Chapter 5
What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?
—Nietzsche1
With autumn approaching and daily temperatures beginning to drop, my honeybees are beginning their final preparations for winter. I’ve kept bees for the past three years and have grown accustomed to their end-of-season drama. The nectar collecting season is almost over, and they are now busy drying out the last of the honey for storage during the winter months. This will be their only food source until the dandelions start blooming again in March. To avoid the risk of starvation and ensure that there’s enough honey to go around, they begin downsizing their population. They need just enough bees in the colony—maybe forty thousand—to keep themselves warm, but not so many that they burn through their food stores before spring. Which means September is the time to get rid of the freeloaders. In other words, the drones.
Drones are male honeybees whose sole purpose is to mate with new queens from other colonies. They are larger and fatter than the female worker bees, with big goofy eyes that help them spot other drones and virgin queens. They don’t have stingers, and so can’t defend the hive. In fact, they can’t do much of anything other than mate. They don’t clean the hive, make honeycomb, or look after larvae. Their tongues are short, so they are unable to collect nectar from flowers. They even have a hard time licking the honey out of the honeycombs, so female workers must place food directly into their mouths. Thus, during winter, drones are high maintenance and low value. Which is why, when September arrives, the female workers round up all the drones, drag them to the front entrance of the hive, and push them out. If they try to come back in, they are attacked or killed. Since they can’t feed themselves, it won’t be long before they starve or freeze to death. This time of year, the fronts of my hives are covered in banished and bewildered drones.
It’s quite a tragic—but utterly natural—state of affairs, and I can’t help but pity these poor guys. Lately, I have taken to collecting the hapless drones and putting them in a little cardboard box on my deck. I put some honey in there for them so they can try to feed themselves one last time before their inevitable death. I want to give them one final moment of happiness.
Last week, I showed my drone collection to my friend Andrea who is always amused by my animal escapades. “This seems like a lot of work for no reason,” she said. “You’re not really making them ‘happier.’ It’s not like they’re conscious. They don’t appreciate all this effort.”
“I’m not sure I agree with that,” I said. “Out of curiosity, what animals do you think are conscious? Is Clover conscious?” Clover is Andrea’s new border collie—a boisterous puppy who was staring intently at the chickens behind my fence.
“Yes, I think so,” replied Andrea.
“What about those chickens?”
“Hmmm. Chickens? I’m not sure. No? If they are, they’re a lot less conscious than Clover. But these bees aren’t conscious. They’re not self-aware. Insects just run on instinct.”
“Would it surprise you to learn,” I said, “that many scientists and philosophers would argue that these little drones are, in fact, conscious?”
“What? That’s absurd. How on earth could they possibly make that argument?”
It’s a good question.
What is consciousness?
Consciousness has always been considered one of the things that separates humans from other animals. A thing that we have, but they don’t. Or, as Andrea thinks, maybe something that we have more of than other animals. But this is not the case. As we will see, humans do have a unique relationship to consciousness, which plays a vital role in understanding the nature of human intelligence (and its value). But consciousness is certainly not ours alone.
Consciousness is simply any form of subjective experience. Do you know that disappointing sensation of needing to pee after having just settled into bed? That’s a conscious experience. So, too, is the worry that you feel knowing that you have not studied enough for an upcoming math test. Or that feeling of bittersweet sorrow as you read the final page of a book that has captured your imagination. Or even just the sound of the waves lapping at the hull of a boat, the yellowness of a banana, or the taste of stale coffee. Consciousness is what happens when your brain generates a sensation, feeling, perception, or thought of any kind that you are aware of.
To understand the tension around the question of whether animals have consciousness, we need to spend a moment drilling down into those two words that make up its definition: subjective and experience. Let’s start with the concept of subjective.
If something is subjective, it means that it is being understood or experienced by someone from their perspective. In his iconic essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that the subjective experience of the world as felt by an individual (human or animal) is not something that can be observed or explained in objective terms.2 There is simply no way to get inside the head of another creature and measure their experiences. This is what philosophers call the problem of other minds, the inescapable fact that the subjective experience of other minds will always remain hidden inside a black box.
The word experience refers to the actual sensations that manifest in your mind as an emotion or thought crops up. For example, if you eat a bowl of Cheerios, it creates a flood of physical and emotional sensations that your mind experiences. These properties of conscious experience are what philosophers call qualia.3 You can put words to your Cheerio-eating qualia, like sugary or crunchy or disgusting to convey to other people how you feel while eating them. Maybe if I ate the same bowl of Cheerios, I would use the same words to describe my Cheerio-eating qualia. But that doesn’t mean we’re describing the same conscious phenomena. It’s possible that the sensations that bubble up in your mind when eating Cheerios are—if they could be measured objectively—entirely different from mine. But qualia are always private experiences and can’t be measured objectively, so we cannot know.
