Cephalove

Dr. Colin Allen

Next in this week’s all-star lineup of experts on animal cognition and consciousness is Dr. Colin Allen. Dr. Allen is a prolific writer on a variety of topics related to cognitive science and philosophy, and associate editor of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (where he’s authored, notably, the entry “Animal Consciousness“.) You can find check out his home page for more info and links to his publications. As usual, my questions are in plain text, and Dr. Allen’s responses are in boxes.

Just to get readers oriented, what’s your background and what do you do (professionally and/or otherwise)?

My academic training is in philosophy, and I was initially attracted to philosophy because of its breadth. For example, if you like art you can pursue aesthetics, and if you like science you can pursue the philosophy of science, and if you want you can even combine these in the philosophy of cognitive science by reflecting on what (or whether) the neuroscience of aesthetic judgments can tell us about concepts of art. As an undergraduate I got interested in brains and language, so philosophy of language and philosophy of mind but also logic and philosophy of science were among my favorite topics. And when I got to graduate school in philosophy at UCLA, I also took classes in linguistics, anthropology, biology, and computer science — really designing my own course of study in cognitive science before there even was such a thing available there.

I’m currently a professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. I have a split appointment between the Department of History & Philosophy of Science (HPS) and the Program in Cognitive Science, and I’ll be the director of the latter when I come off a sabbatical leave in the summer of 2011. IU provides a lot of possibilities for being interdisciplinary. As well as HPS Department and Cognitive Science Program, which are inherently interdisciplinary, I belong to IU’s Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior which brings together biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and the occasional philosopher such as myself.

Generally, I’m interested in almost any topic related to the scientific explanation of behavior and cognition, but I’ve specialized in animal behavior and cognition partly because of being in the right place at the right time at UCLA, and also because I think these areas present very interesting challenges to traditional philosophical approaches to mind and knowledge. The Darwinian perspective from biology is of course important, but it’s one thing to affirm “evolutionary continuity” and quite another to work out what that really means for the evolution of cognition. And I’ve been lucky enough to keep my interest in computers and artificial intelligence going in various ways, including working on interactive websites for teaching logic, becoming associate editor for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, finishing a book a couple of years ago titled “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong”, and currently directing a project we call the Indiana Philosophy Ontology which aims to provide a gateway for people and machines into the entire discipline of philosophy.

You’ve published on (what looks like to me, at least) a huge variety of topics. Where does the study of consciousness in animals fit into your work, and why?

At UCLA I wrote my doctoral dissertation about intentionality and communicative meaning in the vocalizations of monkeys, and for the first few years after that, I rather avoided the topic of consciousness because I thought it was (a) very hard to say anything new and (b) too much of a distraction from other areas concerning the scientific study of animal minds that deserved more attention from philosophers. I still think that these are both true. But when I wrote “Species of Mind: the Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology” with the ethologist Marc Bekoff I knew that we had no choice but to write a chapter on consciousness or risk being accused as too timid — something that Marc would never be accused of on this subject! Donald Griffin, who invented the term ‘cognitive ethology’ had insisted on putting animal consciousness front and center, and while he did much to advance the field there were also many reasons to be dissatisfied with his specific ideas about consciousness which did not necessarily withstand philosophical scrutiny. As a result, criticism of Griffin’s ideas was often used to attack cognitive ethology as a whole, so Bekoff and I wanted to steer the conversation about cognitive ethology towards more tractable topics such as the cognitive aspects of topics like animal communication, social play, and anti-predatory vigilance, and away from the easy dismissals of cognitive ethology as romantic anthropomorphizing. Nevertheless, we included a chapter making some tentative suggestions about animal consciousness and placed it (some might say buried it) as chapter 8 (of 9) in the book. Subsequent to writing “Species of Mind” I got interested in pain research and have written about what it might tell us about consciousness in animals, and I have written and maintained the entry on animal consciousness in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has required me to keep abreast of the relevant scientific and philosophical literatures. So, animal cognition generally is my original line of academic work, and animal consciousness is an unavoidable subtopic within that. But it also connects to my interests in machine intelligence since there are many similar questions.

Why should people (scientists or non-scientists) care about research into animal consciousness?

Lots of reasons, not all of which will appeal to everyone. But the primary one, for me, is the intellectual challenge it poses — understanding for the sake of understanding. Secondly, of course, many people are motivated by the ethical implications of such work. Third, there’s a human-centered motivation of studying animals in order to develop insight into the mechanisms underlying human consciousness. I realize that some people think that scientific or philosophical skepticism about animal consciousness is a kind of ostrich-like refusal to see what’s obvious. But I think that scientific and philosophical challenges to common sense represent a long and distinguished tradition that can sometimes produce completely new ways of seeing the world, but even when reaffirming common sense leads to a better understanding of these “obvious” truths. Some people want all research to have immediate practical applications, but I think such an attitude is always short-sighted. Who would have predicted that the research of logicians into the foundations of mathematics over a hundred years ago would eventually lead to digital computers and the Internet?

A lot of people claim that consciousness is impossible to study, presumably because it doesn’t seem to be easily pinned down to specific physical phenomena. How do you respond to people who say that consciousness is not something that can be empirically investigated?

One thing to say is that consciousness is being studied empirically, so the question has a false premise. There are lots of empirical studies of human consciousness, and for animals one can point to such things as the study of sleep in a variety of animal species, or of blindsight in monkeys. These people you refer to may respond that they meant some other sense of consciousness that is untouched by those studies. Of course, someone might define consciousness in such a way that makes it impossible to study empirically, but why should we accept such a definition? I also ask them what do they know that I don’t know? I don’t think we know enough to say that it is impossible to study consciousness empirically. One of my undergraduate teachers was Colin McGinn, a philosopher of mind who has claimed that for us to understand consciousness (human or animal) is probably like asking a dog to understand calculus. We are too stupid to figure it out. But I think we are perhaps too stupid to know whether or not we are too stupid to figure it out. I don’t see how any a priori argument could establish the claim, since it would depend on knowing already exactly what it is that we are unable to grasp. There’s another kind of challenge which simply says that people been trying for ages with little progress, but even if it’s true that there has been little progress (which I would dispute), for similar reasons I think it’s prematurely defeatist to say that progress is impossible. The only way to find out is to keep trying.

What is the most convincing piece of evidence you’ve encountered either for or against the idea that or non-human animals have consciousness?

More than any one thing, I think it’s an accumulation of multiple lines of evidence. Neuroanatomy, physiology, and behavior all reveal similarities that are relevant to consciousness, and scientists are also learning more about different kinds of learning. Some take place implicitly and without conscious effort (although perhaps requiring much repetitive training), while more flexible kinds of learning seem to depend on explicit awareness of the relevant stimuli. Simply piling up a list of similarities between animals and humans can, however, seem weak — arguments from analogy are never conclusive — so that’s where more theoretical ideas about the role of consciousness in decision making and learning can help make the specific case for animal consciousness. It is necessary, also, to distinguish different ideas about consciousness — some people want to equate that term with a fully reflective self-consciousness, which as adult humans permits us to think of ourselves as beings in time with determinate births and deaths and a range of projects to carry out in between (when we are not otherwise occupied with simply getting through the day, that is.) I doubt that any non-humans have such a beginning-to-end self-conception. But more basic forms of sensory experience, memory, and anticipation, involve various degrees of integration of information over time and space that allow animals to flexibly adapt their own behavior to novel information and new goals. Nicky Clayton’s work at Cambridge University springs to mind here, with her experiments on the ability of scrub jays to remember where, when, and what kind of food they hid, and also to decide what to hide for tomorrow based on what they were deprived of today.

