November 5, 2025 • 32 mins
Is your dog self-aware? Do bees have feelings? Can octopuses dream? Jorge dives into the minds of animals with two sentience experts to figure it out.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, the production
of iHeartRadio. I'm More Hey, chim and today we're answering
the question do animals have consciousness? Have you ever looked
into your dog's puppy eyes and wondered what's going on
(00:22):
in there? Can animals have thoughts, sense of self and
even dream What about chickens, or fishes or even bugs?
Can they have an inner world and feelings? To find out,
we're going to talk to a couple of experts on
animals sentience, and we're going to learn how to tell
if an animal has consciousness, which ones have it, and
(00:44):
we're going to ask the big question about what it
would mean for them to be conscious. So dream along
with us as we answer the question do animals have consciousness?
Enjoy Hey everyone? Today on the episode, we're going to
find out if different animals have consciousness. We're going to
(01:07):
learn whether the monkeys have it, where their dogs have it.
We'll even talk about whether their chickens and crabs have consciousness. Now,
consciousness is a super tricky topic, so the first thing
we're going to do is define what consciousness is. And
to do that, I reached out to an animal philosopher.
Here's doctor Heather Browning.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
So I'm doctor Heather Browning. I'm a philosopher who works
at the University of Southampton, and I'm most interested in
using the methods of philosophy to answer questions about the
minds of animals. So animal sentience and animal welfare incredible.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
First of all, can you tell us what is consciousness?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
All right? So we start with the really big questions.
So consciousness is something that's proved notoriously difficult to define.
A lot of philosophers try to think really hard about this,
and essentially, when we want to talk about consciousness, I
think the best way is to think about it through
examples of the kinds of experiences that are familiar to us.
So you might think that, for instance, a rock doesn't
feel anything when water falls on it, but we do.
(02:08):
When a grain falls on our skin, it feels like something.
For that, when we're asleep, it doesn't feel like anything
to be us. When we're awake, we're seeing, we're smelling,
we're tasting. All these experiences have this quality of feeling
that are associated with it, and that's what makes up consciousness.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Okay, so it's very tied to the idea of a feeling.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
So one way to think about consciousness is that it's
the opposite of being a rock. Rock exists in the
world and things happen to it, but it doesn't feel anything.
It doesn't have thoughts about the things happening to it. Basically,
there's nothing going on inside of a rock. Another way
to think about consciousness is that it's also kind of
(02:51):
the opposite of being a robot. You can imagine making
a robot that looks like a person in this program
to act and respond like a person, but that robot
we don't have an inner life the same way you do.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
But when I look at another person, the only information
I have about them really is the words that come
out of their mouth and the behaviors that they do,
and they all resemble mine in a lot of ways.
But technically that person, you know, they could be sort
of an android with nothing going on inside, or they
could be what philosopher's like to call philosophical zombies, which
is a person who essentially is like a robot. You know,
(03:27):
if there's no kind of light on, no spark.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Now, there are other things that are part of being conscious.
For example, some people say having consciousness is having a
sense of self, you know, like a feeling that you're
a person in this world. Another part of consciousness is
having the power to make decisions that you don't do
things automatically, but that you think about them. There are
(03:50):
lots of definitions, but for now, just hang on to
the phrase. It means that you have an inner life.
And so the question now is do animals have this
inner life? Well, the problem is that we can't ask them.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, So, I mean this is something philosophers like to
debate a lot, and they call it the problem of
other minds. And we don't know when we look at
another person, we don't know for sure that they're not
a philosophicals on video, they're not an android. And I mean,
right now you're just seeing me on a screen. I
could just be an AI. You know, shot out. That's
from program.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I Am an AI. By the way, you're being interviewed
by an artificial interviewer.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We're very sophisticated on us.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Thank you. We worked on it a lot. What doctor
Browning is saying is that it's hard enough to know
if another person has consciousness, much less an animal we
can't even communicate with, So how can we know if
an animal has consciousness? Well, it turns out scientists have
come up with sort of an animal consciousness test to
(04:52):
tell us about it. Reached out to doctor Alex Schnell.
You might remember her from a few episodes ago. He's
a comparative psychologist who is all so in National Geographic Explorer,
and she talked to us about how smart octopuses are.
It turns out she's also a researcher on animal consciousness. Well,
(05:12):
thank you, doc, there's not for joining.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Us again, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Are you conscious right now?
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Slightly? It's about thirty two degrees celsius. I don't know
what that is fahrenheit, it's very very high.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Scientists like her study consciousness and animals have come up
with a set of indicators or tests that can tell
you whether an animal potentially has consciousness. What does that mean?
What are the indicators? I guess?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
So the indicators are We've got four that are neural
that really look at the presence of nose receptors, so
receptors that can respond to stimuli like a prick or
heat or an electric shop whether they have integrative brain
regions where that information can be combined and integrated.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
So the first indicator scientists used to tell if an
animal has consciousness is whether the animal can feel pain.
And really the scientists are interested in whether the animal
can feel anything, but they pick pain because there's a
lot more data out there on it. Then see whether
an animal feels happy or sad. Okay, that's step number one. Now,
(06:22):
if an animal does feel pain, the sign of consciousness
is what the animal does about it.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, And then behavior indicators include protective behaviors. So you've
brought octopus, so I'll tell you for an example, if
it octopus is inflicted in with something that might cause
pain or harm, they generally show protective behaviors that you
might see in your pet dog or cat at home.
(06:49):
You know, they'll stroke their arm or rub their arm,
or wrap their injured arm really close to their body
and protect it with their other arms, and they won't
use that as often.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Interesting, So a sign of consciousness is if an animal
feels pain and then acts to protect where they feel
the pain, because that means they have a feeling and
they're conscious of it. It affects how they behave The
next step is whether they learn from their experiences.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Another indicator is learning from experience, just learning that doing
a particular activity, if you're getting a negative emotion from that,
to stop doing that.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So if an animal feels something like pain and they
stop doing it, that's a sign that they're in a
way thinking about that feeling and that they have learned
what caused that feeling. That's another sign of consciousness. And
the last test of whether an animal has consciousness is
whether they can make choices that trade off different feelings.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
And then also the last one is showing a preference
or an aversion to an experience that is going to
have a particular vailance. So if you keep getting stung
or prodded in one particular room, then you might avoid
that room in the future.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Okay, these are going to make more sense a little
later when we apply these tests to different animals, and
I think you're going to be surprised how some animals,
even bees, respond to these tests. So this is a
list of indicators that let's say an animal checks all
of the boxes, then it's a very clear candidate that
it may be has sentients and maybe consciousness is how
(08:31):
you would phrase it.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
So definitely like Marx that there's strong evidence that they
are sentient.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Okay, when we come back, we're going to apply this
set of tests to a wide range of animals, including dogs, chickens, hermit, crabs,
and even bees to find out which of them have consciousness.
