentaries. In this response we have collated what we see as the major themes of the discussion. It is clear that we differ from some commentators in our commitments to what subjective experience is and what the midbrain is capable of. Here we clarify where we stand on those points and how our view differs from some other influential perspectives. The commentaries have highlighted the most lively areas of disagreement. We revisit here the debates surrounding whether the cortex is essential for any form …
Consciousness And Evolutionary Biology, Yew-Kwang Ng
Consciousness And Evolutionary Biology, Yew-Kwang Ng
Animal Sentience
Reber’s axiom: “Any organism with flexible cell walls, a sensitivity to its surrounds and the capacity for locomotion will possess the biological foundations of mind and consciousness” does not seem to be supported by things we know and the logic of evolutionary biology. The latter leads to the conclusion that conscious species are flexible in their behavior (rather than in their cell walls), as argued in Ng (1995, 2016). Locomotion may be completely hard-wired and need not involve consciousness. It is hard enough to explain how consciousness could emerge in a sophisticated brain: Isn’t it a harder problem to show …
The Difference Between Conscious And Unconscious Brain Circuits, Ezequiel Morsella, Zaviera Reyes
The Difference Between Conscious And Unconscious Brain Circuits, Ezequiel Morsella, Zaviera Reyes
Animal Sentience
Theoretical frameworks in which consciousness is an inherent property of the neuron must account for the contrast between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain and address how neural events can ever be unconscious if consciousness is a property of all neurons. Other approaches have sought answers regarding consciousness by contrasting conscious and unconscious processes and through investigating the complex interactions between the two kinds of processes, as occurs most notably in human voluntary action. In voluntary action, consciousness is associated most, not with motor control or low-level perceptual processing, but with the stage of processing known as action selection.
Resolving The Hard Problem And Calling For A Small Miracle, Arthur S. Reber
Resolving The Hard Problem And Calling For A Small Miracle, Arthur S. Reber
Animal Sentience
With the exception of the commentary by Key, the commentaries on Reber have a common feature: the commenters feel, with varying levels of enthusiasm, that there is at least some virtue in the core assumption of the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory that consciousness (or subjectivity or sentience) accompanies the earliest forms of life. The model has two important entailments: (a) it resolves the (in)famous Hard Problem by redirecting the search for the biochemical foundations of sentience away from human consciousness; and (b) it reduces the need for an emergentist miracle to a far simpler scale than is currently …
No Help On The Hard Problem, Derek Ball
No Help On The Hard Problem, Derek Ball
Animal Sentience
The hard problem of consciousness is to explain why certain physical states are conscious: why do they feel the way they do, rather than some other way or no way at all? Arthur Reber (2016) claims to solve the hard problem. But he does not: even if we grant that amoebae are conscious, we can ask why such organisms feel the way they do, and Reber’s theory provides no answer. Still, Reber’s theory may be methodologically useful: we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of consciousness, but perhaps the study of simple minds is a way to go about …
Unconscious Higher-Order Thoughts (Hots) As Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness?, Rocco J. Gennaro
Unconscious Higher-Order Thoughts (Hots) As Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness?, Rocco J. Gennaro
Animal Sentience
Rowlands argues that many nonhuman animals are “persons,” contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy which rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. He argues that self-awareness bifurcates into two importantly different forms — reflective self-awareness and pre-reflective self-awareness — and that many animals can have the latter, which is sufficient for personhood. I agree that there is good reason to think that many animals can have pre-reflective self-awareness, but I think Rowlands is mistaken about its nature. His account runs the risk of leading to an infinite regress objection, and his notion of pre-reflective self-awareness …
The Psychological Concept Of “Person”, Kristin Andrews
The Psychological Concept Of “Person”, Kristin Andrews
Animal Sentience
Reluctance to overextend personhood seems to drive many of the skeptical responses in the first round of commentaries on Rowlands's target article. Despite Rowlands’s straightforward Response that we already accept some nonhumans as persons, there is still hesitation to accept that other nonhuman animals are persons. Rowlands's argument is sound but the skeptics don’t accept the Lockean notion of person. The metaphysical sense of person is a psychological one, however, and psychological properties grant one moral status according to many ethical theories.
