KidLit Forum

This article deals with the idea if other species have conscious experiences like ours, if they do, what are they like, do they have thoughts and feelings and are they aware of the world around them.
It is very difficult to demonstrate the existence of conscious experiences in non-human animals. There are two groups of people who see this study different. The first group is sceptical about the idea that conscious experiences exist in any species except our own, because there is no proof that other species have feelings, thoughts or emotions and refuse the possibility that they might have them. The second type of people believe that animals have consciousness.
There are obstacles in finding if other animals have consciousness. These obstacles can be overcome, but the researchers have to be careful in what they accept as good evidence for consciousness in non-humans, because not all the evidence is as good as it appears. First of all, the researchers try to define what is consciousness, which is very difficult. The word can have several meanings. We can be “consciously aware” of a pain or of something else, but also, we can have immediate sensations as a result of an unconscious process. We can be conscious of some images or memories and we can forget someone and then, suddenly bring the image of what they look like. Sometimes our consciousness reaches higher levels and we are aware not only of a color, but also of the world and our place in it. We are self-aware and this is the crucial part of human consciousness. The consciousness comes to us in many forms and its nature is deeply mysterious to us. What is very important is to decide if other animals have consciousness and if they have this will change our attitude and the ideas about what is morally acceptable to do to them. This refers to the fact of eating them , killing them, doing experiments on them and many other things.
The assumption that other people have the same experiences like us is basic to many ideas of what is ‘right’ and what is’ wrong’. It is wrong to destroy an object, but the wrong becomes much greater if we destroy a human being, because we are causing pain to the body with a conscious mind.
If the animals have conscious experiences, we may be forced to bring them inside the circle with the human being. For some it is enough the fact that animals feel pain, but for others isn’t. They can feel pain, but also they have an ability to be aware of pain and its cause. Other will be impressed by the fact that they can think. Most people centre their ideas on the aspect if the animals have minds or not, whether they can think or feel or are aware of what they are doing.
People study animals because they want to understand the diversity of life and how all the organisms evolved. They want to see how their bodies work, how they reproduce.
For biologists consciousness is an embarrassing problem because it seems that it doesn’t fit into their usual framework. Sometimes they say that consciousness cannot be studied scientifically. According to Darwin’s theory- the animals and plants we are seeing today are the survivors of various agents of destruction such as diseases or particularly clever predators that killed their less well self-protected contemporaries, and the ones that succeeded had some kind of protection, a superior immune system or skin color. There cannot be done a difference between conscious animals or unconscious animals , maybe in the way of what we could detect in their behavior.
It is very important for us what non-human species experience because this could change our view of how we should treat them.
Many sustain that the study of consciousness is quite impossible because even if we have head pains we can’t tell that they are the same with somebody else pains. We know what we experience inside, but our knowledge of experiences inside other bodies are strictly limited. There are moments when we can’t know what other people are experiencing due to logic and acting. We can also predict what some people will do next because we are quite accurate of what they are experiencing. There are people who are different but they take into account the circumstances . For example, an old man’s cat is killed. If you don’t have a cat, your feelings won’t be the same as his experience is different. At people we assume that if they are like us, they are also like us in their possession of consciousness. We have to decide if other species are similar enough to ourselves using the argument form analogy. There are many similarities than many people may realize, even if they are covered with scales, feathers, instead of bare skin.
The principle from analogy is available for other species too, particularly as we discover more about their behavior and the complexity of their natural lives. Even if we learn something from other species experience, this doesn’t mean that we know everything. We are using the principle of reason. We have to take into account the difference between us in life style and circumstances. The world in which it lives is very important. Does it spend its life being sociable with the others from its species, or does it live alone? Does it rely on others to help it find food? We can understand other species only if we know their biology and the facts of its life style. There are moments when we don’t believe other people when they say that they really understand us, but if they tried to find out how you have responded to a particular set of circumstances and you tell the story in your own way, maybe you fell that they understand you.
If we try to see the animals’ experiences through our eyes, then we’ll never succeed that . If we go beyond anthropomorphism that sees human conscious experiences as the only way of experiencing the world maybe we will be able to discover completely new realms of awareness.
There are many non-human animals that emerge as much clever and much more ‘like us’. We have to cross over the barrier that is between as ‘language’. There are people who say that animals don’t experience because they can’t tell us. It is true that we use language to find out about the inner world of someone, and it can appear as obstacle to our understanding of non-human animals. Even if words are useful, they are not essential. We understand babies before they can speak. We understand people from what they do or even from their expressions on their species. Actions speak louder than words. Without words we have to be a little bit more ingenious.