So stay with us. We'll be right back, and we're back.
(09:05):
We're talking about whether animals have consciousness, and so far
we talked about what that means and how you might
tell even animal has it. Scientists who study this have
somewhat of a test for consciousness or sentience as some
people call it, which involves looking at how animals react
to pain. How they react to, for example, getting tricked
(09:26):
by a sharp object or getting a slight electric shock
can tell you a lot about whether they have feelings
and whether they have complex thoughts about those feelings. And again,
they use pain because a lot of the research out
there focuses on whether animals feel pain. Now, the question
is which animals pass this test to Monkeys, dogs, birds, crabs,
(09:47):
or even insects show signs of consciousness well. According to
doctor Heather Browning, it's kind of hard to tell.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah, I think there's still a lot of uncertainty and
controversy about which animals are conscious or which animals are sentient,
because this is something that we're talking about that's happening
inside their heads, inside their minds, and we don't have,
you know, a consciousness scope that we can just go
and look into the minds of animals and tell us
what they're thinking or feeling. We don't even have that
for other humans.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Now. The thing about consciousness is that most scientists don't
really see it as a kind of on or off thing,
meaning that you either have it or don't. The more
common view is that it's something that's on a scale.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So that is something that there's still debate about, and
I think people aren't sure because I think intuitively it
makes sense to us to think about it as being
on or off, but that doesn't trap very well with
how we think about a lot of the rest of biology.
When we think about the kinds of evolved traits that
other animals might have, often they do come in degrees.
You know, Yes, some animals can fly and some animals
(10:49):
can't fly, but there's all kinds of gradients in between
there where some animals can glide, some animals can fly
a little bit, and some animals can't do that at all,
And so it makes sense that almost all traits and
biology are actually on these kinds of gradual scales, and
consciousness is probably something.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Like that, Yeah, well, I feel like right now we're
in a very different time zone, and so I am
only partially conscious right now myself. Yes, okay. According to
this definition of consciousness, doctor Browning says most experts agree
that most mammals, down to about a dog or a mouse,
demonstrate signs that they have consciousness. It's clear that they
(11:30):
have feelings and that there is some kind of inner
life going on inside their brains.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
So it's very very difficult, I think, for anyone who's
had a pet dog and spend any time with it
to really, you know, and not think that there's someone
there on the inside in the mind of that dog,
but they're really interacting with another being or another subject there.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
So there isn't much debate about whether animals like dogs
or horses, or elephants, or pretty much any mammal has
some form of consciousness. Where it gets triggier is in
animals like birds, or even chickens.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, so I think what chickens get over looked quite
a lot. But yeah, they are actually quite cognitively complex animals.
You know, chickens can learn very well, they have good memories,
they make complex decisions, they have complex social lives. You know,
they're able to remember and interact with a lot of
different chickens as well, and thinking about what they feel.
(12:25):
Certainly we see chickens that have the kinds of injuries
that we would think would be painful when a human.
They will preferentially go and eat food that has a
painkiller in it. Even that food tastes worse and a
normal chicken that wasn't in pain wouldn't want to eat it,
which you know, is very strong evidence in my mind
that they are feeling pain, that there is something there
that they're trying to stop, just like we would.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
I see, there are things they like and they things
that they don't like.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, that's right, And a lot of work in animal
welfare science is trying to look at, you know, what
animals like and don't like through doings that they call
preference testing, you know, giving them different situations and seeing
what they choose.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Okay, this is part of that test that I mentioned
to you before. Here's what the experiment looked like. You
offer a chicken two balls of food. One are the
bulls is food that tastes great to a chicken, and
the other ball has food that doesn't taste that great
to chickens. Now, normally chickens will choose the food that
tastes better, But if the chicken is in pain for
some reason, and you put pain medicine in the food
(13:23):
that tastes worse, the chicken will choose the one with
the pain medicine. And this, scientists argue, is a sign
that chickens can feel and have a preference and make
a choice based on that preference, all of which are
signs of consciousness.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
And chickens have been the subjects of a huge amount
of these tests. And you know, do they prefer to
stand on the floor, do they like to be on
a perch? Do they like to be in a nest box?
Or do they like to nest in a corner on
the ground. And yeah, they're very good at telling us that,
And it really does seem like they have those kind
of rich sets of preferences about what they want and
what they don't want what they like and what they
don't like.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Okay, the next animal we're going to talk about are fish.
Do fish have consciousness?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
So fish a roment of travelers. They ran into a
lot of skepticism because their brains are very different from ours,
and so the kinds of inferences that we make from
our types of brains and saying well, look, other animals
have brains that are similar, so they probably produce the
same kinds of experiences. You should have different kinds of brains,
And so people wanted to use that as a reason
to say, well, they can't have consciousness, And people who
worked with fishes and look at their behavior wanted to
(14:27):
push back on that and say, well, no, a fish
might have a different brain than ours, but we might
still be able to have consciousness. Fish do a lot
of these sort of complex things. They respond when they
receive I mean we would think would cause pain, or
if they get an injection in their lips of a
mild acid that should cause them pain, they will wrap
their face on the tanks, they will lose interest in
(14:47):
their food, They'll be less likely to respond to predators
because they're distracted. They will preferentially go to tanks. They
have painkillers in them. All those same kinds of responses
that if we saw them in a mammal or a
bird tho sort of experiences we see in fish.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
So according to our definition of consciousness, fishes are conscious
beings too. They have feelings, they can feel things, and
they have complicated thought processes that guide how they behave. Okay,
now we get to even trick your animals. Invertebrates. These
are animals like crabs and shrimps and octopuses and insects.