What sorts of projects would you most like to see done (or feel most need to be done) in the field of animal cognition and consciousness?

Although the situation in animal cognition studies is much richer than it was just 15 years ago, it still seems to me that too much current work focuses on what I call “trophy hunting” — the attempt to show that one’s favorite species can do something regarded as clever when humans do it: recognizing themselves in mirrors, using human language, predicting how others will behave given only information about what they have seen, and so on. Instead of taking a few studies and over-generalizing them to entire species, we need to be much more careful to find out what it is in the individual lives of animals entering these experiments that supports their success or leads to their failure. For instance, it is practically dogma that apes can recognize themselves in mirrors and monkeys “never get it” to quote one widely replayed public television documentary. But an article published in the journal PLoS ONE in June 2010 reports on rhesus monkeys using mirrors to inspect themselves. Now, let me hasten to add that this research, which was a side project involving monkeys who had received surgical implants in their heads, may offend some readers because of the surgeries involved, and I don’t want to deny that concern. We also should always be cautious of any new scientific result that has not been replicated by another lab (which is not a demand for more surgery to be done on monkeys either). But what it indicates to me is that we shouldn’t assume that the failure to get monkeys in previous studies to show self-directed behavior in mirrors may have as much to do with the prior experiences of the monkeys as to do with a perhaps mythical ape/monkey discontinuity. All in all we need a more developmental approach to animal cognition, one which investigates the way in cognitive development is cumulative, [the way] earlier experiences affect later cognitive outcomes. For example, another 2010 study, this one in PLoS Biology showed that cichlid fish who experienced a change in food levels during early development were better learners later in life. It didn’t matter whether the food supply went from low to high, or high to low — simply that there was a change. We have only begun to think about how early life experiences affect later cognitive abilities.

On the consciousness front, I think that’s a harder question. I’ve had a few ideas aimed at trying to get at whether animals can switch flexibly between how things appear to them and how they really are. The basic idea can be explained using the example of visual illusions, which come along with a certain conscious experience but also the knowledge that the experience is inaccurate. We know that many animals are subject to the same illusions as humans, but what we don’t know is whether they are capable of recognizing that their experience is illusory. However, experiments to test this would be tricky to set up, and very time consuming. It’s a big risk for scientists who face constant pressure to produce publishable and fundable research to invest a lot of effort into an experiment that might not work. Nevertheless, as I said earlier, there’s a lot of work going on in the neural and behavioral sciences that helps support the idea that the basic brain architecture that supports human consciousness is present in other mammalian species too. And we are finding out more about the interesting brain structures that have evolved in non-mammalian species, for instance the mushroom bodies of honey bees and the area VL of octopus brains, that seem to have similar structural organization and play a similar role in cognitive flexibility as the mammalian and avian hippocampus systems. This kind of comparative work will continue and become more detailed. And there are even people currently working on techniques for measuring the brain activity of rats and birds using non-invasive functional MRI, although I don’t think anyone has a plan to try it on an octopus … yet!

Are there any popular misconceptions about consciousness or cognition in non-human animals that you’ve encountered? What are they, and what would you prefer the public thought?

It seems to me that there are misconceptions in all directions here, ranging from the fabulous — psychic pets, or scheming, vengeful predators — to the willingly ignorant — painless castrations of bullocks, or emotionless reptiles. But I think that the one idea I hear most often that I would like to change is that there is a simple linear scale of consciousness or intelligence with humans at one end (or the top) and worms, or perhaps sponges, at the bottom. Going along with that is the comparison of various animals to human children at a certain age. A chimpanzee is not a furry four year-old, and there is not a simple scale according to which dolphins fall between (say) dogs and chimpanzees. Evolutionary adaptation and the processes of individual development conspire to produce sets of capacities that may be variously enhanced or lowered in different individuals and different species. Gaining an appreciation for this complexity and a fascination for the sheer variety of life and cognition strikes me as one of the best things we could convey to the public, with the hope of fostering the desire to know more instead of being satisfied with simplistic “pigeon-holing” of species according to their perceived intelligence.

Do you have any comments or advice for people who might want to pursue scientific or philosophical research in the area of animal cognition and/or consciousness?

Despite the explosion of interest in scientific studies of animal cognition, there are still considerable pockets of skepticism out there. Rightly so, in my opinion, since science generally thrives on skepticism: trust but verify! To be able to convince skeptics from whatever direction, you need to know where they are coming from, and to speak the languages of these different disciplines. For this it is necessary to obtain a broad background in neuroscience, biology, psychology, and philosophy — the cognitive sciences more generally. If your initial motivation is a desire to work with one of the “glamour species” — dolphins or the great apes — realize that there’s an extreme competition for that kind of work, so you may want to broaden your horizons and think about what could be accomplished with different and more accessible species. A lot of great work has been done in recent years studying crows, ravens, and jays, and there is an explosion of work currently using pet dogs as subjects. Even rats and pigeons have a lot to offer. After years of taking goldfish as the representatives of fish in general, scientists are starting to look at other species and finding some surprisingly sophisticated abilities. To be sure, we must not forget the cephalopods either! But no matter how many species have been studied or will be in the next few years, we will only have scratched at the diversity of cognitive abilities that biology has to offer.

The studies that Dr. Allen referred to are:

“Planning for the future by western scrub-jays” (2007) by Raby, Alexis, Dickinson, and Clayton (and similar works,) “Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) Do Recognize Themselves in the Mirror: Implications for the Evolution of Self-Recognition” (2010) by Rajala et al., and “Environmental Change Enhances Cognitive Abilities in Fish” (2010) by Kotrschal and Taborsky.

Thanks for reading!

Today’s piece in our week-long series of interviews takes a step away from cephalopods; we’re talking to Dr. David Smith, a researcher whose work focuses on metacognition in non-human animals (more specifically, how some non-human vertebrates monitor and respond to their own uncertainty – for a review of this topic check out his 2009 paper, “The study of animal metacognition.”.) Let’s get right down to it, then! My questions are in plain text, and Dr. Smith’s responses are in boxes.

Just to get readers oriented, what’s your background and what do you do (professionally and/or otherwise)?

I received my B.A. (Anthropology) from Yale University (1975), my M.S. Ed. from the Bank Street College of Education (1977), and my Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania (1982), where I attended graduate school as a Danforth Foundation fellow. I served in the Teacher Corps from 1975-1977, teaching pre-kindergarten, fourth grade, and sixth-grade science at P.S. 179 in Manhattan’s Spanish Harlem. I was a professor of psychology at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research (1982-1991), and I am a professor at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (1992-present) where I am also a member of the Center for Cognitive Science. With my colleagues, I inaugurated a new area of inquiry in comparative psychological research, demonstrating that some nonhuman animals have capacities for uncertainty monitoring and mental-state awareness that have strong parallels to those in humans. My current research in this area is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. I also have strong research interests in the cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience of human and animal category learning. My current research in this area is also funded by the National Institutes of Health.

