Animal
Consciousnes
s
Initial discussion
Are animals conscious?
In what ways?
Several approaches
One behavioural test that would ‘prove’
it
Mirror test for self-consciousness
Meta-memory
Set the bar high enough => convincing!
Accumulative evidence
Behavioural
Methods
Functional analysis of consciousness
Analogy to human case (behavioural
and neurophysiological)
First person reflection
Meta-memory
Explicit episodic declarative memory
sometimes seen as evidence of
consciousness
But is it?
Shea and Hayes want more!
Attempt to find a test of phenomenal
Mechanisms and functions
“We call a task ‘consciousness-involving’ if humans’ performance of the task, or their performance of the task in a particular way, correlates with their being conscious of the task-relevant parameters, as indexed by subjects’ introspective and environmental reports. We can study a range of consciousness-involving tasks (Jack and Shallice 2001 ). Given thorough investigation, the mechanism deployed in each
consciousness-involving task can be characterised in detail: C1 , C2 , … , Cn . Each such
characterisation is then susceptible to independent investigation in animals, without relying on verbal report, to see which other animals have the Ci mechanism.”
“We will not discuss the neural mechanisms of human consciousness-involving metamemory, although they may be an important part of the story, but will instead aim at a broadly functional characterisation that can be carried across from humans to other animals.”
“Experiments must test whether humans and animals deploy the same mechanisms, our focus here being on a functional characterisation of those mechanisms.” Pp. 97-98
Meta-memory task
Probe trials – no
study phase (to test
whether it really is
memory or not)
Also different delay
periods
Monkeys choices
reflect
Low vs. high level
representations
Only ‘high level’ representations are a
good marker for consciousness
“Condition C: The subject represents
Possible tests
Do other ways of affecting memory also
lead to same behaviours? (e.g. stimulus
duration, masking, distractor tasks
Is this a substantive
claim?
“We have generated condition C by introspective reflection on
our own case. That is only a
weak source of evidential support
. It
is enough, however, to be a
plausible basis
for generating a
hypothesis for empirical test. It is a
substantial empirical issue
whether condition C does in fact correlate in humans with
conscious recall of a perceptual stimulus as measured by
subjects’ verbal reports. That is, do human subjects meet
condition C only when they report being conscious, and are they
ever conscious without meeting condition C ?
The argument
above makes it plausible, but does not prove
, that condition C
may correlate with other measures of consciousness— which is
enough to motivate a proper empirical investigation.” P. 106
Is it new?
“Our concern was to see what needed to be added to
meta-representation, to turn it into a plausibly
consciousness-involving mechanism. However, once
we’ve seen that additional factor
X
, we can ask whether
…the factor
X
would, on its own, be good evidence for
consciousness….We restrict ourselves to observing that
our factor
X
is similar to Dehaene’s global workspace
hypothesis
(Dehaene and Naccache 2001 ), which is
formulated as a necessary and sufficient condition for a
mechanism to be conscious.” p. 109
Your questions: Why meta-memory?
What is the difference between meta memory and day to day experience?
The fact that the monkey can be trained to respond to a stimulus and
make a decision suggests by itself that the monkey remembers the task.
Isn’t that evidence of consciousness?
Why do they think they are investigating phenomenological
consciousness when they rely on an animal to estimate its memories and
act accordingly?
The authors implicitly characterize C as having “a memory trace which
allowed [the animal] to use information about a past perceptual stimulus
to inform a range of different behaviours”. If this is sufficient, then is
every Aplysia conscious?
To what extent is the factor X, claimed by Shea & Heyes (2010), related to
conscious processing. How are metamemory and metamemory + X
qualitatively different? Though the authors claim their X to be similar to
the global workspace mechanisms, how do their suggestions for empirical
investigation test more than simple generalization effects, which can be
even be found in completely implicit paradigms using classical
Methodological Questions
How is testing whether memory is transferred across
actions different from simply doing the Hampton’s
experiment? Training is always required for the
monkey to learn different response actions.
How promising is the research on animal
consciousness? Does it make sense trying to find
correlates of animal consciousness without even
having made clear what correlates of human
consciousness are? In which way could the study of
animal consciousness be useful to get a clearer
Beshkar: Flexibility again
“The one functional property that I use to make
a bridge between consciousness and cognitive
capacity is ‘flexibility’ or ‘versatility’. One may
cast doubt on the appropriateness of this
criterion and ask why consciousness should
confer flexibility, and whether functions other
than consciousness (such as ‘learning’) might not
also confer versatility in the absence of
consciousness.”
Does consciousness
confer
flexibility?
Is
it
Common features
Seth, Baars, Edelemann, 2005
Consciousness related to:
Irregular, low amplitude, high frequency
activity
Global rather than local activation
Activity in thalamocortical network (or
Accumulative evidence
Semantic communication
Explicit episodic memory
Display of emotions
Problem solving
Tool use
Self-awareness
…more clever stuff
(primates, rats, dolphins, corvids, octopuses,
Videos
Observational learning in Octopus vulgaris
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQwJXvlTWDw
Tool use in corvids
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofjo26O0z_o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg
Mirror test in primates and magpies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-pc_M2qI74
How to proceed?
Does testing animal consciousness pose
any special problems? (E.g. compared to
studies of vegetative state, human
infants, dementia patients).
Is it any different to finding out about
cognitive capacities?
What kind of evidence is the most
How to proceed?
How should we characterise the grades
of cognitive abilities animals have, in
relation to consciousness?
Can we only talk about animal
consciousness in relation to these
cognitive abilities?
Can we make general claims?
Does this tell us something about
Your questions: What can we
infer?
Trace conditioning would not work with anterograde amnesic patients, distracted
subjects, or simply non collaborative animals. It looks like that any failure in tests for consciousness cannot be distinguished from a conscious intent to not
collaborate.
A possible reconstruction of the argument:
P: task A is consciousness-involving
Q: the underlying mechanisms of task A are C R: animal X shows C
→ if P ^ Q ^ R then animal X is conscious
But couldn't C be sufficient to solve task A without being sufficient to produce
consciousness?
If a certain behavior or task in humans is always accompanied by report of
subjective experience/subjective knowledge of underlying parameters (i.e. consciousness), is this a proof for the same behavior or task performance being accompanied by consciousness in animals as well? What prerequisites, e.g. in
terms of underlying mechanisms, would be necessary for this assumption? How are they empirically testable?
The authors point out that even if an animal can accomplish a task that in humans