Can we say that they have consciousness too. We'll start
(15:25):
with an easy one, which are octopuses. Here's doctor Alex Schnell.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
So, for example, we looked at three hundred studies by
way a team of scientists led by Jonathan Birch to
find evidence of sentience in cephalopods and decapod crustaceans, and
octopus satisfied seven of the eight criteria, and the one
that it didn't satisfy studies in that criteria had not
(15:52):
been conducted.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
So octopuses passed seven of the eight indicators that tell
you they might have consciousness, and some sodis even show
that octopuses might even dream.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
There was some other research that's not my own, but
some researchers in Brazil had conducted on octopus looking at
different phases of sleep, and this was so cool. They
showed that octopuses have two phases, a quiet phase and
an active phase, and their active phase looked very similar
to the way that humans sleep during RAM, so the
(16:29):
rapid eye movement phase, and in humans that is a
phase when we dream. And so they had a lot
of behavior footage of an octopus clearly asleep because their
eyes are closed and they'd be prodden just to make
sure that they're asleep, but changing coloration and texture is
if they were having a dream. You know, sometimes they
look like they were outfeeding and hiding for a predator.
(16:52):
So wouldn't that octopus be dreaming? You know, there's still
a huge question mark, but it was pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
To think that is fascinating. Well, I guess, first of all,
I didn't know octopuses slap, but that the dream is
amazing and that you can see it in their coloration.
They might dreap, sorry, that they might dream, yeah, and
that you might be able to see it in their
coloration and their movement.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
That's incredible because there's not many other animals. I mean,
you can see a dog when they you know, they
might be dreaming and they're running in their sleep and
they're whimpering like they're trying to catch something.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
You can see that in dogs. I don't know inn
a dog.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
So oh, okay. I think there's a whole community of
YouTubers that share results and videos their dogs and cats dreaming.
It's very entertaining. But yeah, you can. But there aren't
many animals like an octopus where you can actually see
the color of their skin changing. And so I like
to think that they wear their emotions on their skin
and maybe that's a window into their mind.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
It kind of makes you wonder what does an octopus
dreap about? Okay, So that covers octopuses and like extension,
also curdlefish and probably squids as potentially having consciousness. Now
we get to even trickier animals like crabs and these
do insects have consciousness? We'll review the scientific evidence for
it after the break. Stay with us. You're listening to
(18:13):
sign stuff and we're back. Okay, we're talking about whether
animals have consciousness, and so far we talked about what
that means how to tell if an animal has it.
(18:33):
And we've gone down the evolutionary tree of life to
see which animals can be said to possibly have consciousness,
And now we're at animals that are very different from us,
the invertebrates, invertebrate animals, that is, animals without bones or
a spinal cord, separated from us, or we separated from
them over five hundred and ninety million years ago. And
(18:56):
yet invertebrates like octopuses clearly have intelligence and can be
said to have a consciousness too, even perhaps to have dreams.
But what about other invertebrates like crabs or shrimp or
even insects. We'll start with crabs. So crabs, what was
the evidence of crabs?
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, so crabs action there was a surprisingly large amount.
We went into the project assuming that there'd be quite
a lot about octopuses, because we know people find octopuses
very interesting, but crabs. Actually there was almost as much
evidence in crabs as there was in octopuses. So hermit
crabs are crabs that don't have their own hard shells,
but they move into the shells that are left behind
by other sea creatures and they change those shells over
(19:38):
time as they grow, or if they find a better shell.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Okay, here's the experiment that's been done with hermit crabs,
and it's pretty interesting. This was done by a biologists
named Bob Elwood. Elwood and his team gave hermit crabs
the choice of different shells to pick for their new home.
But all the shells were rigged. Each had a little
ho all drilled into them with the wire that went
(20:02):
inside the whole. Now, the hermit crab would try on
all the shells and eventually pick the one the crab liked.
But here's the twist. After they picked a shell, the
scientist would send a mild electric shock to the crab
through the wire place inside the shell. So now the
hermit crab had a problem. The shell they liked had
(20:22):
this annoying quality that it would shock them every once
in a while, and so they had to make a
choice should they stay or should they go and find
a different shell. The hermit crabs would get a variety
of different shells qualities, and some of them would give
them a shock, So they really had to think about, well,
which shell do I want?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah? And can I sustain that shock? And just to
keep this great house that I'm in or I'm just
going to get rid of this house and go for
one that's of less equality to me.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Well, what they showed is that if they were in
the good shell, they'd be much less likely to leave it.
I'd be much slower to get out of it than
if they're in the badge. And so, you know, they
were showing that they valued these shells, that they really
did make this kind of decision based on the badness
of the shock versus the goodness of the shell.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And then the scientist made it even more complicated for
the crabs. They would sometimes put in the water the
smell of a predator that tries to eat the hermit crab,
And so now the hermit crab had to make an
even harder choice. Should I stay in my preferred home
even though I'm getting shocked, or should I take the
risk and go find another shell, even though it seems
(21:31):
there's something out there trying to eat me.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
And so they would have to integrate the risk of
getting the shock and maintaining that home and trade off
between those risks and opportunities. And so it really told
a nice story of how hermit crabs why they might
not have an inner monologue. They to have the capacity
to integrate this information and make decisions based on that integration.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
You would have thought that of all animals, the hermit
crab would have a monologue. They don't really talk to
any other crabs. Yes, so even crabs seem to pass
the test or potentially having some form of basic consciousness. Now,
at this point you might be wondering, how far does
this go? Do all animals have consciousness, even insects? Well,
(22:19):
it turns out the answer is maybe, Okay. So then
if we keep going down the complexity of animals from
shump you and crabs, you would get insects. And so
what do we know about insect consciousness?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah? So I think insects report will you wear a
lot of the players right now? I think that's where
people are paying a lot of attention the question of
insect consciousness. This is because our use of insects is increasing,
Insect farming is set to rapidly increase over the coming years,
and so the question of whether or not they're sentient
is becoming very very relevant to the ethics of insect farming.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
What do you mean insect farming for what? For food?