How did you become interested in the study of cognition and metacognition in animals (that is, instead of any other area of research)?

I became interested in these areas from the perspective of human cognitive development. Developmental theorists were then supporting the idea that metacognition (MC) is one of the most sophisticated and late-emerging cognitive capacities in humans. However, it appeared that partly this was because the paradigms they were using to measure MC were highly verbal, introspective, and requiring of the child’s self-report. My thought then was that we should build simpler, purely behavioral, non-verbal paradigms for studying young humans. Then, it emerged as an equally productive avenue that one could apply these paradigms to the study of MC across species.

Your research seems to focus on vertebrates, specifically on mammals and birds. What do you think about the study of consciousness and cognition in other groups of vertebrates or invertebrates like cephalopods?

I think the phylogenetic distribution of awareness and reflective mind across many species, and the evolutionary emergence of these distinctive cognitive capacities, are among the important issues within comparative psychology today. For many reasons—species availability, research tradition, cognitive-evolutionary assumptions, commonalities in perceptual systems/brain organization, comparative researchers have focused on rats, pigeons, nonhuman primates, and undergraduates for their research. However, there is no reason why the current cognitive and metacognitive paradigms should not be applied as broadly as is feasible, with scientific open-mindedness.

Why should people (scientists or non-scientists) care about research into animal consciousness?

I can speak to why people should care about research on animals’ cognitive self-awareness and MC. The question of animal MC is intrinsically important because that capacity is one of humans’ most sophisticated cognitive capacities that could be unique to them. Studies of animal MC complement other measures of reflective mind and awareness in animals, and allow important evolutionary conjectures to be tested about when reflective mind emerged and how broadly it is distributed phylogenetically. Studies of animal MC help sharpen the theoretical constructs surrounding MC in human psychology, given the conservative standards in interpreting animals’ behavior. For example, if animals show MC capacities like those in humans, those results call into question the language basis for humans’ MC. Animal studies can provide animal models for humans’ MC, and allow the study of neurochemical facilitation that could benefit cognitively aging populations. These studies also have significance for expanding the range of behavioral metacognition paradigms available for testing very young human children and special-needs populations of various kinds. They could reveal more basic forms of cognitive regulation that could be preserved or fostered in children who are challenged in the highest-level components of metacognition that feature introspection, explicit verbal report, conscious self-regulation, theory of mind, executive attention, and so forth. Finally, studies of animal MC could help reveal the phylogenetic roots of human MC, which might have implications for understanding how or why cognitive awareness and cognitive regulation came to be such a crucial aspect of humans’ cognitive system.

A lot of people claim that consciousness is impossible to study, presumably because it doesn’t seem to be easily pinned down to specific physical phenomena. How do you respond to people who say that consciousness is not something that can be empirically investigated?

I try to avoid even using the word consciousness. It is broad, intimidating, it has many meanings, and it inflames passions unnecessarily. I talk about declarative cognition, cognitive awareness, and so forth. These are narrower, nearer to my research, and slightly safer. Humans apparently have this extra hierarchical layer of monitoring their cognition, guiding/directing, it, evaluating it, and so forth. They can tell you about it, sometimes they talk to themselves about it. One can ask whether nonhumans share these capacities, with the proviso that of course they will not talk about it, but perhaps they can behave about it. One doesn’t have to get bound up in all the baggage about consciousness, its physical instantiation, its metarepresentational feel, or anything else. The question is a testable one about cognitive organizations and cognitive capacities. Then, one can consider whether, if animals have the same architecture and organization, it may or may not feel the same to them experientially.

What is the most convincing piece of evidence you’ve encountered either for or against the idea that non-human animals have consciousness?

I can speak about the evidence for animal MC. My macaque monkeys have met almost every test of animal MC that I have given them. In my research, I give animals an uncertainty response with which they can choose to decline any trials they want to, and they choose to decline the most difficult trials that they will likely be wrong on if they try. Animals can make uncertainty responses in many task contexts at once, essentially metacognitively multi-tasking. They can make uncertainty responses on the first trial of new tasks, when no training has taught them to. They can make uncertainty responses when direct reinforcement (food rewards and timeouts for right and wrong answers) is removed from their immediate performance. They can make uncertainty responses when they don’t remember what they saw. It is equally interesting that some species—that is, capuchin monkeys and especially pigeons—do not show robustly this uncertainty-monitoring capacity. This also suggests that animal MC is a high-level capacity that some species evidently lack. It is the totality of the evidence, not any single finding, that supports the idea that nonhumans share with humans a basic metacognitive capacity, though animals may not share every aspect of the human capacity.

What sorts of projects would you most like to see done (or feel most need to be done) in the field of animal cognition and consciousness?

I can speak to constructive projects that might be done in the field of animal cognition and metacognition. Our research has shown that animals’ uncertainty responses are not conditioned, are not learned, and are not dependent on reinforcement. They are different than that, and more cognitive than that. Now, the field is moving toward studies that analyze the actual processes that animals may be using as they evaluate trials and respond to their uncertainty about them. Are they actively holding information in working memory? Are they using attentional resources? Are there prefrontally based hypotheses under review in animals’ minds? These studies will bring us closer to testing whether animal MC really is the explicit, declarative report about mental states that it is in humans.

Are there any popular misconceptions about consciousness or cognition in non-human animals that you’ve encountered? What are they, and what would you prefer that people thought?

There was the historical misconception by strict behaviorists that metacognition and even cognition were humanly unique, so that no nonhuman possessed these capacities. There is the more recent misconception that if these capacities extend beyond humans, they only do so narrowly to the few species of great ape. The evidence is thin for this proposal, and, in fact, substantial research speaks against it. However, the research does not yet say that these capacities extend all the way to the cephalopods. Notice—when I say all the way to the cephalopods—I betray comparative psychology’s assumption that they are a long way away. I would prefer that people understand that many species are definitely cognitive. Moreover, some species have important functional parallels to human MC—that is, they behave just as humans do in MC tasks.

Being a student, I’m interested in the process of becoming a scientist. Do you have any comments or advice for people who might want to pursue research in the area of animal cognition and/or consciousness?

Starting out, I would recommend joining someone’s laboratory for an internship, to gain experience and contacts in your field. Many laboratories at UB encourage students to come in and do research internships. We host 3-4 students every semester.

Thanks for reading!

To start off, I’m really happy with how this series came out, and all of the interest it’s garnered in the topic. The time has come, however, to wrap up my writings on consciousness in cephalopods (for the moment, at least.)

In the first three parts of this series (found here, here, and here) I threw a lot of facts out at you. At the end of it all, I’m left with the impression that what’s unique about the argument for the possibility of cephalopod consciousness is, like the arguments for the possibility of various types of conscioussness in many animals, are easily rejected on philosophical or ideological grounds. Importantly, all of the arguments for “cephalopod consciousness” are actually arguments for the possibility that cephalopods might be consciousness – this is something I’ve tried to emphasize throughout. Because these arguments are based on behaviors that are somewhat poorly studied, and have even more poorly studied neural correlates, all the arguments from analogy in the world will have a hard time conclusively confirming or disproving the existence of consciousness in cephalopods, at until the neural basis of consciousness is closer to being solved (assuming, of course, that it can be solved – we’re all materialists here, right?)