Nonetheless, we’re generally confident that most human beings share similar experiences of the world around us because our described qualia tend to match up. This allows me to predict quite confidently that you would prefer eating a bowl of Cheerios to a bowl of human hair. Even if my hair-eating qualia are slightly different from yours, there’s a high probability that most humans experience disgust when trying to swallow a wad of hair. My confidence levels start to plummet, however, once I’m dealing with different species. Carpet beetles, for example, would love to tear into a bowl full of human hair, and probably would avoid Cheerios altogether. So, my subjective experiences of hair-eating tell me nothing about the hair-eating qualia of a carpet beetle.
The main stumbling block with attempting to guess what nonhuman animals’ qualia feels like (or if they even have qualia) is that we cannot talk to them about their experiences. As we learned earlier, animals can communicate about their emotional states (like anger or fear) with signals like bared teeth or growling, but they do not have the linguistic ability to describe what these emotions feel like subjectively. So we have relied on analogies—not language—to make guesses as to what animals’ qualia are like. If a chimpanzee is cradling the body of her dead infant, we can guess that she might be experiencing something analogous to human grief. After all, humans are quite closely related to chimpanzees, and this mourning behavior closely resembles our own. But this type of analogy breaks down as the animals we’re thinking about get further away from us on the phylogenetic tree. For instance, what human qualia might be analogous to what an octopus experiences as she places a tentacle onto a crab and “tastes” it using the chemotactile receptors in her suckers?4 Because octopus arms operate autonomously, this information possibly stays in her arm for processing and might never make it to her central brain. Our bodies and minds interact very differently, and so we have no real analogue to compare this to.
Despite the impossibility of measuring subjective experience and the inadequacy of human-centric analogies, many scientists and philosophers are quite confident that animals at least have subjective experiences. Nagel argued that being a bat feels like something, and I don’t think I overstep by saying that many—if not most—animal cognition researchers and philosophers would agree. Which is why, in 2012, a group of them signed a document titled the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which reads as follows: “Convergent evidence indicates that nonhuman animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”5
How are they able to argue this if subjective experience is, by definition, private and inaccessible in animals? How can they possibly know?
The argument for animal consciousness is based on two lines of evidence: brains and behavior. The brain argument is relatively straightforward. We know that humans have subjective experience (i.e., consciousness). We don’t know exactly how a brain generates consciousness, but unless you subscribe to the view that consciousness is something that happens outside of the brain, then the brain (or maybe the nervous system in general) has to be the source. Animal brains and human brains are all made of the same stuff, and in the case of mammals, brain tissue appears to be divided up in the skull along generally similar lines. Since the brain structures we suspect are involved in the subjective experience of something like fear in humans are also found in corresponding areas of the brains of most vertebrates (e.g., the insular cortex), it’s reasonable to assume that they, too, experience fear subjectively.
This is a huge oversimplification, of course, but it’s the thrust of the argument. In reality, scientists suspect, but don’t know for sure, which structures in the human brain are responsible for the conscious experience of emotions like fear. And just because brains are structured similarly does not necessarily mean they will function identically. An MRI of my and my wife’s brain would suggest that they are nearly indistinguishable structurally, and yet I will never be able to learn Old Irish grammar or sing like she can. A chimpanzee brain and the famous chef Gordon Ramsay’s brain are also nearly identical when compared to the brain of a carpet beetle, and yet chimpanzees will never be able to cook a beef Wellington as well as Gordon. Analogous brain structures alone are not evidence that other animals possess analogous subjective experiences or cognitive capacities. This is why you need to pair brain structures with the behavioral evidence of animals acting as if they are conscious.
There are two types of behavioral evidence. The first is the most fun since it involves getting drunk. When humans ingest alcohol, it has a well-studied impact on the function of our minds. It can lead to the suppression of our inhibitions, lack of motor coordination, and—if you do it wrong—loss of consciousness. But we tolerate these less than desirable effects because drinking alcohol releases dopamine, which gives our brains that sensation of euphoria. In other words, we drink because it’s pleasurable. Elephants, it turns out, behave the same way.
In a scientific study from the early 1980s—when giving alcohol to elephants in the name of science seemed like an acceptable thing to do—researchers presented a group of captive elephants at a safari park in California with water buckets with varying concentrations of ethanol: 0, 7, 10, 14, 25, and 50 percent.6 The elephants were then free to drink from whichever bucket they wanted. They preferred the 7 percent alcohol solution to everything else (including plain water). After drinking the alcohol, the elephants behaved very much like drunk humans; a few stood swaying on their feet with their eyes closed. A few laid down on the ground. Most of them wrapped their trunks around themselves—something elephants do when they are feeling ill. A couple of the more aggressive elephants became even more belligerent (familiar to anyone who’s witnessed a bar brawl). In vino veritas, which means “in wine, there is truth,” applies to humans as well as elephants, it seems. This (ethically questionable) experiment shows that elephants appeared to seek out alcohol in concentrations that would make them drunk—but not too drunk—in order to experience that feeling of euphoria, which we are all too familiar with. This alcohol-seeking behavior only makes sense if two things are true: 1) alcohol affects elephant brains like it does human brains, and 2) elephants experience subjective feelings of euphoria when drinking, just like humans.