Speaker 2 (22:57):
For humans? So insect farms, So say, crickets for instants
are being seen as potential sources of protein for humans. Know,
when we're struggling to feed the world in a way
that has kind of you know, effishient, environmentally friendly protein
sources and also more than that, as food for the
animals that we feed. So black soldier fly larvae in
(23:19):
particular are being used quite a lot to feed feed chickens,
to feed fish in aquaculture.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Okay, all right, so then what do we know about
insects sentience?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
So there was a relatively recent review done of the
evidence for sentience and insects, very similar to the one
I was talking about that we did in cephalopods and decapods,
and again found quite positive and promising results. They ran
into many of the same problems in that there's not
a lot of research done, and insects are very diverse,
like there are so many different groups of insects, and
(23:49):
insects also have very different life stages. You know, they
have larval stages, they have pupair stages, they have adult stages,
and so really what you need is evidence for each
of these different groups of animals at each of these
different life stages and that is not there. But again,
there is pretty good evidence for at least some groups
of insects that they do seem to meet these same criteria. Bees,
(24:09):
for instance, are pretty well studied, and there's evidence that
bees can make your flexible decisions, that they respond to
painful stimuli.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yes, if you can beleave it. Scientists have done experiments
to test whether bees have consciousness. The experiment when something
like this. They offered bees the option to drink sugary
water from different feeding stations. Some stations had sweeter water
than others, but all the feeding stations were rigged so
(24:39):
that the pads the bees had to stand on to
drink could get hot, hot enough to make it uncomfortable
for the bees to drink from that station. Now, when
nothing was heated, bees would choose the sweetest stations, but
when those stations were made to be hot, the bees
would switch and drink from the less sweet feeding stations.
(25:00):
Meaning the bees had to weigh the pros and cons
of their options. Should I drink from the sweetest station
but then it's kind of too hot, or should I
go for a less sweet station even though I'm getting
less sugar? And this shows the scientists argue. In this
case a biologist named Matilda Gibbons and her team that
bees are doing something that resembles being conscious.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
And so what she was looking at is again whether
they could integrate that information on the risk of going
to get the more sugard concentration based on the heat
on their fate. At what point was it just not
worth it?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
In that case, they were weighing whether the buzz was
worth it.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Yeah, I like what you do there, And it's sort
of pointing to a sophistication in how they respond and
make choices.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It's not a simple mechanism in their little brains. It's
like they have to kind of think about it.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yeah, And that's kind of the basis of the idea
of sentience, is that they're thinking about things.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
They're not reflexively responding. Like there's integration going on, there's
weighing up, there's decision making.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
According to doctor Brownie, bees have even been shown to
potentially play, so.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yes, a very cool work on bees recently showed that
they seem to play for no other reason but can
be explained except that they seem to like it. So
if they get these little plastic balls that they can
roll around. Even if those balls have got nothing to
do with their food. You've never had anything to do
with their food. You know, the food's in another room.
The bees will still go and roll these balls around
for you know, decent periods of time. Really only explanation
(26:44):
that the researchers can give is that they seem to
be enjoying it, that this is something they like and
it's fun for them, and so they do seem to
be these little beings who can have these experiences of
the world.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
All right, at this point you may be wondering, well, well,
what doesn't have consciousness? Well, it turns out people who
study consciousness and animals do draw a line at some point.
For example, the general consensus is that worms probably don't
have consciousness. When you apply the same set of tests
we've been talking about to worms, they score pretty low.
(27:20):
They don't seem to have preferences or be able to
weigh these complex decisions. And also plants, philosophers are fairly
sure they're not conscious, although not everyone agrees. You just
put up an interesting point, which there plants, and I
assume most people greep plants are not conscious.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, I think that is definitely the mailstream view. At
the moment, there are people who think the plants are conscious,
and I've seen some work of people arguing if plants
are much more complex than I think we used to
think they were, well communicate with one another. You know,
trees have these massive underground root systems that no one
really knew about before, where they can send chemical signals
to one another, They can respond to different kinds of
(28:02):
environmental stimuli. But I think none of that passes the
thresholds for what we would take in animals to be
required for a conscious experience, okay, and particularly the speed
of processing. So a lot of people think that in
part what consciousness might be for is to help us
respond relatively quickly to changes in the environment, to update
what's happening to us, to be able to make decisions
(28:23):
between competing motivations that we might have and plants they
don't move that kind of spilled. So one of the
big things that differentiates an animal from a plant is
that one part of the animal, right we're wanting to feed,
an other part might be wanting to reproduce, and they
can't do both those things at once. It has to
pick one or the other. Whereas a plant is able
to actually do multiple things at once. They don't have
to physically move themselves around, and.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I see they don't have a sense of its whole
being all at the same time.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Yeah, that's your right.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Okay. The last question we're going to ask about animal
consciousness is what does it all mean? What does it
mean that a dog has conscious thoughts, or that than
octopus dreams, or that bees like to play. I asked
both our experts this question. Okay, the last question, what
are the implications of animals or certain animals having or
(29:13):
not having consciousness or sentience?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
So one sentience is recognized. I think humans are faced
with ethical legal obligations.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
When we think about how we act towards other animals.
In my mind, whether or not they're sentient is the
key feature that tells us whether or not we should
be concerned about the harms that we're doing to them.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And I think that is profound because even if an animal,
let's say a crab or an octopus, doesn't have an
inner monologue, or they can't communimicate feelings or reason, it
doesn't mean that they can't suffer, and so the ethical
considerations of that remain critical. It means that their suffering counts.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I guess to get a little bit deeper, you said,
it makes this these certain questions and responsibilities. What does
that mean or why is that?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
What it is? Is it? So being able to recognize
that an animal has the capacity to feel negative and
positive emotions, it removes this barrier of arpness, and so
we could recognize that like us, like humans, they have
this capacity, and so it bridges I guess, our world
with theirs.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
So studying consciousness and animals should make us think about
how we treat them, and it can also tell us
something about our own consciousness. What does that mean about
our consciousness that animals are conscious?
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Well, I think that a lot of research in the
past has been like, well, this is unique to humans,
and human intelligence and consciousness is highly complex, and we
are able to obtain knowledge and understand concepts and thing
can reflect in ways that we haven't been able to
see in other animals. But these things that pop up
in our mind are not evolutionarily isolated, and so by
(31:00):
recognizing and researching other animal minds, then forming a more
comprehensive view of how the mind evolved in our evolutionary trade.
Because each mind is one piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
I see, we can trace where our consciousness came from,
and that's a huge part of understanding what it is
and how it works.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, exactly, all right.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
We hope that made you a little more conscious of
animal consciousness, so the next time you look at an
animal eyes, you wonder what's going on in there. Thanks
for joining us, See you next time you've been listening
to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced by
(31:46):
me or Hm, predited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland,
an audio engineer and mixer Ksey Pecrom and you can
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Hey, Please take a second and leave us a review
on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, the production
of iHeartRadio. I'm More Hey, chim and today we're answering
the question do animals have consciousness? Have you ever looked
into your dog's puppy eyes and wondered what's going on
(00:22):
in there? Can animals have thoughts, sense of self and
even dream What about chickens, or fishes or even bugs?