As a scientist, I find that two questions are important in this problem.

The first question: Do cephalopods have consciousness, and what are its characteristics? This is a very difficult question to answer. In fact, I remain unconvinced of any answer to this question. They types of experiments that we would need to answer this question have mostly not been done yet. It seems to early to claim a positive answer to this question, but the evidence so far is too suggestive to claim a negative answer to this question. As an insightful commentators on the first post said, it appears that the most scientifically valid answer in this case is “I don’t know.”

The second question is less direct, but more important: Is it possible that cephalopods have consciousness? Phrased another, perhaps more relevant way: Is it likely enough that cephalopods have consciousness to make it worth further study? To this, I can more assuredly say “yes.” Cephalopods have many of the complex behaviors and cognitive abilities that lead us to suspect various levels consciousness in other animals (and in some cases, to do the difficult experiments that are needed to find more direct evidence of this consciousness.) There is definitely a possibility for cephalopod consciousness.

The mild publicity that this series has garnered is heartening, but also a bit frustrating. Several people have linked to me or quoted me and said something like “Cephalopods really are conscious!” (to be fair, many more have accurately represented my position and phrases.) To set the record straight, the arguments I’ve covered are arguments for the possibility of cephalopod consciousness, not for its existence per se. The most important conclusion I have to make about the topic (given my brief period of involvement with it) is that it’s a horrendously complicated question, and one that probably has no simple or easy answer. Even if we could validly say “cephalopods are conscious” it would be difficult to tell what this meant without further clarification of the various states of cephalopod consciousness and their analogs (if any) in mammals (notably, humans.) This sophistication in our ability to study neural and behavioral phenomena is a long way off.

I’d like to add that I don’t believe this is problematic to the ethics of using animals. The uncertainty of the conscious status of cephalopods (or any animal) should not bear heavily on our ethics regarding that animal. Strictly speaking, the conscious status of every organism but myself is somewhat ambiguous to me, as I don’t have direct access to anybody else’s thoughts, experiences, or impressions. However, it does not make sense that I could violently assault some animal (a human, a dog, or a cephalopod) in a way that would cause great pain and suffering if done to myself, and then claim in my defense that there’s no way to prove that the other organism is conscious enough to perceive and suffer from the harm I’ve inflicted on it. Ethical treatment cannot be reserved for those organisms whose consciousness we can prove beyond doubt, because this would exclude every organism besides one’s self. Thus, if there is a reason to suspect that an organism is conscious in any way (that is, has some sort of awareness of its environment and itself that, presumably, could be pleasant or unpleasant) it deserves ethical consideration.

I’d also like to announce that, because this topic seems to be very popular as well as very difficult, I’m working on a series of interviews with researchers who study consciousness in animals (including cephalopods.) I’ve often felt, while writing this series, that I do not have the background to give much insight into the problem, so I decided that it would be best to solicit the insight of some experts in the area! Look for the posts around October; until then, I’ll be taking on other topics.

Finally, I’d like to thank everybody who left a comment on these articles or linked to them – it feels very good to write something that people like, and even better to write something that they can have a well-written, involved disagreement with.

Thanks for reading!

Here it is, finally: the post you’ve been waiting for. Having already convinced you that you should care about the possibility of consciousness in cephalopods in Part 1 and having briefly outlined the state of research on consciousness in non-human animals in Part 2, I’ll get right down to it and discuss the possibility of consciousness in cephalopods in this post. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic, I suggest reading Parts 1 and 2 of the series – in this article, I’ll be very brief with explaining some concepts that are explained in more detail there.

In this post, I’ll reference Jennifer Mather’s 2008 article (which I can’t recommend highly enough) “Cephalopod consciousness: behavioural evidence” and Edelman and Seth’s article (which is also an excellent read) “Animal consciousness: A synthetic approach”. These are both review articles, so I’ll be citing their descriptions of other people’s experiments a lot – I know this is bad practice, but hey, this is a blog – I can get away with it. I’ll cite a research study itself if I discuss it detail, but I’ll mostly be sticking to the arguments outlined in these two papers.

If you’ll remember from the last post in the series (and I’m sure you do, but I’ll summarize here anyways,) there are several methods that researchers use to get at the question of consciousness. Most directly, there is accurate self-report, whose use is limited to animals with whom we can communicate through language. This is not a useful approach with cephalopods, who (thus far) are not known to use language.

In the absence of language, animals can be trained to report on their experience (such as by performing a task for a reward when they detect a certain stimulus.) This approach is not well developed in cephalopods. Octopuses have been trained through reward and punishment to attack certain stimuli and not others in many studies; despite this, there is no protocol (that I know of) that to train octopuses with a task that would allow hypotheses about the animal’s awareness of its own experience to be tested directly in the ways that has been done for primates (for example.) Nevertheless, there is some evidence suggesting that cephalopods may be consciously aware from studies that use specific trained tasks.

Mather makes the point that the ability of cephalopods to learn a variety of tasks reliably and quickly, and then to forget them afterwards, makes them good candidates for at least primary consciousness because it implies the sort of behavioral and cognitive complexity that appears to be associated with consicousness in vertebrates. As an example of this, when experiments on visual discrimination in the octopus were done (mostly by M. J. Wells in the 1970′s and earlier,) experimenters attempted to discover the basis by which octopuses discriminated between two visual stimuli. In a sense, they were looking at how the octopus categorized stimuli. A number of hypotheses were generated to explain this within a simple, computational framework, but it was eventually concluded that octopuses (that is, individuals of the species O. vulgaris, the common octopus) don’t use a set of simple rules to categorize objects. Rather, Mather argues, they “[evaluate] a figure on several dimensions and [generate] a simple concept, where [a] concept is an abstract or general idea inferred or derived from specific instances.” Other evidence for the ability of cephalopods to exhibit learning like that taken to indicate cognitive ability (and thus the potential for consciousness) in vertebrate species comes from more complex learning tasks. The spatial learning abilities of cephalopods have been studied and it has been found, in general, that they might be capable of spatial learning to rival that of commonly used vertebrate laboratory species (such as rodents,) as long as the apparatus used is adapted to their capabilities (obviously, we cannot expect a rat and a cuttlefish to learn the same things in the same circumstance, but both can show impressive spatial learning given the right circumstances.)

Consciousness can also be suggested by non-trained behavior of an animal. As I’ll address at more length in a little bit, such evidence in cephalopods is found in accounts of their foraging behavior, their responses to novel objects in their environment, and the presence of sleep-like (and possibly REM-like) states. Most convincingly, in my mind, is the evidence suggesting the superior behavioral flexibility of cephalopods.