The second type of behavioral evidence involves what the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness describes as “the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.” Remember from Chapter 2 that an intentional behavior is one where an animal has a goal in mind, and actively monitors the situation to determine whether that goal has been achieved. This definition assumes subjective awareness of a goal; keeping something “in mind” means being conscious of one’s intentions. In other words, any animal that looks like it intends to do something could be understood as displaying behavioral evidence of consciousness.
Consider the case of Bruce. He is a kea, a parrot species native to New Zealand and famous for their curiosity and problem-solving abilities. In 2013, Bruce was rescued from the wild after having lost the top half of his beak. A nonfunctional beak is a huge bummer for a kea—or any bird really. It makes eating a challenge, but also makes it much harder to engage in a behavior called preening. Preening is where a bird scrapes their feathers between the two halves of their beak to remove dirt and parasites. Despite his handicap, Bruce devised a solution, which resulted in one of the best arguments for the presence of intentional behavior in any animal species.7
When it comes time to preen, Bruce will search his enclosure for a small stone. It has to be just the right size to fit comfortably between his lower beak and his tongue. He then slides his feathers between the stone and his tongue, resulting in perfectly clean feathers. Amalia Bastos and her colleagues from the University of Auckland made an elegant case that Bruce’s pebble-preening was clear evidence of intentional behavior. For starters, in 93.75 percent of cases where Bruce picked up a pebble, he used it to preen. “Bruce’s manipulations of pebbles were almost always followed by preening, suggesting that he picked up the pebble with the intent of using it as a preening tool,” argued Bastos. And in 95.42 percent of cases where Bruce dropped the pebble while preening, he either picked it up again or grabbed a similar pebble to continue preening. Both his ability to pinpoint the right tool and persistence in getting the job done suggest that Bruce wasn’t just stumbling haphazardly into solutions to his preening problem. He had to have been intending to clean his feathers and devised a solution that was not part of a kea’s normal behavioral repertoire. “Kea do not regularly display tool use in the wild,” Bastos told The Guardian, “so to have an individual innovate tool use in response to his disability shows great flexibility in their intelligence. They’re able to adapt and flexibly solve new problems as they emerge.”8
This is, in my opinion, a rock-solid case (pun intended) for intentional behavior in an animal. When you combine Bruce’s evidence with the fact that parrots are known to get drunk on purpose (there’s a tree in Australia called the Drunk Parrot Tree with fermented berries that attracts the red-collared lorikeet), and the fact that scientists have found “substantial anatomical homologies and functional similarities with mammals in the thalamocortical systems that are associated with consciousness”9 in birds like parrots, you have a case that parrots satisfy all the criteria for having consciousness as laid out by the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.
It’s easy to see how this line of reasoning would apply to other species that we observe engaging in innovative or flexible or intentional behavior like dolphins, elephants, and crows. Or species whose brains are structured similarly to humans like the great apes. But honeybees? Is it really the case, as I said to Andrea, that scientists think insects have the brain structures necessary to support consciousness? That they exhibit intentional behaviors like Bruce? Do insects get drunk? The answer to these questions is: yes, yes, and you betcha.
Bee brained
To help make my case, I need to introduce you to Lars Chittka. An expert on bee cognition, Chittka is a behavioral ecologist with Queen Mary University of London, and perhaps the most prominent insect intelligence evangelist around today. He has published extensively on the idea that insect brains—despite their size—have everything they need to generate complex cognition, including subjective experience. The basic argument in favor of the “who needs big brains for consciousness” stance is that, when it comes to generating complexity, it’s not the number of neurons that matters, it’s the way they wire together. Bee brains have just one million neurons compared to humans’ eighty-five billion. But these one million neurons can create up to a billion synapses (connections to other neurons) in the bee brain, which is more than enough to create a ginormous neural network capable of massive processing power.10 “In bigger brains we often don’t find more complexity, just an endless repetition of the same neural circuits over and over,” argues Chittka. “This might add detail to remembered images or sounds, but not add any degree of complexity. Bigger brains might in many cases be bigger hard drives, not necessarily better processors.”11
What about brain structure? Surely there’s something special about human (or other big-brained animals) brains in terms of how they wire that is what generates our consciousness? Not so, argues Chittka. “The much-sought-after neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) has not been identified in humans; thus one cannot argue that certain animals don’t have human-type NCC.” In other words, since we do not understand how consciousness arises from the way neurons wire and fire, we have no basis for assuming insect brains lack the necessary structures.