Consciousness And The Unity Of Mind, Mark Rowlands
Consciousness And The Unity Of Mind, Mark Rowlands
Animal Sentience
Several types of objection have been raised against the arguments I presented in my target article, “Are animals persons?” Among the objections are the following: (1) the claim that animals are persons is of little significance, (2) my use of the Lockean conception of the person is questionable, (3) whether a creature qualifies as a person is a matter of social construction rather than objective fact, (4) reflective consciousness is more important than I realize, (5) my reliance on implicit self-awareness in the account of personhood is ill-advised, (6) my account entails that too many creatures qualify as persons, and …
Insects: Still Looking Like Zombies, Christopher S. Hill
Insects: Still Looking Like Zombies, Christopher S. Hill
Animal Sentience
In arguing that insect brains are capable of sentience, Klein & Barron rely heavily on Bjorn Merker’s claim that activity in the human mid-brain is sufficient for conscious experience. I criticize Merker’s claim by pointing out that the behaviors supported by midbrain activity are much more primitive than the ones that appear to depend on consciousness. I raise a similar objection to Klein & Barron’s contention that insect behaviors are similar to behaviors that manifest consciousness in human beings. The similarity is weak. I also respond to the related view that integrative activity in mid-brain structures is sufficient to explain …
Cognitive Dissonance Or Contrast?, Thomas R. Zentall
Cognitive Dissonance Or Contrast?, Thomas R. Zentall
Animal Sentience
According to Festinger (1957), cognitive dissonance occurs when one’s behavior or belief is inconsistent with another belief and one modifies one of the beliefs in an attempt to reduce the dissonance. In nonhuman animals, we have examined a version of human cognitive dissonance theory called justification of effort, according to which the value of reward following more difficult tasks increases, presumably to justify (to oneself or to others) performing the more difficult task. We have examined the justification of effort effect in animals and found a pattern similar to the one in humans but we propose a simpler underlying …
Darwin’S Empirical Evidence, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Darwin’S Empirical Evidence, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Animal Sentience
Darwin’s extensive writings may seem antiquated to current thinkers with their predilections for cognitive science, neuroscience, and analytic branches of philosophy. He showed that morphologies are not simply taxonomic distinctions that allow classification into species. They describe living animals, hence morphologies-in-motion: animate forms of life engaged in synergies of meaningful movement, all of which are testimony to animal sentience.
Animal Personhood Is An Evolutionary Issue, James E. King
Animal Personhood Is An Evolutionary Issue, James E. King
Animal Sentience
The Rowlands target article makes a case, based on John Locke’s metaphysical argument, that personhood can be applied to many species beyond a few nonhuman primates. The problem with this argument is that personhood has an open-ended list of defining attributes and can, at best only be partially applied to nonhuman species. Therefore, a dichotomous distinction cannot be made between qualifying and non-qualifying species. Instead, between-species comparisons must be based on observational and experimental procedures to demonstrate the extent to which human mental attributes are shared with other species. This would allow a more informed view about the appropriateness of …
How Could Consciousness Emerge From Adaptive Functioning?, Max Velmans
How Could Consciousness Emerge From Adaptive Functioning?, Max Velmans
Animal Sentience
The sudden appearance of consciousness that Reber posits in creatures with flexible cell walls and motility rather than non-flexible cells walls and no motility involves an evolutionary discontinuity. This kind of “miracle” is required by all “discontinuity” theories of consciousness. To avoid miraculous emergence, one may need to consider continuity theories, which accept that different forms of consciousness and material functioning co-evolve but assume the existence of consciousness to be primal in the way that matter and energy are assumed to be primal in physics.
“Cellular Basis Of Consciousness”: Not Just Radical But Wrong, Brian Key
“Cellular Basis Of Consciousness”: Not Just Radical But Wrong, Brian Key
Animal Sentience
Reber (2016) attempts to resuscitate an obscure and outdated hypothesis referred to as the “cellular basis of consciousness” that was originally formulated by the author nearly twenty years ago. This hypothesis proposes that any organism with flexible cell walls, a sensitivity to its surrounds, and the capacity for locomotion will possess the biological foundations of mind and consciousness. Reber seeks to reduce consciousness to a fundamental property inherent to individual cells rather than to centralised nervous systems. This commentary shows how this hypothesis is based on supposition, false premises and a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. The cellular basis of consciousness …
The Evolutionary History Of Consciousness, Eirik Søvik, Clint Perry
The Evolutionary History Of Consciousness, Eirik Søvik, Clint Perry
Animal Sentience
Klein & Barron argue that insects are capable of subjective experience, i.e., sentience. Whereas we mostly agree with the conclusion of their arguments, we think there is an even more important message to be learned from their work. The line of reasoning opened by Klein & Barron proves instructive for how neuroscientists can and should explore the biological phenomenon of consciousness.
Beginnings: Physics, Sentience And Luca, Carolyn A. Ristau
Beginnings: Physics, Sentience And Luca, Carolyn A. Ristau
Animal Sentience
According to Reber’s model, Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), sentience had its origins in a unicellular organism and is an inherent property of living, mobile organic forms. He argues by analogy to basic physical forces which he considers to be inherent properties of matter; I suggest that they are instead the stuff of scientific investigation in physics. I find no convincing argument that sentience had to begin in endogenously mobile cells, a criterial attribute of the originator cell(s)for sentience according to CBC. Non-endogenously mobile cells, (i.e., plants or precursors) in a moving environment would suffice. Despite my concerns and the …
Might Insects Experience Pain?, Robert W. Elwood
Might Insects Experience Pain?, Robert W. Elwood
Animal Sentience
The aim of this commentary is to expand the discussion about subjective experience to other arthropods, notably crustaceans. Various species of crustaceans show responses consistent with their feeling pain. Hermit crabs also show prolonged investigation of new shells. They clearly attend to and integrate information from a wide variety of sources that enable them to evaluate the quality of the new shell relative to their current shell. These observations too are consistent with their having subjective experience.