One of the more straight-forward tasks that is used to suggest conscious awareness in human and non-human alike is the mirror self-recognition task (MSR). What happens when you show a cephalopod a mirror – does it recognize itself, or does it treat its reflection as if it were another animal? Mather cites a personal communication suggesting that cuttlefish fail the MSR. You can see for yourself, in this great video of a cuttlefish at Epcot being shown its own image on an electronic screen. It turns very dark and pursues its image as if it were confronting another cuttlefish. The mechanics are a bit different, but it’s essentially similar to the MSR:

Mather makes a case for the cognitive abilities of cephalopods using the results of a study that looked at the strategies that octopuses use to open bivalves (which she discusses in this interview on Scientific American.) Not only do octopuses use different techniques for opening clams of different species (that is, they pry open the shells of the weaker ones, and drilling holes through the shells of the stronger ones, but they could switch strategies if one wasn’t working properly. When the experimenters took the clams that the octopus normally ate by prying open and wired them together so that they couldn’t be opened, the octopus figured this out and started drilling. This sort of behavioral flexibility, particularly the selection of one possible behavior among many on the basis of its effectiveness in a specific situation, could be attributed to some sort of centralized “executive processor” that might associated with consciousness.

Although definitions of “play” are often disagreed-upon, Mather argues that some octopuses have been observed playing with objects. While the existence of play behavior in a species is not indicative of consciousness, it suggests the possibility of consciousness; object play is, as Mather says, “something that intelligent animals do” to allow them to learn about things in their environment. (You can read my discussion of one study of octopus play at this link.)

It has also been (rather famously) argued that some octopuses have evolved the ability to use tools – specifically, one species of octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) has been seen carrying empty coconut shells across the sea floor, which they use as mobile shelters. It can be argued that tool use is only possible when the animal using the tool has developed some rather sophisticated cognitive awareness of their surroundings that allows them to appreciate how an object can be used for a certain function. Here’s a video of this behavior, taken by one of the authors of the 2009 paper on the subject:

The comparative neuroanatomical argument for consciousness (epitomized by Panksepp’s “triangulation” approach to the problem, which recommends using affective, behavioral, and neural approaches together to infer consciousness in non-humans) is much more difficult to make for cephalopods than it is for vertebrates. The reason for this is simple: humans are vertebrates, and share many features of the anatomical and functional organization of our brains with other vertebrates. If you dissect a rat brain and a human brain side-by-side, most of the parts in one of them will show up in the other one in some form. Thus, it is rather easy to make an argument from analogy claiming that, because the brain activity and behavior of the two species in some situation are similar, it is likely that their experiences are likely to also be similar. It is harder to make this argument between people and cephalopods, because there is no direct equivalence between any of the parts of a cephalopod brain and the parts of a human brain, with the possible exceptions of the retina and primary visual processing areas of the two species and some parts of memory systems (eg. the vertical lobe system in cephalopods and the hippocampus in humans.) Even these are examples of convergent evolution (meaning they started from different places and got the same functional result,) and so the equivalences between these two brain areas in cephalopods and humans are only approximate, and based on a very limited knowledge of the functions of the cephalopod brain. Despite this difficulty, there are some overall features of the cephalopod brain that suggest consciousness, including its apparent organization as a complex integrator for sensory information, its lateralization, and its patterns of activity during sleep and wakefulness.

Edelman and Seth argue that we have a good reason to suspect that birds have some sort of consciousness, based on apparent anatomical and functional correspondence between the brains of mammals (including humans) and birds. They show this figure, which illustrates this correspondence – it shows diagrams of a human brain and a finch brain, with homologous structures colored similarly in each diagram:

As you can see, human and zebra finch brains (and indeed, mammalian and avian brains in general) have somewhat similar layouts, which allows one to make an argument for the inference of similar subjective states that correspond to certain types of neural activity in multiple vertebrate species. The basic logic is simple: if the brains are similar, and most of the output of the brain (that is, behavior) is similar in a certain situation, the rest of the output of the brain (that is, affective and/or conceptual awareness, eg. consciousness) is reasonably likely to be similar.

At the bottom of the figure, though, they show the octopus brain. Notice that it’s done in a completely different color scheme. This is because the functional or anatomical subunits of the octopus brain are not clearly equivalent to those found in vertebrate brains. A few localized functions of the octopus brain can be compared to those of vertebrate brains – for one, the vertebrate retina and the octopus optic lobe have apparently analogous structures and functions (that being the initial processing of visual information,) and the vertical lobe/medial superior frontal lobe system of the octopus is known to be involved in memory consolidation, and may have a microscopic structure that resembles that found in the mammalian hippocampus (for more info on this, check out Young, 1991, who makes the argument that the cellular structure and computational properties of the mammalian hippocampus might resemble those of the octopus memory system.)

Functionally, however, it is possible to find similarities between cephalopod brains and vertebrate brains, even if it is difficult to do so anatomically. Mather discusses the evidence for lateralized specialization of function in the cephalopod brain at length (that is, the general feature of the brain that two mirror-image halves can work somewhat independently, and may have different functions.) Lateralization is seen in humans and other primates, and seems to be one evolutionary result of the need for cortical tissue to be both locally differentiated and highly interconnected; it allows for more specialized cortical areas, because the right and left sides of the brain need not be functionally equivalent. Thus, the apparent laterality of the octopus brain (as this is already getting on in length, I’ll let you check out Mather’s article for a more complete discussion) might suggest that it has also evolved the sort of complex cognitive capacities that lateralization is associated with in mammals.

Finally, EEG-like recordings have been done in both octopus and cuttlefish, leading to the general (but very preliminary) finding that cephalopods have complex, low-frequency “background” electrical activity in some parts of their brains that seems to vary with their states of consciousness. In addition, they show sensory-evoked changes in this activity, in the same way that human EEGs do. This suggests that some of the gross functional properties of the cephalopod brain might resemble those of mammals on a system-wide level.

All of the arguments by analogy should be taken with a grain of salt, because while it is interesting to consider the possible theoretical importance of the apparent similarities between octopus and vertebrate brains, it seems premature at this point, given how little we know about them. While laterality, distributed low-amplitude electrical activity, and a certain kind of memory system architecture are found in the brains of animals who are almost definitely conscious (eg. mammals and birds,) it’s hard to say that their presence in such highly divergent nervous systems (eg. those of vertebrates and cephalopods) has the same set of functional consequences in all cases.

So there it is – these are the arguments for consciousness in cephalopods. It’s an astoundingly complicated and difficult question, and one that I’m sure I haven’t done justice to. Look for the last planned article of the series later this week, where I’ll reflect upon these arguments and figure out where I stand (and also hopefully invite discussion) on the science of cephalopod consciousness.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Today is my first day of classes for the Fall semester. Wish me luck!

MATHER, J. (2008). Cephalopod consciousness: Behavioural evidence Consciousness and Cognition, 17 (1), 37-48 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2006.11.006

Edelman, D., & Seth, A. (2009). Animal consciousness: a synthetic approach Trends in Neurosciences, 32 (9), 476-484 DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2009.05.008

Young, J. (1991). Computation in the Learning System of Cephalopods Biological Bulletin, 180 (2) DOI: 10.2307/1542389

Finn, J., Tregenza, T., & Norman, M. (2009). Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus Current Biology, 19 (23) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.052

In this second post of the series “Cephalopod Consciousness”, I’ll talk about the methods that scientists have used to attempt to study consciousness in animals. For perhaps the first time in the history of this blog, I’ll write about science without making any specific reference to cephalopods – I’m saving that for part 3. Here I’ll just cover enough background get a basic handle on the study of consciousness in non-humans, so that I can talk all about its application to cephalopods next time.