While science hasn’t found definitive evidence for the exact neuronal structure (or combination of structures) that generate subjective experience, we do know that insect brains have brain structures that we suspect are correlated with consciousness in animals. For insects, there’s a structure called a central complex that generates cognitive processes we associate with consciousness. It’s a place in their brain that integrates information from the senses, which in turns helps an insect navigate their environment by creating a mental model of themselves and the world around them. According to the philosopher Colin Klein and the neurobiologist Andrew Barron, because mammals have analogous structures in their midbrains that appear to do these same things, and because these structures and cognitive skills are generally understood to be involved in consciousness for humans, there is “strong evidence that the insect brain has the capacity to support subjective experience.”12 All this to say that, while we can’t say for certain that insects have the brain parts needed to generate consciousness, there is a perfectly good argument to be made that they do.
What about insect behavior, though? Are their tiny brains generating complex behavior that suggests consciousness? It appears so. Consider this famous experiment conducted by Chittka and his team on bumblebees. To test their ability for complex learning, the bees were given a food-reward task unlike anything they might encounter in nature. A tiny plastic ball was placed in a dish that had a target drawn at the center of it. If the bees could grab and drag the ball to the target, they would receive a sugar-water reward. Bumblebee foraging behavior in the wild does not require a skill of this sort, yet they were able to do it. A remarkable feat on its own, but not as remarkable as what happened next. In a follow-up experiment, three balls were placed at different distances from the center of the dish.13 The two balls closest to the center were glued down, so to nail the task, the bumblebee learned that she needed to move the farthest one. Meanwhile, an observer bee that was unfamiliar with the experiment had been watching these “demonstrator” bees solve the task from outside the testing area. When the observer bee was then allowed to enter the testing area for the first time, she did something that revealed that she truly understood the nature of the task at hand. This time, the balls were no longer glued down. Instead of simply copying what she has seen the other bee do (i.e., grab the farthest ball), she made a beeline to the closest ball and dragged it to the target. She was not just imitating the behavior of the other bee through associative learning. She knew that a ball had to go on the target and that it made the most sense to grab the closest ball. She had thought about the problem and devised a better strategy. Chittka argued that this demonstrates that bees have “a basic understanding of the outcome of their own actions, and those of other bees: that is, consciousness-like phenomena or intentionality.”14 If that’s the case, then this is evidence that bees satisfy the intentional behavior criterion as outlined in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.
And lastly, there is evidence that insects seek out mind-altering substances. Consider this unusual but elegant study from the neuroscientist Galit Shohat-Ophir.15 Her team bred fruit flies with brains that would generate a specific neuropeptide—corazonin—whenever they were exposed to a red light. Corazonin usually floods the brain whenever a male fruit fly ejaculates, so switching on a red light should induce an affective (emotional) state similar to an orgasm. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that these altered flies clearly preferred spending time in the areas of their enclosure illuminated by red light. As part of the experiment, one group of male fruit flies were exposed to a lot of red light over the course of a few days, while another group didn’t have the orgasm-inducing red light turned on a single time. When given the choice of two foods to consume, the flies that had been deprived of the red light—and thus not orgasming for three days straight—ate more of the food containing ethanol. In other words, they got themselves drunk. Meanwhile, the flies that had been enjoying a steady stream of red light–induced pleasure didn’t really want the alcohol-laced food. The fact that the orgasm-deprived fruit flies opted for mind-altering drugs—presumably in search of an endorphin rush—suggests that they had some awareness of their own decreased happiness levels and intentionally turned to alcohol to make themselves feel better. As Lars Chittka stated in response to this study: “Why would an organism seek out mind-altering substances when there isn’t a mind to alter?”16
All this evidence points to the very real possibility that subjective experience—consciousness—is something that insects have. If that’s so, consciousness is a trait that must have evolved very early on in our evolutionary history from an ancient common ancestor of humans and flies, which is likely an ocean-dwelling invertebrate that lived five hundred million years ago.17 Which means, by my definition, that most animals alive today probably have consciousness. If that’s the case, then why is it that your average Joe (or your average Andrea in my case) thinks it’s so absurd that insects (or chickens) might be conscious? That, as Andrea put it, they just run on instinct like little robots? There is a long history of thinking of animals this way, going back to the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, who labeled nonhuman animals bête machine: animal/beast machines. In other words, Andrea’s in perfectly good company. And I dare say that many animal cognition folks are still skeptical of the claim that insects have subjective experience, although I am personally on team Chittka.
The reason for the skepticism is quite simple. When most people use the word consciousness, they are not talking solely about subjective experience. They include other cognitive traits, like self-awareness. Andrea had said that it was crazy to assume my honeybee drones were conscious specifically because she thought it was impossible that they were self-aware. But self-awareness and consciousness are not synonymous. People also include cognitive skills like episodic foresight or even theory of mind when they think about consciousness. In fact, there are a ton of cognitive traits that we conflate with consciousness. I will explain more about these differences later in the chapter, which will help us develop a more nuanced understanding of the value placed on human consciousness. But before I do, we need to understand a bit more about how consciousness works in tandem with all these other processes to generate the human and animal mind in the first place.
