Can we ever know what it is like to be another animal?
Until 1989, vets trained in the United States were taught simply to ignore animal pain, and researchers into the 1980s were unsure whether animals felt it at all. Behind that gap sits one of philosophy's hardest puzzles: animals cannot tell us what they experience, and we struggle even to define experience.
Animal consciousness means an animal's awareness of the world or of itself. For humans the word has been stretched to cover sentience, subjectivity, the ability to feel, wakefulness, a sense of self and the mind's executive control. Animals sharpen the old problem of other minds, because they lack language to report what goes on inside them. The question is also emotionally loaded: to say a creature is not conscious often sounds like saying it cannot suffer and that harming it is no wrong.
Thomas Nagel framed the modern debate in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? An organism is conscious, he argued, only if there is something it is like to be that organism. Thinkers who treat that inner experience as the core of consciousness tend to conclude we can never rigorously know whether other species have it. Scientists have pressed on regardless for over a century; in 1927 the psychologist Harvey Carr insisted that any measure of animal awareness depends on first understanding its conditions in humans.
Underneath lies the mind-body problem. Dualists split mind from matter, monists treat them as one stuff, and one influential branch, epiphenomenalism, holds that mental states are side effects of brain activity rather than causes. In the 1740s La Mettrie suggested consciousness adds nothing to behaviour, and Thomas Henry Huxley later likened it to a locomotive's steam whistle, which accompanies the engine's work without driving it. William James replied in Are We Automata? that evolution would hardly preserve something useless.
Science has not closed the gap. In 1976 Richard Dawkins called the rise of subjective consciousness the deepest mystery in modern biology, and in 2004 eight neuroscientists admitted they had no idea how it emerges from brain activity or whether machines could ever share it. Bernard Rollin of Colorado State University, principal author of two US laws on pain relief for animals, recalls being asked repeatedly to prove animals are conscious before colleagues would act.
Source: Animal consciousness