I’ll refer primarily to three review articles as I move through the various paradigms used to argue for or against non-human consciousness. These articles are Animal consciousness: a synthetic approach by Edelman and Seth (2009), Subjective experience is probably not limited to humans: The evidence from neurobiology and behavior by Baars (2005), and Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans by Panksepp (2005). There are many good articles and books on the topic that I am not covering here, so feel free to point out what might be better/useful sources in the comments if you think I’ve missed something important.

In any case, let’s dive right in!

We have to start out assuming that the question of consciousness in non-human animals is worth investigating (eg. that my last post in the series contained at least one valid argument – I might be pushing my luck, but bear with me!) Where do we start?

The first thing to do is to operationalize consciousness. We have to determine how we will identify consciousness in non-human animals, if it exists. The classic way of studying consciousness in humans is through “accurate report”, which Edelman and Seth (2009) define as “a first-person account of what an individual is experiencing, made without the attempt to mislead.” Assuming that you believe that other humans are actually conscious (which can be argued; I won’t get into that here, though,) this is as direct a way as any to study consciousness. It is, however, very difficult to do with animals, as we for the most part lack any reliable form of verbal communication with non-humans. Notable possible exceptions to this include parrots (like Alex the Grey Parrot, who learned language well enough to pretty unambiguously demonstrate cognitive capacities such as numerical representation and the ability to categorize objects) and some chimpanzees who have been taught to use simple language (for example, Washoe, who was taught to use American Sign Language to communicate with her keepers.) Despite these exceptions, linguistic reports remain a rare and difficult-to-use tool for studying consciousness in animals.

One way of working around the inability of most animals to use language (and our inability to interpret the other ways they might be projecting information) is to allow the animals to report on their experience through some sort of trained response, such as by pressing a lever, pushing a button, or another physical activity. For example, Baars (2005) describes a study (Cowey and Stoerig, 1995) in which Macaques were trained to touch a screen where a target stimulus appeared, and then also to indicate (by pressing a button) whether they had perceived any stimulus on the screen (known as a “signal-detection task”, this is a pretty standard way to determine whether an intact animal can sense something.) After damaging parts of the cortex that process visual information in these monkeys, the experimenters found that they continued to point to the correct spot, but they not longer reported seeing a stimulus when the stimulus was in a certain part of the visual field. This parallels a phenomenon known as “blindsight” in humans, where a subject will claim not to perceive anything in a part of the visual field but will otherwise show basically normal behavioral responses to objects in that portion of the visual field. By training the monkeys in this study to report on their experience, the authors of this study were able to show that their awareness of their sensory world is separable from the at least some of the basic functionality of their sensory world, arguing that they have some sort of conscious perception of the world on top of the ability to make motor responses to sensory stimuli. By providing a way for animals to make “commentary” on their experience, Baars claims, methods like this provide a method of studying consciousness that is functionally equivalent to the method of accurate report in humans.

In some cases, animals do not need to be trained to show behavioral evidence of complex cognitive processes, which suggest (but importantly do not prove) the existence of consciousness. For example, as part of their arguments for the possibility of consciousness in birds, Edelman and Seth (2009) cite observations of birds exhibiting object constancy (which is the ability to attend to an object even though it leaves the visual field, such as when it is hidden behind another object – for example, peek-a-boo is fun because young babies do not have object constancy, and so they act as if you disappear when you are hidden from sight,) using and modifying tools, and changing their behavior based on their perceptions of being watched by other birds. They argue that these behaviors show that birds have a working memory and spatial cognition as well as “the ability to make sophisticated discriminations and to plan behaviors before executing them.”

Other behavioral experiments get at the question of whether animals have “selfhood” – that is, do animals have a sense of identity? Such a distinction between self and other is considered key to the sort of “higher-order” consciousness that humans have. The most classical method of doing this in humans and apes is by testing to see if they can recognize themselves in a mirror. This ability is rather straightforwardly called Mirror Self-Recognition (or MSR.) It has been used on many animals, and some that appear to have the ability to recognize themselves include dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, and (in one of my new personal favorite behavioral studies by Plotnik et al., 2006) elephants.

If you’re like me, you’re a bit troubled right now. These behavioral methods fall short of actually addressing consciousness per se, and they would never fly as an argument for consciousness in animals in and of themselves (actually, the results with macaques are a veritable one-hit KO in this argument, but only because they involve a species so closely related to humans – arguments from analogy to more distant evolutionary relatives require correspondingly more evidence to make.) Behavioral experiments do not solve the problem of identifying the internal states of animals, which is what we mean when we say “consciousness.” In a particularly lucid explanation of how this problem might be solved despite the shortcomings of behavioral evidence to inform us about internal states, Panksepp (2005) argues for a “psycho-neuro-ethological triangulation” strategy to address the problem of animal consciousness. According to this strategy, we should use neurological processes (some well-studied ones are the mobilization or production of neuroactive chemicals in the body and changes in EEG patterns) as a link between the behaviors we know to be associated with conscious states in humans (in his argument, emotional states in particular) and analogous behaviors in animals. For example, we know that humans feel pain when they are burned by a hot stove (the “psycho-” component of the strategy), and they then withdrawal from the stove and attend to the site of injury. If we watch a rat touch its paw to a hot piece of metal and get burned, we can observe the same sort of reaction (the “ethological” component of the strategy.) Finally, we can attempt to identify neural processes in the rat that correspond with this behavioral reaction in the rat and in humans, as well as neural processes that correspond specifically with the perception of the event (in this case, pain) in humans. If we find that homologous neural processes and behaviors occur in both cases, we have a good case for suggesting that analogous subjective experiences also occur.

In apparent agreement with this idea, both Baars (2005) and Edelman and Seth (2009) make a case for the identification of consciousness in non-humans through the study of neural processes that resemble those associated with human consciousness. The latter authors, in their argument for the possibility of consciousness in birds, identify the presence of human-like (or conscious-like) EEG patterns in birds and the presence of a neural circuit analogous to the thalamocortical circuit of humans (which has been shown through studies of brain-damaged patients and neuroimaging studies to be closely associated with consciousness) as evidence supporting the interpretation of bird behavior as indicative of consciousness. Baars argues that the apparent evolution of these brain structures suggests that consciousness is universal at least among all mammals. Because conscious states and phenomena (for example, wakefulness, REM sleep, and sensory perceptions) are modulated by brainstem structures and “seated in” the thalamocortical circuit, structures which have not undergone much overall structure change throughout mammalian evolution, they are likely to be conserved across all mammals. This is what he claims – I regrettably do not have the expertise in paleobiology or comparative anatomy to agree with or dispute his claims about brain evolution, but they sound like they could be disputed.

In essence, the argument for consciousness in animals remains an argument by analogy from the easily acceptable existence of consciousness in humans. It uses both behavioral and neural evidence to build this case. Critically, though, it makes use of comparative neuroscience to support the existence of consciousness in non-human vertebrates. Remember, though, that non-human mammals and birds are relatively closely related to people, and so their neuroanatomy is (arguably) suitably homologous to human neuroanatomy to make such an argument. What can we make of this line of inquiry when we try to apply it to an animal that is, evolutionarily speaking, much more distantly related to humans – say, an octopus?