Improv on the brain
There are many models for describing the nature of consciousness as it relates to cognition and neurobiology, but it’s not an easy subject to wrap your head around. I have found the best way to make sense of something this complex is to relate it to something I already know about. In this case, improv. Improv—or improvisational theater—is a form of unscripted theater spontaneously generated by a group of improvisers on stage. Aside from being a fantastic way to get your creative juices flowing and share some belly laughs with friends, it’s also the perfect metaphor for how minds work.
Think of your mind as a theater that is putting on an improv show.18 There is a stage, dimly lit except for a spotlight. On the stage are a dozen or so improvisers, all of whom are champing at the bit for their chance to stand in the spotlight. In this metaphor, the spotlight is equivalent to subjective experience (i.e., consciousness). Whatever the improviser standing in that spotlight is doing is transformed into qualia that the rest of your mind experiences. These qualia flood over the other improvisers on stage, the audience, and everyone working behind the scenes: the sound people in the booth, the director standing in the balcony, the stage managers hiding in the wings, etc. Everyone is watching what happens in that spotlight. Thus, the contents of conscious experience are broadcast across the mind, and available to a huge number of cognitive processes for analysis.
In this metaphor, the people onstage are all things that you could be conscious of. This includes sensory input from the things you see, hear, or touch. But also, internal motivational states like hunger, or emotional states like fear. The people offstage are all subconscious processes which never produce qualia of their own, but are nonetheless vital to the improv performance (i.e., the operation of your mind). Maybe the assistant stage manager is like muscle memory: your ability to, for example, ride a bicycle. Once learned, bike riding is something an unconscious part of your brain takes care of automatically. If a stage manager is doing their job correctly, they are never seen, operating at the level of the subconscious. And yet, without a stage manager, the improv show couldn’t exist.
The theater of your mind is populated primarily by unconscious things that will never stand in that spotlight. Like the part of your mind that controls your heartbeat and digestive system. Or the unconscious biases and heuristics that our minds use to make quick decisions. Daniel Kahneman described these as the System 1 mode of thinking in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: instant, automatic decisions made by subconscious cognitive processes operating behind the scenes.
Importantly, you can’t have an improv show without someone in the spotlight. System 1 thinking can’t put on a show all by itself. The reason minds (including animal minds) have this spotlight—the reason they have consciousness—is to help an animal make everyday decisions that require a bit of deliberation. The spotlight is there to tell the rest of your mind who the star of the show is at that moment, and everyone chips in to help that improviser move the show forward. In other words, consciousness exists to help your mind make decisions and generate behavior.
Like on an actual improv stage, the improvisers who end up attracting the spotlight are the ones who do something novel or unexpected, or who demand attention by making a lot of noise. By being the focus of attention, the loudest improviser can recruit multiple cognitive systems—including the unconscious ones watching the improv show—to help solve a problem or decide on what to do next.
Here’s an example. Let’s say that you are sitting on the couch reading a book. This behavior activates several cognitive systems, including your comprehension and linguistics abilities, which are largely unconscious. The spotlight is focusing on the imagined visual images evoked by the words on the page, generating qualia that the rest of your mind is currently enjoying. Suddenly, a new improviser jumps into the spotlight: hunger. The theater of your mind is now focused on the hunger qualia being shouted from the stage. This hunger improviser causes a cascade of action in a huge number of cognitive systems in your mind. Some subconscious system responsible for your motor action begins closing your book—it’s now time to search for a snack. Maybe you have a sudden craving for a Snickers bar—perhaps an unconscious response to a Snickers advertisement that you saw last night on TV. This is the equivalent to an audience member shouting “Snickers!,” which the improvisers must react to. A stage manager will whisper to the performer that they remember seeing a Snickers in the kitchen. This stage manager represents your unconscious memory system. Now another improviser pops into the spotlight for a second: episodic foresight. They’ve come onstage to provide backup to help move the scene along. Episodic foresight generates the conscious experience of you looking through your snack drawer in the kitchen, where the stage manager said the Snickers was located. This combination of cognitive systems—both on- and offstage—now leads to your decision to walk into the kitchen to look for a Snickers bar.
Whenever an animal must make a decision where a bit of thinking and deliberation are required, the spotlight of subjective experience needs to make an appearance so that qualia can be generated. Qualia are the currency of action. Or, as the philosopher Susanne Langer wrote, “to feel is to do something.”19 This is the reason animals evolved subjective experience in the first place, and why it makes the most sense to think of consciousness as a vital part of any animal’s mind.