Can they have an inner world and feelings? To find out,
we're going to talk to a couple of experts on
animals sentience, and we're going to learn how to tell
if an animal has consciousness, which ones have it, and
(00:44):
we're going to ask the big question about what it
would mean for them to be conscious. So dream along
with us as we answer the question do animals have consciousness?
Enjoy Hey everyone? Today on the episode, we're going to
find out if different animals have consciousness. We're going to
(01:07):
learn whether the monkeys have it, where their dogs have it.
We'll even talk about whether their chickens and crabs have consciousness. Now,
consciousness is a super tricky topic, so the first thing
we're going to do is define what consciousness is. And
to do that, I reached out to an animal philosopher.
Here's doctor Heather Browning.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
So I'm doctor Heather Browning. I'm a philosopher who works
at the University of Southampton, and I'm most interested in
using the methods of philosophy to answer questions about the
minds of animals. So animal sentience and animal welfare incredible.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
First of all, can you tell us what is consciousness?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
All right? So we start with the really big questions.
So consciousness is something that's proved notoriously difficult to define.
A lot of philosophers try to think really hard about this,
and essentially, when we want to talk about consciousness, I
think the best way is to think about it through
examples of the kinds of experiences that are familiar to us.
So you might think that, for instance, a rock doesn't
feel anything when water falls on it, but we do.
(02:08):
When a grain falls on our skin, it feels like something.
For that, when we're asleep, it doesn't feel like anything
to be us. When we're awake, we're seeing, we're smelling,
we're tasting. All these experiences have this quality of feeling
that are associated with it, and that's what makes up consciousness.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Okay, so it's very tied to the idea of a feeling.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
So one way to think about consciousness is that it's
the opposite of being a rock. Rock exists in the
world and things happen to it, but it doesn't feel anything.
It doesn't have thoughts about the things happening to it. Basically,
there's nothing going on inside of a rock. Another way
to think about consciousness is that it's also kind of
(02:51):
the opposite of being a robot. You can imagine making
a robot that looks like a person in this program
to act and respond like a person, but that robot
we don't have an inner life the same way you do.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
But when I look at another person, the only information
I have about them really is the words that come
out of their mouth and the behaviors that they do,
and they all resemble mine in a lot of ways.
But technically that person, you know, they could be sort
of an android with nothing going on inside, or they
could be what philosopher's like to call philosophical zombies, which
is a person who essentially is like a robot. You know,
(03:27):
if there's no kind of light on, no spark.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Now, there are other things that are part of being conscious.
For example, some people say having consciousness is having a
sense of self, you know, like a feeling that you're
a person in this world. Another part of consciousness is
having the power to make decisions that you don't do
things automatically, but that you think about them. There are
(03:50):
lots of definitions, but for now, just hang on to
the phrase. It means that you have an inner life.
And so the question now is do animals have this
inner life? Well, the problem is that we can't ask them.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Yeah, So, I mean this is something philosophers like to
debate a lot, and they call it the problem of
other minds. And we don't know when we look at
another person, we don't know for sure that they're not
a philosophicals on video, they're not an android. And I mean,
right now you're just seeing me on a screen. I
could just be an AI. You know, shot out. That's
from program.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
I Am an AI. By the way, you're being interviewed
by an artificial interviewer.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
We're very sophisticated on us.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Thank you. We worked on it a lot. What doctor
Browning is saying is that it's hard enough to know
if another person has consciousness, much less an animal we
can't even communicate with, So how can we know if
an animal has consciousness? Well, it turns out scientists have
come up with sort of an animal consciousness test to
(04:52):
tell us about it. Reached out to doctor Alex Schnell.
You might remember her from a few episodes ago. He's
a comparative psychologist who is all so in National Geographic Explorer,
and she talked to us about how smart octopuses are.
It turns out she's also a researcher on animal consciousness. Well,
(05:12):
thank you, doc, there's not for joining.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Us again, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Are you conscious right now?
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Slightly? It's about thirty two degrees celsius. I don't know
what that is fahrenheit, it's very very high.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Scientists like her study consciousness and animals have come up
with a set of indicators or tests that can tell
you whether an animal potentially has consciousness. What does that mean?
What are the indicators? I guess?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
So the indicators are We've got four that are neural
that really look at the presence of nose receptors, so
receptors that can respond to stimuli like a prick or
heat or an electric shop whether they have integrative brain
regions where that information can be combined and integrated.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
So the first indicator scientists used to tell if an
animal has consciousness is whether the animal can feel pain.
And really the scientists are interested in whether the animal
can feel anything, but they pick pain because there's a
lot more data out there on it. Then see whether
an animal feels happy or sad. Okay, that's step number one. Now,
(06:22):
if an animal does feel pain, the sign of consciousness
is what the animal does about it.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, And then behavior indicators include protective behaviors. So you've
brought octopus, so I'll tell you for an example, if
it octopus is inflicted in with something that might cause
pain or harm, they generally show protective behaviors that you
might see in your pet dog or cat at home.
(06:49):
You know, they'll stroke their arm or rub their arm,
or wrap their injured arm really close to their body
and protect it with their other arms, and they won't
use that as often.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Interesting, So a sign of consciousness is if an animal
feels pain and then acts to protect where they feel
the pain, because that means they have a feeling and
they're conscious of it. It affects how they behave The
next step is whether they learn from their experiences.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Another indicator is learning from experience, just learning that doing
a particular activity, if you're getting a negative emotion from that,
to stop doing that.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So if an animal feels something like pain and they
stop doing it, that's a sign that they're in a
way thinking about that feeling and that they have learned
what caused that feeling. That's another sign of consciousness. And
the last test of whether an animal has consciousness is
whether they can make choices that trade off different feelings.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
And then also the last one is showing a preference
or an aversion to an experience that is going to
have a particular vailance. So if you keep getting stung
or prodded in one particular room, then you might avoid
that room in the future.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Okay, these are going to make more sense a little
later when we apply these tests to different animals, and
I think you're going to be surprised how some animals,
even bees, respond to these tests. So this is a
list of indicators that let's say an animal checks all
of the boxes, then it's a very clear candidate that
it may be has sentients and maybe consciousness is how
(08:31):
you would phrase it.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
So definitely like Marx that there's strong evidence that they
are sentient.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Okay, when we come back, we're going to apply this
set of tests to a wide range of animals, including dogs, chickens, hermit, crabs,
and even bees to find out which of them have consciousness.