Tune in next time to find out!

(For those who are interested in the topic, the journal Consciousness and Cognition put out an issue dedicated to animal consciousness in 2005. It’s very worth checking out.)

BAARS, B. (2005). Subjective experience is probably not limited to humans: The evidence from neurobiology and behavior Consciousness and Cognition, 14 (1), 7-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2004.11.002

Edelman, D., & Seth, A. (2009). Animal consciousness: a synthetic approach Trends in Neurosciences, 32 (9), 476-484 DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2009.05.008

PANKSEPP, J. (2005). Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans Consciousness and Cognition, 14 (1), 30-80 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2004.10.004

Plotnik JM, de Waal FB, & Reiss D (2006). Self-recognition in an Asian elephant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103 (45), 17053-7 PMID: 17075063

Cowey, A., & Stoerig, P. (1995). Blindsight in monkeys Nature, 373 (6511), 247-249 DOI: 10.1038/373247a0

This is part on of my series looking to answer the question: “Are cephalopods conscious?” In this post, I’ll try to pin down just why it matters whether or not cephalopods have consciousness.

Consciousness is a difficult term to define, but (working from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on the subject) it seems to be best captured by the criterion of awareness. A conscious creature is one who is aware of the world, who has some subjective state which allows them to experience things. More strictly, we might say that a conscious creature must be aware of itself – it must have some notion that it exists, and that it is separate from the rest of the world. Obviously, the ability to have complex internal representations of things is generally considered a prerequisite to this sort of consciousness. This is sometimes called “cognitive ability” (perhaps more properly, the abilities to perform various tasks requiring this capacity are called “cognitive abilities”.) It does not necessarily imply consciousness, but consciousness as defined here requires that an animal to be able to form such representations of the world “before” it can be considered conscious.

Some authors use the term “primary consciousness” and “secondary consciousness” to refer to different aspects of what others call “cognition” – that is, an animal with “primary consciousness” has awareness of sensory impressions and emotions, and an animal with “secondary consciousness” can think about its experiences.  Either of these abilities might be spoken of as being part of the workings of cognitive abilities, with or without any implication in consciousness.  The primary/secondary terminology emphasizes that consciousness probably comes in many varieties that cannot always be easily described using the binary concepts of “conscious” and “non-conscious”.  This is especially important to keep in mind when talking about animal consciousness, as it is likely than other species have consciousness that is qualitatively very different from ours, but can still be identified as the same type of phenomenon.

It’s relatively easy to determine if a human is conscious; you just ask them. The fact that we can use language makes it very easy to determine if a human is currently conscious (that is, not in a deep sleep, dead, or in a coma.) In general, though, we’re comfortable making the assertion that humans are conscious. It is much harder to make this case with non-human animals (hereafter just called “animals”.) Because animals generally cannot directly report their experience to us – or because we cannot understand their reports well enough – we have difficulty knowing from an animal’s behavior whether or not it is conscious, or how to characterize its possible consciousness. We can determine the extent of an animal’s cognitive abilities relatively routinely using a variety of tests. This approaches the problem of consciousness tangentially, and from these tests we derive most of our information about the possibility of consciousness in animals. I’ll get more into this in Part 2 of this series of posts. For now, another question is at hand:

Who cares? Why in the world should we be concerned with the mental states of animals? In particular, why do we want to know if cephalopods are conscious?

I’ll answer this question two ways: first, as a scientist, and second, as an ethicist.  There are probably other reasons to care, and I cannot cover either of the ones I have chosen exhaustively.  In any case, let’s press forward:

Scientifically, the question of animal consciousness (mostly studied these days in terms of animal cognition) is exceedingly important to neuroscience, zoology, psychology, and biology-in-general. If we accept the dogma of neuroscience, specifically that the nervous system is responsible for all of the behavioral and mental processes of an animal, then it must be that the brain of an animal is responsible for that animal’s consciousness (humans included.) If neuroscience is supposed to learn how the brain works, then it within the goals of neuroscience to understand how the functioning of the brain gives rise to consciousness. As neuroscience is not just about human nervous systems, but nervous systems in general, it is important that we know whether animals are conscious, and if so how this consciousness might differ from or be similar to our own consciousness.

Besides being a good subject for science fiction movies, “solving” consciousness in terms of neural function would also be a huge theoretical milestone for neuroscience and computer science. It might allow us to construct computers that were conscious, and could perform tasks with human-like (or even animal-like) intelligence. Because consciousness is widely thought of as one of the most complex and integrative brain functions (that is, it involves the action of a very large and very variable group of brain areas and functions,) it is likely that, by the time we reach this goal, we will have solved most of the rest of the functions of the brain as well. Thus, understanding consciousness is an important goal in neuroscience.

In zoology, ethology, and psychology, all of which attempt (at least in part) to understand behavior, the question of animal consciousness is central. If animals use conscious processes to make decisions, then it is appropriate (and indeed, necessary) that we identify these and study the animal’s behaviors on these terms. As it stands, cognitive processes are recognized throughout a wide swath of the animal kingdom, but we have yet to reliably extend our inquiry to consciousness. Thus, understanding if and how animals are conscious is important to understanding animals and their behavior in general, which is the goal of these disciplines.

Why cephalopods, though? As I’ve harped on before (for example, here, here, here, and here,) cephalopods are a unique group of model animals in the comparative study of the brain and behavior. Most of the anatomy (and presumably the function) of their nervous systems evolved independently from the other animals we usually grant “cognitive” or “conscious” status to (eg. birds, mammals, and possibly reptiles.) When we theorize about the relationship between neural function and cognition, we can use cephalopods as a way to test our theories about what sorts of neural circuits and/or patterns of activity correspond with different cognitive faculties and conscious states. This is only true if, in fact, cephalopods can be conscious. As far as cephalopods are generally useful in developing theories of behavior and brain function in general, they are useful in the scientific study of consciousness – that is, if they are conscious. Thus, determining whether cephalopods are or are not conscious is important to the future of the comparative study of behavior and cognition.

Finally, the question of cephalopod consciousness has implications for how humans should use animals – that is, in terms of the ethics regarding the way that humans interact with other animals. Panksepp (2005) lists 5 reasons for studying affective consciousness (while he’s interested in emotions, many of the same arguments apply to consciousness in general,) including the following: “an understanding of affect in the lives of other animals may be critical for making informed choices on how we ethically treat other creatures… By failing to study such issues, we may continue to deny animals the respect they deserve.”