More conscious is not a thing
I hope you’re still with me at this point, Andrea, because now is the time when I can reveal the reason why human consciousness seems so different from that of animals’. This improv show model has exposed something important. Human consciousness is in fact special for this reason: We, as a species, have a much larger number of cognitive processes that are potentially able to step into the spotlight of consciousness and generate qualia for us. We’re not more conscious, we’re just conscious of more things. This is an important difference to understand, so I will provide an example from my life to illustrate the point.
A few years ago, my friend Monica was explaining the concept of aphantasia, a disorder that she had. This is the inability for some people (approximately 1 percent of the population) to see images in their mind’s eye. “When people with aphantasia close their eyes, they see only blackness, never able to conjure up the image of, say, an apple,” she explained.
“That’s sad. So, wait a minute—if you close your eyes, you’re unable to think of an apple?” I asked.
“No. That’s not it. I can think of an apple, I just can’t see it as if it were a photograph. Like normal people can.”
“Right,” I said. “But, of course, nobody can actually see an image of an apple in their mind’s eye as if it were a photograph. That’s crazy.”
“Most people can.”
“But that’s impossible. I mean, when I close my eyes, I know that I am thinking of what an apple looks like. I just don’t see an apple.”
“Umm, Justin? I think you might have aphantasia, too.”
I asked my wife if, when she closed her eyes and tried to picture an apple, she actually “saw” a picture of an apple. She said she could. Everyone else I asked confirmed that they can see photograph-like images of apples in their mind’s eye, with varying levels of detail and intensity. But I see nothing. Monica was right. It turns out that I, too, have aphantasia.
Unlike a neurotypical human, my conscious mind is incapable of generating imagined images of things to help it figure out, for example, where in the supermarket the peanut butter is located. The thing is, I know the peanut butter’s location in the store and I can describe where it is using words. I can “feel” its location somehow. I just can’t “see” the layout of the store in my mind. I lack a capacity for conscious visual imagination. When I read a science fiction book, I cannot conjure images of the space stations that are being described. I cannot close my eyes and see my daughter’s face. And yet, I guarantee that I am no less conscious than other human beings. My experience of consciousness as it flits across that improv stage feels the same as yours. I just have one fewer improviser waiting to step into the spotlight.
The players on the human stage
When we think about animal consciousness, what we really want to know is not if they have it (because they do), or how much consciousness they have (the same amount), but which cognitive processes each species is able to send out onto that improv stage. When I say that humans are conscious of more things, what does that mean exactly? It means that human minds evolved to allow us to be consciously aware of a large number of cognitive processes that are either completely unique to our species, or things that, for most animals, only happen on the subconscious level. To see what I mean, let’s first consider the kinds of things that most animals would have available to that spotlight of subjective experience: emotions and feelings.
The word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere, which means to move out or agitate. This etymological fact helps us understand that emotions are states of activation in the brain whose goal is to agitate an animal into moving out and doing things that will ensure its survival.20 The neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp coined the term affective neuroscience to describe the study of the underlying neurology that generates emotional states in the animal (and human) mind, and identified seven classes of emotions that you’re likely to find in most mammals: seeking, lust, care, play, rage, fear, and panic.21 Much of animal behavior can be explained by the way these seven affective systems interact with our mind to motivate us to do things that help us live long enough to sire offspring. Seeking makes us want to find food and shelter. Lust makes us want to mate. Care helps us nurture our offspring or aid our social partners. Play helps us maintain those social partners while also honing our physical skills. Rage makes us defend ourselves, our food resources, and our homes from attackers. Fear tells us which things to avoid or defend against. And panic gives us a reason to seek out social partners in the first place.
Many of these emotions likely exist in similar forms in the minds of non-mammalian species as well. And many of these subconscious emotions will likely get translated into conscious experiences so animals will be better equipped to make decisions. When subconscious emotions make their way onto that improv stage and into the spotlight of subjective awareness for use in decision-making, scientists sometimes give them a new name: feelings. Frans de Waal elegantly explains in his book Mama’s Last Hug that feelings “happen when emotions bubble to the surface so that we become aware of them.”22
Humans, however, are unique: We have many more emotions that get translated into conscious feelings. Like that feeling of fairness we saw in the study of macaques, which likely exists for primates, but maybe not honeybees. Or things like nostalgia, that rely on our unique capacity for mental time travel. Or guilt, which relies on the unique way we relate to others via theory of mind. Unfortunately, because of the problem of other minds, it is notoriously difficult to tell just by observing animal behavior whether it is experiencing complex or basic feelings. For example, on the first day of class for my Animal Minds course, I show students a YouTube video of Denver the dog.23 While his owner was out of the house, Denver ate a bag of cat treats. With the camera rolling, the owner asks Denver if he was the one that ate the treats. Denver avoids eye contact. He droops his ears, squints, and licks his chops—looking every bit like he’s experiencing guilt at having eaten the cat’s treats. When I ask the students what’s happening in Denver’s mind at that moment, they all reach the commonsense conclusion that Denver feels guilty. I then go on to show research into what submissive body language looks like in dogs, and how Denver’s behavior can be elicited from any dog when in the presence of a confrontational owner regardless of whether they did something wrong. That’s not to say that a dog couldn’t be consciously aware of violating some sort of norm leading to guilt. It’s just that the behaviors displayed by Denver occur whenever a dog is trying to avoid a fight with another dog or human. In other words, it is more likely to be the behavioral expression of one of Panksepp’s more basic affective states: fear.