So stay with us. We'll be right back, and we're back.
(09:05):
We're talking about whether animals have consciousness, and so far
we talked about what that means and how you might
tell even animal has it. Scientists who study this have
somewhat of a test for consciousness or sentience as some
people call it, which involves looking at how animals react
to pain. How they react to, for example, getting tricked
(09:26):
by a sharp object or getting a slight electric shock
can tell you a lot about whether they have feelings
and whether they have complex thoughts about those feelings. And again,
they use pain because a lot of the research out
there focuses on whether animals feel pain. Now, the question
is which animals pass this test to Monkeys, dogs, birds, crabs,
(09:47):
or even insects show signs of consciousness well. According to
doctor Heather Browning, it's kind of hard to tell.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah, I think there's still a lot of uncertainty and
controversy about which animals are conscious or which animals are sentient,
because this is something that we're talking about that's happening
inside their heads, inside their minds, and we don't have,
you know, a consciousness scope that we can just go
and look into the minds of animals and tell us
what they're thinking or feeling. We don't even have that
for other humans.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Now. The thing about consciousness is that most scientists don't
really see it as a kind of on or off thing,
meaning that you either have it or don't. The more
common view is that it's something that's on a scale.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
So that is something that there's still debate about, and
I think people aren't sure because I think intuitively it
makes sense to us to think about it as being
on or off, but that doesn't trap very well with
how we think about a lot of the rest of biology.
When we think about the kinds of evolved traits that
other animals might have, often they do come in degrees.
You know, Yes, some animals can fly and some animals
(10:49):
can't fly, but there's all kinds of gradients in between
there where some animals can glide, some animals can fly
a little bit, and some animals can't do that at all,
And so it makes sense that almost all traits and
biology are actually on these kinds of gradual scales, and
consciousness is probably something.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Like that, Yeah, well, I feel like right now we're
in a very different time zone, and so I am
only partially conscious right now myself. Yes, okay. According to
this definition of consciousness, doctor Browning says most experts agree
that most mammals, down to about a dog or a mouse,
demonstrate signs that they have consciousness. It's clear that they
(11:30):
have feelings and that there is some kind of inner
life going on inside their brains.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
So it's very very difficult, I think, for anyone who's
had a pet dog and spend any time with it
to really, you know, and not think that there's someone
there on the inside in the mind of that dog,
but they're really interacting with another being or another subject there.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
So there isn't much debate about whether animals like dogs
or horses, or elephants, or pretty much any mammal has
some form of consciousness. Where it gets triggier is in
animals like birds, or even chickens.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yeah, so I think what chickens get over looked quite
a lot. But yeah, they are actually quite cognitively complex animals.
You know, chickens can learn very well, they have good memories,
they make complex decisions, they have complex social lives. You know,
they're able to remember and interact with a lot of
different chickens as well, and thinking about what they feel.
(12:25):
Certainly we see chickens that have the kinds of injuries
that we would think would be painful when a human.
They will preferentially go and eat food that has a
painkiller in it. Even that food tastes worse and a
normal chicken that wasn't in pain wouldn't want to eat it,
which you know, is very strong evidence in my mind
that they are feeling pain, that there is something there
that they're trying to stop, just like we would.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
I see, there are things they like and they things
that they don't like.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, that's right, And a lot of work in animal
welfare science is trying to look at, you know, what
animals like and don't like through doings that they call
preference testing, you know, giving them different situations and seeing
what they choose.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Okay, this is part of that test that I mentioned
to you before. Here's what the experiment looked like. You
offer a chicken two balls of food. One are the
bulls is food that tastes great to a chicken, and
the other ball has food that doesn't taste that great
to chickens. Now, normally chickens will choose the food that
tastes better, But if the chicken is in pain for
some reason, and you put pain medicine in the food
(13:23):
that tastes worse, the chicken will choose the one with
the pain medicine. And this, scientists argue, is a sign
that chickens can feel and have a preference and make
a choice based on that preference, all of which are
signs of consciousness.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
And chickens have been the subjects of a huge amount
of these tests. And you know, do they prefer to
stand on the floor, do they like to be on
a perch? Do they like to be in a nest box?
Or do they like to nest in a corner on
the ground. And yeah, they're very good at telling us that,
And it really does seem like they have those kind
of rich sets of preferences about what they want and
what they don't want what they like and what they
don't like.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Okay, the next animal we're going to talk about are fish.
Do fish have consciousness?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
So fish a roment of travelers. They ran into a
lot of skepticism because their brains are very different from ours,
and so the kinds of inferences that we make from
our types of brains and saying well, look, other animals
have brains that are similar, so they probably produce the
same kinds of experiences. You should have different kinds of brains,
And so people wanted to use that as a reason
to say, well, they can't have consciousness, And people who
worked with fishes and look at their behavior wanted to
(14:27):
push back on that and say, well, no, a fish
might have a different brain than ours, but we might
still be able to have consciousness. Fish do a lot
of these sort of complex things. They respond when they
receive I mean we would think would cause pain, or
if they get an injection in their lips of a
mild acid that should cause them pain, they will wrap
their face on the tanks, they will lose interest in
(14:47):
their food, They'll be less likely to respond to predators
because they're distracted. They will preferentially go to tanks. They
have painkillers in them. All those same kinds of responses
that if we saw them in a mammal or a
bird tho sort of experiences we see in fish.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
So according to our definition of consciousness, fishes are conscious
beings too. They have feelings, they can feel things, and
they have complicated thought processes that guide how they behave. Okay,
now we get to even trick your animals. Invertebrates. These
are animals like crabs and shrimps and octopuses and insects.