If we are going to have a rational ethics that can instruct us as to what is permissible and what is not permissible to do with animals (a goal that all of us should have,) we need to know if animals experience the world, and if they do, how they experience it. The ethical stance most commonly taken when looking at the use of animals by humans, welfarism, has at its center the idea that the suffering and discomfort of animals should be considered when using animals; specifically, the suffering of any animals that people use should be minimized. The focus is on the “welfare” of the animal, which means its general well-being, comfort, and quality of life. This is different from the case for “animal rights”, which ascribes to animals rights not to be treated as a means-to-an-end that, like the rights we ascribe to people, would prevent them from being ethically used by humans at all. As (for example) researchers, farmers, and the pet industry are still using animals, and they (and by proxy, all of us who make use of their discoveries and products) depend on the continued use of animals, we mostly reject the latter argument, focusing on the welfare of animals instead of the rights of animals. It’s a somewhat subtle distinction, but it’s important. From a welfare-based perspective, which is based on preventing suffering, it is important to know how animals can suffer. It seems likely that having self-awareness can allow an animal to suffer in more and possibly deeper ways – for example, from loneliness, self-pity, shame, boredom, unfulfillment, anger, and so forth. Thus, the question of animal consciousness is important to animal welfare-based ethics. From a rights-based perspective, the consciousness of animals is not as important. The supposed right of animals not to be used by humans is intrinsic to sentient animals (that is, animals who can sense and react to their environment.) From this viewpoint, regardless of their specific capacity for cognition or conscious awareness, these animals should be protected from human use. I’ll just (for convenience, because it’s what I believe, and because it’s the dominant view, socially speaking) adopt a welfarist perspective on the ethics of the use of animals.

How does this apply to cephalopods? Well, humans use a lot of cephalopods. More than 4 million tonnes of cephalopods were harvested from the oceans in 2007, according to the FAO yearbook of Fishery and Aquaculture Statistics for that year. Perhaps particularly troubling, depending on the capacity of cephalopods to suffer, is the practice of eating extremely fresh cephalopods – that is, those who are still alive (or killed/incapacitated just prior to eating,) which, as a quick YouTube search will attest, is not unheard of in southern Asia and maybe elsewhere. In addition to their use as food, smaller numbers of cephalopods are kept as pets, as research animals, and in aquaria. If the study of the possibility of consciousness in cephalopods is necessary to inform our ethics regarding how we treat cephalopods (and it seems like it is, given how important consciousness appears to be to our common-sense notions of “suffering”, and even some philosophical formulations thereof) then we should get on the ball and pursue this research.  That is, if we accept the welfarist position, and we want to have a scientifically reasonable ethical viewpoint, both of which I think are relatively conservative assumptions.

I should note, before I finish this up, that the science of animal consciousness and the ethical question of animal consciousness relate to each other, but make different assumptions. Scientists are necessarily conservative about making positive assertions, and for good reason – it’s bad science to speak as if a thing (like consciousness in non-human animals) exists if there’s not some positive evidence for it. Put another way, scientific theorizing is set up to rigorously avoid false positives. On the other hand, in a system of ethics that is based on preventing suffering, it’s more important to avoid false negatives than to avoid false positives. In making an ethical decision about a certain animal (or person,) one would rather accidentally treat an agent that doesn’t need ethical considerations as if it does than to unwittingly subject that agent to undue suffering by assuming that it doesn’t have the capacity to suffer in a certain way. Thus, welfare ethics demands that we fastidiously avoid false negatives in the case of consciousness and other psychological phenomena that might determine an animal’s capacity to suffer, even at the expense of occasional false positives.  Essentially, given no other information than our impression that animals might have consciousness, a scientist should assume that they don’t, and an ethicist should assume that they do.  The best solution to me seems to be to entertain both ideas, and apply them to different problems as the specific problems demand it.

I suspect that this mention of the ethics of using cephalopods will garner more attention than the discussion of the scientific value of the study of consciousness in cephalopods, if only because animal ethics is more politicized than the comparative psychology, and is perceived as somewhat easier to talk and theorize about without much technical background.  I don’t want it to seem as if I’m making an argument for or against any use of cephalopods at this point – although I think this is an important issue, I’m not trying to deal with it here.  I’ve tried to keep this post free of any ulterior agenda, and I think I’ve largely succeeded.  The next few posts will be more science-y and less philosophy-y, I promise – although it’s sort of hard when talking about consciousness, which is written about by philosophers far more often than by scientists.

Thanks for reading!

PANKSEPP, J. (2005). Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans Consciousness and Cognition, 14 (1), 30-80 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2004.10.004

FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, . (2009). Fao yearbook: fishery and aquaculture statistics 2007 (Online Version)

In my last few in-depth posts before the school year begins (during which I’ll have considerably less time to spend writing in-depth posts here,) I want to tackle a topic that’s been exciting me and bothering me for a while now: the possibility of consciousness in cephalopods. This is a difficult topic to cover for many reasons, notably that it’s difficult to get anybody to agree on a good functional definition of “consciousness”. In any case, I’m going to take 4 posts to deal with this issue. I’m laying out my plans ahead of time to keep myself on track, as well as to build up some entertaining suspense for you, dear reader. Here’s my plan:

Part 1: Who cares?
In the first post, I’ll discuss why we want to resolve the question of cephalopod consciousness. I’ll briefly define the problem and some relevant terms, and then I’ll look into the ethical and scientific problems that the confirmation that cephalopods have consciousness might raise or settle.

Part 2: The Case for Animal Consciousness
To make sure that we have plenty of background on the topic before I discuss cephalopod consciousness, I’ll review important points of the study of consciousness in general. I’ll more extensively define what we mean by “consciousness” in animals, and how we might go about figuring out if it exists and what its properties are.

Part 3: The Case for Cephalopod Consciousness
In the third post in the series, I’ll discuss how the approaches reviewed in Part 2 have been used to address the question of cephalopod consciousness. I’ll try to look briefly at the history of the study of consciousness (and related constructs like “intelligence” and “cognition”) in cephalopods, and review as much of the relevant scientific literature as is possible without making the post too technical. This will be the meat and potatoes of the series, so to speak.

Part 4: Reflections
In this post, I’ll goof off, editorialize, and promote ridiculous armchair hypotheses about cephalopods, consciousness, and all sorts of tangentially related topics. Or maybe I’ll just recap the arguments review in the other posts and offer a brief summary of whatever side I end up taking, and why I took it. I haven’t quite decided which way to go with this yet.

You can be pretty sure that my coverage of the question of cephalopod consciousness won’t be biased by my prior knowledge on the topic – I have almost none! Let the next 1.5 weeks be a journey of discovery for both of us! (Speaking of which, if anybody has any good resources on the subject that you think I might otherwise miss, please leave them in the comments. I need all the help I can get, trust me.)

Thanks for reading!

In their paper Identifying hallmarks of consciousness in non-mammalian species (2005), Edelman, Baars, and Seth put forth the idea that research on consciousness needs to expand beyond methodologies which rely solely on the ability of organism somehow report their concious awareness of something (that is, behavioral tests) and encompass neuroanatomical and neurophysiological investigation.  To my delight, they chose to focus on birds and octopuses as examples of animals whose possible consciousness might be probed via non-traditional methods of inquiry.

Citing evidence related the neuroanatomical and functional bases of consciousness in humans and other mammals, the authors eventually conclude that it there is a good case for avian consciousness, and the possibility of cepahlopod consciousness, based on the presence or uncertainty of these three necessary criteria:

               (1) identification of neural structures that are the functional equivalents 
                       of cortex and thalamus; 
               (2) neural dynamics analogous to those observed in mammals during 
                       conscious states 
               (3) rich discriminatory behavior that suggests a recursive linkage 
                      between perceptual states and memory

I like their style and their argument.  However, I really wanted to write about this paper for a much simpler reason.  It has one of the best concluding figures that I have ever seen in a paper:

Not only do they have good ideas, but a great illustrator, too.