by There is good reason to believe that fish, amphibians, molluscs and insects are sentient, according to a new declaration signed by three dozen scientists.
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness argues that current scientific research shows that such widespread animal consciousness is a “realistic possibility” – and that scientists and policymakers must take that into account when considering risks to these animals.
The declaration was published on Friday at an event at New York University, where scientists have been engaged in an active and sometimes heated debate about the state of the science of animal consciousness, and the wisdom of making such a statement at all. at all.
The problem with considering animal consciousness is that it gives us “immediate exposure to serious imaginative limits,” co-signer Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, told attendees.
That’s a problem wrapped up in the title of many classic papers and books dealing with the subject, from philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 paper “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” to primatologist Franz de Waal’s 2017 book “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?”
Many scientists and philosophers have argued that the limitations of humans — as a species with a dense inner monosyllable, relying on sight and a culture built on spoken language — can blind us to how things work. sensitivity in other species.
“These imaginative constraints sometimes make people question whether the scientific evidence has any bearing on these questions at all,” Birch said.
“But I think that’s wrong,” he said. “I personally don’t think other animals will have an inner oral monologue the way I do. But by the same token, other animals probably have forms of consciousness that we don’t have,” like the subjective experience of a bat navigating a dark forest using echoes.
The declaration is short — only three paragraphs — and its wording is very limited. It does not cut the argument that animal consciousness is certain or proven. Instead, he argues that decades of literature now show “strong scientific support” for the idea that mammals and birds are conscious, and the “real possibility” of consciousness in creatures ranging from reptiles to octopuses, crabs and insects.
As long as such a possibility exists, the signatories agreed, “we should assess welfare risks and use the evidence to guide our responses to these risks.”
There was not universal support for this idea among event attendees. One scientist in the front row told Birch that he was concerned the assertion would be seen as an irresponsible exaggeration of the evidence.
“I’m not sure this declaration is a good idea,” he said. All scientists, he said, “are familiar with articles summarizing research that people don’t trust — because they feel they’re cherry-picking the data, they’re relying on studies that aren’t objective.”
But Birch argued that the declaration was actually quite conservative. “This is not advocacy work. It is describing as fairly as possible the state of science.”
He also said that although the signatories themselves did not agree on the dimensions of animal consciousness and the ethical implications of it, they agreed that “great steps have been taken in the last 10 years,” and that these needed to be part of the conversation.
The report follows more than a decade after the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness found that “mammals, birds, and other animals have the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors” and that “humans are not unique in the neural substrates that generate to have consciousness.”
Scientists’ understanding of animal consciousness evolved in the interim. According to a recent summary of the research in Quanta Magazine, “we now know, for example, that octopuses feel pain and sting when remembering the details of specific past events … and that zebrafish show signs of curiosity .”
In the insect world, Quanta noted that “bees show apparent play behavior, while Drosophila fruit flies have distinct sleep patterns that are influenced by their social environment. Meanwhile, lobsters exhibit anxiety-like states – and those states can be altered with anti-anxiety drugs.”
One research has found evidence of increased self-awareness in fish and reptiles. Reptiles, in particular, are ancestral to both mammals and birds, and are the two orders with the strongest evidence of emotion.
“If we assume that mammals and birds are conscious, consciousness evolved at least twice in each of those separate lines, or all animals have an ancestor, in which case probably reptiles conscious too,” said Anna Wilkinson, said. studies amphibians at Lincoln University.
Speaking about whether reptiles or fish have pain – a big question when considering their welfare – Wilkinson admitted that recent research shows that fish have different neural structures than mammals.
But she argued that “just because birds can’t fly without feathers — that doesn’t mean bats can’t fly. They don’t have feathers – they just make it through a different mechanism.”
“It seems unlikely that the types of consciousness that reptiles have are similar to the types of consciousness that mammals have,” she said. “And this is a challenge that I think we have to overcome.”
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