Aside from emotions, animal brains generate homeostatic sensations like hunger or thirst. Given how vital these are to agitating us into action, it is likely that they, too, are experienced subjectively by animals. And then, of course, there are sensory affects, including pain, temperature, pressure, or really anything that our sense organs (eyes, ears, skin, tongue, etc.) send to our brains. All these basic sensory signals are used by the nonconscious parts of our mind to generate automatic, System 1–style behavior (e.g., pulling your hand away when you touch a burning hot cookie sheet). But sensory signals often make their way into conscious awareness as well. This helps us plan our more complicated behavior, like looking for an oven mitt to put on our hand so we don’t burn ourselves on the cookie sheet again. Panksepp argued that all mammal brains (and perhaps some other species as the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness argues) have subcortical regions capable of producing these emotional, homeostatic, and sensory affective states.
The beautiful thing about the affective systems of nonhuman animals is that each species will have a tapestry of sensations available to it that are unique to its sensory, physiological, or social systems. Dolphins, for example, can channel bizarre perceptual information to their conscious mind via their ability to echolocate. By sending click sounds out into the water, dolphins can create acoustic images detailing the shape, density, and movement of objects in their environment. Echolocation can even penetrate some substances, allowing them to “see” fish buried in the sand using sound. Dolphins can also eavesdrop on the echolocation signals of other dolphins swimming next to them. This gives dolphins an ability to know—on a level that’s beyond human comprehension—precisely what their friends are perceiving. It would be a bit like me getting an image in my mind of what you were seeing on your smartphone just by sitting next to you on the couch with my eyes closed. This is a cognitive and conscious process wholly foreign to a human, but it plays a major role in how dolphins go about their lives. The animal kingdom is absolutely flooded with animal cognitive, affective, and sensory processes for which there is no analogue in humans. It doesn’t make these animal species “more conscious” than us. It just gives each species’ improv stage a different set of improvisers to work with.
Which brings us to humans. Aside from having a few complex emotions/feelings that other animals might lack, humans are unique because of the sheer number of things available to our conscious minds, as well as the complexity of those things. Let’s start with this idea of self-awareness.
There is no such thing as a singular concept of self-awareness. This term encompasses many “awarenesses,” which different species possess in different forms. There are three main categories: temporal self-awareness, body self-awareness, and social self-awareness.24 Importantly, an animal can possess one of these types of self-awareness without it being available to consciousness. That might sound weird, but here’s how it works.
For example, temporal self-awareness is the mind’s capacity to understand that it will continue to exist in the (near) future. Pretty much all minds must have this baked in. Otherwise, animals would never be able to have goals or intentions. Bruce the parrot, for example, intended to preen his feathers with the help of a stone. The only possible way his mind could coordinate this behavior is if his mind was aware that it would continue to exist in the future. But that doesn’t mean that Bruce’s temporal self-awareness was standing on that improv stage, receiving the spotlight of consciousness. For humans, we know what happens when we are aware of our temporal self-awareness: We can engage in mental time travel and episodic foresight. When temporal self-awareness is onstage, we can take that feeling of “my mind exists and will continue to exist” and broadcast it to all the other cognitive systems. Doing so allows us to imagine our mind existing in the past, future, and eventually existing no more (i.e., death wisdom). But since it does not appear that Bruce (or many other animals) can envision themselves in similar circumstances, we can only assume that temporal self-awareness never steps onto the stage for him. And yet, he can still engage in goal-directed behavior because his temporal self-awareness provides the unconscious scaffolding upon which his mind rests.
The same is true for body self-awareness. This is the awareness of one’s own body as being a thing that exists in the world and is separate from other things, and that can be controlled by the mind. The fact that any animal appears to be able to move its body through space and interact with objects suggests that body self-awareness is a rather basic kind of cognitive skill. One of the classic tests of self-awareness in animals has been the mirror self-recognition test (MSR). This involves putting a mark on the body or head of an animal without them noticing and then giving them access to a mirror. If they use the mirror to inspect the weird new mark that they see on themselves, we could assume that they know that it’s themselves they see in the mirror and are thus “self-aware.” Many species “pass” this test, including chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, etc. But what this test might actually reveal is the fact that, for some species, their body self-awareness is available for conscious consideration. For those species that fail the MSR test, like dogs or cats, it would be ridiculous to suggest that they are not aware of their bodies. Their mind is busy controlling that body all day long, so it must have some concept of body self-awareness tucked away in there. But it’s entirely possible that dogs and cats are not able to consciously consider the nature of their body like a chimpanzee can, which is why cats and dogs are flummoxed by mirrors.
