Animal consciousness: what matters and why - In the Company of Animals

ARE animals conscious? The way we are? Which species, and why? What is it like to be a bat, a rat, a vulture, a whale?

But perhaps we really do not want to know the answers to these questions. We should not despise the desire to be kept in ignorance--are there not many facts about yourself and your loved ones that you would wisely choose not to know? Speaking for myself, I am sure that I would go to some lengths to prevent myself from learning al! the secrets of those around me--whom they found disgusting, whom they secretly adored, what crimes and follies they had committed, or thought I had committed! Learning all these facts would destroy my composure, cripple my attitude towards those around me. Perhaps learning too much about our animal cousins would have a similarly poisonous effect on our relations with them. But if so, then let us make a frank declaration to that effect and drop the topic, instead of pursuing any further the pathetic course upon which many are now embarked.

For current thinking about animal consciousness is a mess. Hidden and not so hidden agendas distort discussion and impede research. A kind of comic relief can be found--if you go in for bitter irony--by turning to the "history of the history" of the controversies. I am not known for my spirited defences of Rene Descartes, but I find I have to sympathize with an honest scientist who was apparently the first victim of the wild misrepresentations of the lunatic fringe of the animal rights movement. Animal rights activists such as Peter Singer and Mary Midgley have recently helped spread the myth that Descartes was a callous vivisector, completely indifferent to animal suffering because of his view that animals (unlike people) were mere automata. As Justin Leiber (1988) has pointed out, in an astringent re-examination of the supposed evidence for this, "There is simply not a line in Descartes to suggest that he thought we are free to smash animals at will or free to do so because their behavior can be explained mechanically." Moreover, the favorite authority of Descartes's accusors, Montaigne, on whom both Singer and Midgley also uncritically rely, was a gullible romantic of breathtaking ignorance, eager to take the most fanciful folktales of animal mentality at face value, and not at all interested in finding out, as Descartes himself was, how animals actually work!

Much the same attitude is common today. There is a curious tolerance of patent inconsistency and obscurantism and a bizarre one-sidedness in the treatment of evidence regarding animal minds. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes a book, The Hidden Life of Dogs (1993), which mixes acute observation and imaginative hypothesis-formulation with sheer fantasy, and in the generally favorable welcome the book receives, few if any point out that it is irresponsible, that she has polluted her potentially valuable evidence with well-meant romantic declarations that she could not have any defensible grounds for believing. If you want to believe in the consciousness of dogs, her poetry is just the ticket. If you want to know about the consciousness of dogs, you have to admit that although she raises many good questions, her answers are not to be trusted. That is not to say that she is wrong in all her claims, but that they just will not do as answers to the questions, not if we really want to know the answers.

A forlorn hope, some say. Certain questions, it is said, are quite beyond science at this point (and perhaps forever). The cloaks of mystery fall conveniently over the very issues that promise (or threaten) to shed light on the grounds for our moral attitudes toward different animals. Again, a curious asymmetry can be observed. We do not require absolute, Cartesian certainty that our fellow human beings are conscious--what we require is what is aptly called moral certainty. Can we not have the same moral certainty about the experiences of animals? I have not yet seen an argument by a philosopher to the effect that we cannot, with the aid of science, establish facts about animal minds with the same degree of moral certainty that satisfies us in the case of our own species. So whether or not a case has been made for the "in principle" mystery of consciousness (I myself am utterly unpersuaded by the arguments offered to date), it is a red herring. We can learn enough about animal consciousness to settle the questions we have about our responsibilities. The moral agenda about animals is important, and for that very reason it must not be permitted to continue to deflect the research, both empirical and conceptual, on which an informed ethics could be based.

A striking example of one-sided use of evidence is Thomas Nagd's famous paper "What is it Like to be a Bat?" (1991). One of the rhetorical peculiarities of Nagel's paper is that he chose bats and went to the trouble to relate a few of the fascinating facts about bats and their echolocation, because, presumably, those hard-won, third-person-perspective scientific facts tell us something about bat consciousness. What? First and least, they support our conviction that bats are conscious. (He did not write a paper called "What is it Like to be a Brick?") Second, and more important, they support his contention that bat consciousness is very unlike ours. The rhetorical peculiarity--if not outright inconsistency--of his treatment of the issue can be captured by an obvious question: if a few such facts can establish something about bat consciousness, would more such facts not establish more? He has already relied on "objective, third-person" scientific investigation to establish (or at least render rationally credible) the hypothesis that bats are conscious, but not in just the way we are. Why wouldn't further such facts be able to tell us in exactly what ways bats' consciousness isn't like ours, thereby telling us what it is like to be a bat? What kind of fact is it that only works for one side of an empirical question?