Can we say that they have consciousness too. We'll start
(15:25):
with an easy one, which are octopuses. Here's doctor Alex Schnell.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
So, for example, we looked at three hundred studies by
way a team of scientists led by Jonathan Birch to
find evidence of sentience in cephalopods and decapod crustaceans, and
octopus satisfied seven of the eight criteria, and the one
that it didn't satisfy studies in that criteria had not
(15:52):
been conducted.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
So octopuses passed seven of the eight indicators that tell
you they might have consciousness, and some sodis even show
that octopuses might even dream.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
There was some other research that's not my own, but
some researchers in Brazil had conducted on octopus looking at
different phases of sleep, and this was so cool. They
showed that octopuses have two phases, a quiet phase and
an active phase, and their active phase looked very similar
to the way that humans sleep during RAM, so the
(16:29):
rapid eye movement phase, and in humans that is a
phase when we dream. And so they had a lot
of behavior footage of an octopus clearly asleep because their
eyes are closed and they'd be prodden just to make
sure that they're asleep, but changing coloration and texture is
if they were having a dream. You know, sometimes they
look like they were outfeeding and hiding for a predator.
(16:52):
So wouldn't that octopus be dreaming? You know, there's still
a huge question mark, but it was pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
To think that is fascinating. Well, I guess, first of all,
I didn't know octopuses slap, but that the dream is
amazing and that you can see it in their coloration.
They might dreap, sorry, that they might dream, yeah, and
that you might be able to see it in their
coloration and their movement.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
That's incredible because there's not many other animals. I mean,
you can see a dog when they you know, they
might be dreaming and they're running in their sleep and
they're whimpering like they're trying to catch something.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
You can see that in dogs. I don't know inn
a dog.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
So oh, okay. I think there's a whole community of
YouTubers that share results and videos their dogs and cats dreaming.
It's very entertaining. But yeah, you can. But there aren't
many animals like an octopus where you can actually see
the color of their skin changing. And so I like
to think that they wear their emotions on their skin
and maybe that's a window into their mind.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
It kind of makes you wonder what does an octopus
dreap about? Okay, So that covers octopuses and like extension,
also curdlefish and probably squids as potentially having consciousness. Now
we get to even trickier animals like crabs and these
do insects have consciousness? We'll review the scientific evidence for
it after the break. Stay with us. You're listening to
(18:13):
sign stuff and we're back. Okay, we're talking about whether
animals have consciousness, and so far we talked about what
that means how to tell if an animal has it.
(18:33):
And we've gone down the evolutionary tree of life to
see which animals can be said to possibly have consciousness,
And now we're at animals that are very different from us,
the invertebrates, invertebrate animals, that is, animals without bones or
a spinal cord, separated from us, or we separated from
them over five hundred and ninety million years ago. And
(18:56):
yet invertebrates like octopuses clearly have intelligence and can be
said to have a consciousness too, even perhaps to have dreams.
But what about other invertebrates like crabs or shrimp or
even insects. We'll start with crabs. So crabs, what was
the evidence of crabs?
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, so crabs action there was a surprisingly large amount.
We went into the project assuming that there'd be quite
a lot about octopuses, because we know people find octopuses
very interesting, but crabs. Actually there was almost as much
evidence in crabs as there was in octopuses. So hermit
crabs are crabs that don't have their own hard shells,
but they move into the shells that are left behind
by other sea creatures and they change those shells over
(19:38):
time as they grow, or if they find a better shell.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Okay, here's the experiment that's been done with hermit crabs,
and it's pretty interesting. This was done by a biologists
named Bob Elwood. Elwood and his team gave hermit crabs
the choice of different shells to pick for their new home.
But all the shells were rigged. Each had a little
ho all drilled into them with the wire that went
(20:02):
inside the whole. Now, the hermit crab would try on
all the shells and eventually pick the one the crab liked.
But here's the twist. After they picked a shell, the
scientist would send a mild electric shock to the crab
through the wire place inside the shell. So now the
hermit crab had a problem. The shell they liked had
(20:22):
this annoying quality that it would shock them every once
in a while, and so they had to make a
choice should they stay or should they go and find
a different shell. The hermit crabs would get a variety
of different shells qualities, and some of them would give
them a shock, So they really had to think about, well,
which shell do I want?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah? And can I sustain that shock? And just to
keep this great house that I'm in or I'm just
going to get rid of this house and go for
one that's of less equality to me.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Well, what they showed is that if they were in
the good shell, they'd be much less likely to leave it.
I'd be much slower to get out of it than
if they're in the badge. And so, you know, they
were showing that they valued these shells, that they really
did make this kind of decision based on the badness
of the shock versus the goodness of the shell.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And then the scientist made it even more complicated for
the crabs. They would sometimes put in the water the
smell of a predator that tries to eat the hermit crab,
And so now the hermit crab had to make an
even harder choice. Should I stay in my preferred home
even though I'm getting shocked, or should I take the
risk and go find another shell, even though it seems
(21:31):
there's something out there trying to eat me.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
And so they would have to integrate the risk of
getting the shock and maintaining that home and trade off
between those risks and opportunities. And so it really told
a nice story of how hermit crabs why they might
not have an inner monologue. They to have the capacity
to integrate this information and make decisions based on that integration.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
You would have thought that of all animals, the hermit
crab would have a monologue. They don't really talk to
any other crabs. Yes, so even crabs seem to pass
the test or potentially having some form of basic consciousness. Now,
at this point you might be wondering, how far does
this go? Do all animals have consciousness, even insects? Well,
(22:19):
it turns out the answer is maybe, Okay. So then
if we keep going down the complexity of animals from
shump you and crabs, you would get insects. And so
what do we know about insect consciousness?
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah? So I think insects report will you wear a
lot of the players right now? I think that's where
people are paying a lot of attention the question of
insect consciousness. This is because our use of insects is increasing,
Insect farming is set to rapidly increase over the coming years,
and so the question of whether or not they're sentient
is becoming very very relevant to the ethics of insect farming.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
What do you mean insect farming for what? For food?
