28/10/2008 by admin.

We need to have a lighter blog for a change, so I will talk about dogs.

I have had smart dogs and dumb dogs. There are smart dogs – I know this in the same way that I know that there are cold winters. Not all winters everywhere are cold but I have personally experienced cold winters and I have experienced smart dogs. People who have known parrots, dolphins, bonobos and the like seem to feel the same about those animals. Of course, there are cold winters and then there are Cold Winters – smart like cold is relative.

My current dog is the sort that looks at your hand when you point at something. My last dog was the sort that looked at what you pointed to and not your finger. This smart dog was a cross between a Border Colley and a Huskie. An example of the sort of behaviour that convinced me that there was a real mind in that head was her showing off the house. We were building a house and the whole ground floor was open with just the studs showing where the walls would be. The dog watched me show someone the house on a few occasions. I would stand in one place and say that this was going to be the bathroom. The visitor would have to imagine walls where the studs were, then on to other rooms. One time I was showing someone the kitchen and I said to the dog to show them the bathroom. She went to the ‘bathroom door’ studs and looked over her shoulder which was her sign for ‘follow me’. I told the person to follow her when she did that posture and she led them into the bathroom. I said to show them the living room, the dog went to the edge of the living room space and looked over her shoulder and then entered the space. And so on.

What she had done was to pick up, in my conversations with others, the words (probably ones I had emphasized and that were accompanied by a gesture) for the rooms. And she picked up the idea of going from room to room. She had a large vocabulary of words she understood – I figure she had well over a hundred. I talked to her in an ordinary conversational way rather then barking commands as I must with my present dog. She had already taught me how to follow her. It took her longer to teach me that, than it took her to learn a few of the things I taught her. She understood from my reference to her and to the next room on the tour that I wanted her to take over the task. The usual ‘dogs only follow commands, they do not communicate’ does not seem to me to cover this sort of situation. Shepherds communicate with their dogs. So do blind people. There really is communication between people and some animals. The communication is not through a language, however, it is through things like words, gestures, postures, and symbols. The communication does include quite complex concepts.

I have the same sort of evidence that my dog had a mind as I had that the next person I might be introduced to had a mind. It is easier for me to understand and predict their behaviour if I use a theory-of-mind then it is otherwise. It is also easier for me to believe that the other person has conscious experience like mine than it is to believe they don’t. The same applied to my dog. She will be more conscious of some things than me and less of others because her senses are slightly different, but on the whole it will be a similar sort of experience.

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04/08/2008 by admin.

First I must declare my interests here. I like dogs and I know how smart and how dumb they can be. I have had a dog that would look where you pointed and I have had dogs that looked at your finger. Whether an animal like a dog, or an ape, or dolphin, or parrot, or elephant is conscious is going to depend on how consciousness is defined. If you want the answer to be no, it can be. If you want it to be yes, it can be. But if your search is to understand consciousness, then you must be interested in its earliest beginnings, whether you consider them fully formed or not.

When we look for the earliest nervous system, we look at the earliest animals. It is very early animals that developed the neuron, although some important pieces existed earlier and are shared with fungus. Yeasts use something akin to synapses to sense their environment. Vertebrate synapses have about 600 proteins, invertebrate only about 300 of these and yeast share about 50. (see here) The neuron is a major feature of a nervous system and the synapse is a major feature of a neuron. We have to go back to the common ancestor with worms to find the start of brains, organized groups of neurons working together as opposed to wide nets. We share a nervous system architecture type with all other vertebrates. We share more specifics with other mammals, still more with other primates and most with other apes. It is going to be impossible to put a point along this history and say before this there was no trace of consciousness and after it there was full consciousness. So the question should probably not be ‘are animals conscious?’ but ‘how similar is the consciousness of this particular species to ours?’ Is it very similar, hardly similar at all or somewhere in between?

Here is the abstract of BJ Baars’ paper, There are no known differences in brain mechanisms of consciousness between humans and other mammals. (paper here)

‘Recent scientific findings indicate that consciousness is a fundamental biological adaptation. The known brain correlates of consciousness appear to be ancient phylogenetically, going back at least to early mammals. In all mammals alertness and sensory consciousness are required for the goal-directed behaviors that make species survival and reproduction possible. In all mammals the anatomy, physiology, neurochemistry and electrical activity of the brain in alert states shows striking similarities. After more than seven decades of cumulative discoveries about waking and sensory consciousness, we have not yet found fundamental differences between humans and other mammals. Species differences such as the size of neocortex seem to be irrelevant to the existence of alertness and sensory consciousness, though different mammals obviously specialize in different of kinds of sensory, cognitive and motor abilities. Skeptics sometimes claim that objective evidence for consciousness tells us little about subjective experience, such as the experience of conscious pain. Scientifically, however, plausible inferences are routinely based on reliable and consistent patterns of evidence. In other humans we invariably infer subjective experiences from objective behavioral and brain evidence — if someone yells Ouch! after striking a finger with a hammer, we infer that they feel pain. The brain and behavioral evidence for subjective consciousness is essentially identical in humans and other mammals. On the weight of the objective evidence, therefore, subjective experience would seem to be equally plausible in all species with humanlike brains and behavior. Either we deny it to other humans (which is rarely done), or, to be consistent, we must also attribute it to other species that meet the same objective standards. It seems that the burden of proof for the absence of subjectivity in mammals should be placed on the skeptics.’

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