Lastly, we have social self-awareness. This is the ability to be consciously aware of your relationship to others in your social world when it comes to social status or the strength or nature of your relationships. It gives us the ability to see ourselves as others might see us, allowing for theory of mind to take root. It also gives us the ability to lie (and bullshit), as well as make predictions about how others behave based on what we think others know or believe. And it gives us the ability to analyze our behavior in relation to that of others, which helps transform our norms into morals. As we have seen for animals, many have social self-awareness. For example, it drives the formation of the pecking order for my chickens. But it’s unlikely that my chickens are—or would need to be—consciously aware of their social selves. Chicken society runs perfectly fine being regulated by unconscious norms without them needing to consciously ruminate on their status within the flock. But conscious rumination of the social self for humans leads to the kind of amazing social complexity we see in human culture, as well as complex moral, ethical, and legal systems we can create (for whatever that’s worth).
When we ask questions about animal intelligence, we are very often wondering about the extent to which other species could thrust these three kinds of awarenesses onto the stage of consciousness. It’s an interesting question, since having the ability to think about yourself (individually or as part of a group) greatly increases one’s ability to generate complex behavior. Humans might well be unique because of our ability to have all three forms of self-awareness available for conscious analysis.
Add to that the ability to be conscious of your own thinking/cognition. This is called metacognition. To understand this concept, I will give you my favorite example. Researchers at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida trained a dolphin named Natua to press one paddle when he heard a high tone (2,100 Hz) and a different paddle when he heard a low tone (anything below 2,100 Hz). Natua would get a fish reward for pressing the correct paddle, or a long time-out for pressing the wrong one. A time-out would mean that the experiment would stop for a while, which means no chance for Natua to receive a fish reward. It was a rather simple task for Natua until the low tone was so close to the high tone that he could no longer discriminate between the two. At that point, he just started randomly pressing paddles. This was no fun for Natua, since a wrong answer would mean no fish for a while.
To see if Natua was aware of his uncertainty when the tones became difficult to distinguish, a third paddle was introduced: the bailout paddle. If Natua pressed the bailout paddle, he would just have to wait for a bit until a new, easy-to-discriminate tone was presented and he could try again. This was the best option in those cases where he was unsure if the tone was low or high, where getting it wrong meant a long wait.
When presented with a low tone that was difficult for him to differentiate from the high tone, Natua reacted exactly as you would expect of an animal that was having a hard time figuring out the answer. He would slowly approach the paddles and sweep his head from side to side—clearly hesitating—before eventually pressing the bailout paddle. The best explanation for this behavior was that Natua knew (via metacognition) that he didn’t know the right answer, and was consciously aware of the difficulty he was having in solving the problem. In other words, Natua’s thought processes were standing on the stage in the full spotlight of conscious awareness, allowing him to think about his thinking.
Metacognition gives an animal the ability to be aware of when it doesn’t know something. To think about its own knowledge. Being aware of one’s ignorance drives the search for more knowledge to help in the decision-making process. There are only a handful of studies (and a lot of controversy) suggesting that a few animal species have metacognition along these lines, including research with monkeys, dolphins, apes, dogs, and rats. If metacognition exists in animals (as it certainly appears to for Natua), it might not be particularly widespread. In contrast, this ability is the bedrock of human thinking. We clearly have conscious awareness of our metacognition, which inspires us to pinpoint gaps and problems in our thinking and seek out solutions using all the other cognitive abilities at our disposal. We use math and language to consciously organize our thoughts, and thanks to our capacity for causal inference and episodic foresight, we can imagine infinite solutions to the problems we face.
The explanation for a human’s ability to do complex stuff we are keen to label “intelligent” is in fact related to our capacity for consciousness. But only in the sense that we have an array of cognitive processes in our minds upon which we can train our spotlight of subjective experience allowing us to coordinate these cognitive processes more efficiently to solve complex problems. All animals are living qualia-rich lives, regardless of the complexity or number of cognitive processes they have available to them that could stand on that improv stage and be illuminated by the spotlight of conscious, subjective experience.
So I am convinced, my dear friend Andrea, that I was in fact making the lives of those doomed drones a little bit happier. I suspect that their little minds were conscious of the pleasure of eating honey that one last time before they died. And yet, there is no doubt that the human mind is conscious of much more than the mind of those drones. You are right that there is something different about the contents of our consciousness, as we’ve seen. The question is: So what? Is everything that we’ve accomplished as a species because of these cognitive abilities—and our subjective awareness of them—either 1) a sign that our species is successful, and 2) a good thing for the planet? Those are the big questions that we’ll tackle next.