Cats and consciousness

[green_amber]

Someone suggested I upfront this comment as a post so here we go:

Oddly, consciousness is the other thing I was noodling about at the weekend. My cats are so obviously conscious, and in really quite subtle ways I never imagined before I lived with animals. They are disappointed, happy, enticing, vain, frustrated, envious and irritated. Yet they have brains like peas no? How stupid do you have to get before consciousness vanishes? Do bees have consciousness? Do goldfish? Do rats? Do all human beings who are not in comas? Do babies, and if so from what age? Is having consciousness the same as thinking? (DO babies think? They dream don't they - is that the same either? My cats dream.)

And where consciousness exists continues to mystify me. Anyone who's studied the Turing test realises that intelligence as an externally observed factor is not the same as intentionality. WE can simulate intelligence but we can't simulate consciousness. Does this indicate there is some kind of mind/brain dualism actually going on?

Comments

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

"Umwelts" is the term you are after...every living creature is conscious of a world and that world is all that is the case for that creature: thus the humble tic has a world painted from precisely three stimuli, two tactile one chemical, those three things are all the tic responds to, that is the world, the Umwelt of the tick. (Germans have all the best words, but they always sound like they are about to hit you.)

So all animals are conscious, the real, or rather the usual, debate in this subject is whether they are self conscious, conscious of themselves. As to the babies, the answer is probably yes, in a rudimentary but crucial fashion they are. I just reviewed Shaun Gallaghers new book on Embodied Cognition (Gallagher, S. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, i would cut and paste the relevant section of the review, but its on my home computer) which is pretty up to the minute neuroscience and behavioural experiment wise and from the data available it looks like babies have a fairly coherent cosnciousness from the off and a rudimentary but real differentiation between self and other is there too, its a "proprioceptive" self, ie its largely a pre-noetic, bodily based one, but neverttheless provides the bedrock for the more sophisticated, symbolically mediated self we all walk about with. This is all rather new, until recently they thought this stuff didnt happen for months, that the world of the infant was, in the words of William james, a "blooming buzzing confusion". Piaget thought the same. not so. babies are performing intentional actions from the off (facial imitation etc). Again you can argue how conscious they are of their intentions, prob not much, but like Andy says, consciousness is massively over-rated anyway. 99.9% of our actions are automatic, pre-noetic is the new buzz word, and consciousness, rather like a senile monarch in a democracy, just smiles and waves whilst thinking shes doing it all.

so for sure your cats are conscious.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's interesting..

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Umwelt is a great word/ concept! *writes it down*