Speaker 2 (22:57):
For humans? So insect farms, So say, crickets for instants
are being seen as potential sources of protein for humans. Know,
when we're struggling to feed the world in a way
that has kind of you know, effishient, environmentally friendly protein
sources and also more than that, as food for the
animals that we feed. So black soldier fly larvae in
(23:19):
particular are being used quite a lot to feed feed chickens,
to feed fish in aquaculture.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Okay, all right, so then what do we know about
insects sentience?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
So there was a relatively recent review done of the
evidence for sentience and insects, very similar to the one
I was talking about that we did in cephalopods and decapods,
and again found quite positive and promising results. They ran
into many of the same problems in that there's not
a lot of research done, and insects are very diverse,
like there are so many different groups of insects, and
(23:49):
insects also have very different life stages. You know, they
have larval stages, they have pupair stages, they have adult stages,
and so really what you need is evidence for each
of these different groups of animals at each of these
different life stages and that is not there. But again,
there is pretty good evidence for at least some groups
of insects that they do seem to meet these same criteria. Bees,
(24:09):
for instance, are pretty well studied, and there's evidence that
bees can make your flexible decisions, that they respond to
painful stimuli.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yes, if you can beleave it. Scientists have done experiments
to test whether bees have consciousness. The experiment when something
like this. They offered bees the option to drink sugary
water from different feeding stations. Some stations had sweeter water
than others, but all the feeding stations were rigged so
(24:39):
that the pads the bees had to stand on to
drink could get hot, hot enough to make it uncomfortable
for the bees to drink from that station. Now, when
nothing was heated, bees would choose the sweetest stations, but
when those stations were made to be hot, the bees
would switch and drink from the less sweet feeding stations.
(25:00):
Meaning the bees had to weigh the pros and cons
of their options. Should I drink from the sweetest station
but then it's kind of too hot, or should I
go for a less sweet station even though I'm getting
less sugar? And this shows the scientists argue. In this
case a biologist named Matilda Gibbons and her team that
bees are doing something that resembles being conscious.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
And so what she was looking at is again whether
they could integrate that information on the risk of going
to get the more sugard concentration based on the heat
on their fate. At what point was it just not
worth it?
Speaker 1 (25:39):
In that case, they were weighing whether the buzz was
worth it.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Yeah, I like what you do there, And it's sort
of pointing to a sophistication in how they respond and
make choices.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
It's not a simple mechanism in their little brains. It's
like they have to kind of think about it.
Speaker 3 (25:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yeah, And that's kind of the basis of the idea
of sentience, is that they're thinking about things.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
They're not reflexively responding. Like there's integration going on, there's
weighing up, there's decision making.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
According to doctor Brownie, bees have even been shown to
potentially play, so.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yes, a very cool work on bees recently showed that
they seem to play for no other reason but can
be explained except that they seem to like it. So
if they get these little plastic balls that they can
roll around. Even if those balls have got nothing to
do with their food. You've never had anything to do
with their food. You know, the food's in another room.
The bees will still go and roll these balls around
for you know, decent periods of time. Really only explanation
(26:44):
that the researchers can give is that they seem to
be enjoying it, that this is something they like and
it's fun for them, and so they do seem to
be these little beings who can have these experiences of
the world.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
All right, at this point you may be wondering, well, well,
what doesn't have consciousness? Well, it turns out people who
study consciousness and animals do draw a line at some point.
For example, the general consensus is that worms probably don't
have consciousness. When you apply the same set of tests
we've been talking about to worms, they score pretty low.
(27:20):
They don't seem to have preferences or be able to
weigh these complex decisions. And also plants, philosophers are fairly
sure they're not conscious, although not everyone agrees. You just
put up an interesting point, which there plants, and I
assume most people greep plants are not conscious.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, I think that is definitely the mailstream view. At
the moment, there are people who think the plants are conscious,
and I've seen some work of people arguing if plants
are much more complex than I think we used to
think they were, well communicate with one another. You know,
trees have these massive underground root systems that no one
really knew about before, where they can send chemical signals
to one another, They can respond to different kinds of
(28:02):
environmental stimuli. But I think none of that passes the
thresholds for what we would take in animals to be
required for a conscious experience, okay, and particularly the speed
of processing. So a lot of people think that in
part what consciousness might be for is to help us
respond relatively quickly to changes in the environment, to update
what's happening to us, to be able to make decisions
(28:23):
between competing motivations that we might have and plants they
don't move that kind of spilled. So one of the
big things that differentiates an animal from a plant is
that one part of the animal, right we're wanting to feed,
an other part might be wanting to reproduce, and they
can't do both those things at once. It has to
pick one or the other. Whereas a plant is able
to actually do multiple things at once. They don't have
to physically move themselves around, and.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I see they don't have a sense of its whole
being all at the same time.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Yeah, that's your right.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Okay. The last question we're going to ask about animal
consciousness is what does it all mean? What does it
mean that a dog has conscious thoughts, or that than
octopus dreams, or that bees like to play. I asked
both our experts this question. Okay, the last question, what
are the implications of animals or certain animals having or
(29:13):
not having consciousness or sentience?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
So one sentience is recognized. I think humans are faced
with ethical legal obligations.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
When we think about how we act towards other animals.
In my mind, whether or not they're sentient is the
key feature that tells us whether or not we should
be concerned about the harms that we're doing to them.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And I think that is profound because even if an animal,
let's say a crab or an octopus, doesn't have an
inner monologue, or they can't communimicate feelings or reason, it
doesn't mean that they can't suffer, and so the ethical
considerations of that remain critical. It means that their suffering counts.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I guess to get a little bit deeper, you said,
it makes this these certain questions and responsibilities. What does
that mean or why is that?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
What it is? Is it? So being able to recognize
that an animal has the capacity to feel negative and
positive emotions, it removes this barrier of arpness, and so
we could recognize that like us, like humans, they have
this capacity, and so it bridges I guess, our world
with theirs.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
So studying consciousness and animals should make us think about
how we treat them, and it can also tell us
something about our own consciousness. What does that mean about
our consciousness that animals are conscious?
Speaker 3 (30:36):
Well, I think that a lot of research in the
past has been like, well, this is unique to humans,
and human intelligence and consciousness is highly complex, and we
are able to obtain knowledge and understand concepts and thing
can reflect in ways that we haven't been able to
see in other animals. But these things that pop up
in our mind are not evolutionarily isolated, and so by
(31:00):
recognizing and researching other animal minds, then forming a more
comprehensive view of how the mind evolved in our evolutionary trade.
Because each mind is one piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
I see, we can trace where our consciousness came from,
and that's a huge part of understanding what it is
and how it works.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Yeah, exactly, all right.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
We hope that made you a little more conscious of
animal consciousness, so the next time you look at an
animal eyes, you wonder what's going on in there. Thanks
for joining us, See you next time you've been listening
to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio written and produced by
(31:46):
me or Hm, predited by Rose Seguda, Executive producer Jerry Rowland,
an audio engineer and mixer Ksey Pecrom and you can
follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics
and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure just
subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your
friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
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