Human and Animal
Minds
The consciousness
questions laid to rest
Peter Carruthers
Jacket book
description
The
continuities between human and animal minds are increasingly well understood.
This has led many people to make claims about consciousness in animals, which
has often been taken to be crucial for their moral standing. Peter Carruthers
argues compellingly that there is no fact of the matter to be discovered, and
that the question of animal consciousness is of no scientific or ethical
significance.
Carruthers offers solutions to two related
puzzles. One is about the place of phenomenal—or felt—consciousness in the natural order. Consciousness is shown to
comprise fine-grained nonconceptual contents that are “globally broadcast” to a
wide range of cognitive systems for reasoning, decision making, and verbal
report. Moreover, the so-called “hard” problem of consciousness results merely
from the distinctive first-person concepts we can use when thinking about such
contents. No special non-physical properties—no so-called “qualia”—are
involved. The second puzzle concerns the distribution of phenomenal
consciousness across the animal kingdom. Carruthers shows that there is
actually no fact of the matter. This is because thoughts about consciousness in
other creatures require us to project our first-person concepts into their
minds; but such projections fail to result in determinate truth-conditions when
those minds are significantly unlike our own. This upshot, however, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter for
science, because no additional property enters the world as one transitions
from creatures that are definitely incapable of phenomenal consciousness to
those that definitely are (namely, ourselves). And on many views it doesn’t
matter for ethics, either, since concern for animals can be grounded in
sympathy, which requires only third-person understanding of the desires and
emotions of the animals in question, rather than in first-person empathy.
Reviews
“In
this well-argued and engaging book, Peter Carruthers makes a comprehensive case
for a first-order global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness, and then
considers the upshot for animals: are they phenomenally conscious, and does it
matter morally? Answer: there is no fact of the matter about whether animals
are phenomenally conscious, but this doesn’t change anything morally, because
consciousness is not what matters morally. … Conclusion: this is a great book,
written with Carruthers’ characteristic insight, lucidity, and open-mindedness.
Everyone should read it.”
Jonathan
Simon, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
“Ironically, we are presented with a book whose well-structured chapters offer a series of complex conceptual analyses and empirically-informed arguments about different aspects of consciousness in humans and animals just to recommend readers that ‘they should stop thinking about consciousness and start investing their time in more important things.’ It is a worthy and enlightening reading, though.”
David Villena, Metapsychology.
“Peter
Carruthers stands out among philosophers for having previously argued that most
animals lack conscious experiences. He returns to the question of non-human
consciousness in Human and Animal Minds
with another striking view. Where he once proposed that the capacity for
higher-order thoughts is essential to phenomenal consciousness and restricted
to a small number of species, he now regards its significance as indeterminate.
He infers that for many species, there is no fact of the matter either way. …
While Carruthers makes a compelling case, many details remain to be filled in.”
Derek
Shiller, Philosophical Quarterly
Contents
Preface
1.
Important preliminaries
1. Kinds of
consciousness
2. Qualia realism
3. Tacit dualism
4. Qualia irrealism
5. Phenomenal consciousness is nonconceptual
6. Phenomenal consciousness is all-or-nothing
7. Other minds and othersÂ’ consciousness
8. Conclusion
2.
Animal minds: the state of the art
1. Discontinuity views
2. Concepts and thoughts
3. Working memory and attention
4. Reasoning and reflection
5. Executive function and inhibition
6. Mindreading and metacognition
7. Language and communication
8. Two systems, two minds?
9. Conclusion
3.
The need for a theory
1. NewtonÂ’s Principle
2. Deeply unconscious perception
3. Contingent unconsciousness
4. Where consciousness seems necessary
5. The origins of subjectivity
6. Constraints on a theory
7. Conclusion
4.
Some initial possibilities
1.
Integrated-information theory
2. Integration in the brain-stem
3. Fragile short-term memory
4. Actual higher-order thought
5. Dual-content theory
6. Conclusion
5.
Global-workspace theory
1. Global-workspace
theory: the initial case
2. Consciousness and attention
3. Consciousness in the brain
4. Objections and replies
5. Positive evidence
6. Animals in consciousness research
7. Conclusion
6.
Explaining the “hard” problem
1. The right level of
explanation
2. The phenomenal concept strategy
3. Implementing the strategy
4. In defense of phenomenal concepts
5. ChalmersÂ’ dilemma
6. Phenomenology beyond representation?
7. Conclusion
7.
Animal consciousness: no fact of the matter
1. Global broadcasting
by degrees
2. Broadcasting as a natural kind
3. Stipulating a categorical boundary
4. The negative semantic argument
5. The positive semantic argument
6. A diagnosis
7. Conclusion
8.
Does consciousness matter?
1. Consciousness and
ethics
2. Do animals feel pain?
3. What makes pain bad?
4. Empathy versus sympathy
5. The task for moral philosophy
6. Of empathy, infants, and the old
7. Of mice, men, and Martians
8. Conclusions
References
Name index
Subject index
Preface
There has been
a flurry of interest in consciousness in animals lately, including books by
Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016) and Michael Tye (2017), as
well as the inauguration in 2016 of a new scientific journal, Animal Sentience, devoted to the study
of the topic.[1] In
part this may result from increasing recognition of the strong continuities
that exist between human and animal minds. But it is also because many of those
who are interested in the morality of our treatment of animals think that the
question of consciousness is fundamental. Indeed, there is a long tradition
among utilitarians, at any rate (stretching back to Jeremy Bentham, 1789), of
treating consciousness as the “magic bullet” that will determine the moral
standing of the creatures in question. This is certainly true of Peter Singer
(1981, 1993), for example. And even those of a more Kantian persuasion might
think that consciousness is critical for the question whether certain
treatments of animals are cruel, and
hence inconsistent with duties of beneficence. As people have become
increasingly convinced that animals are capable of genuine mentality, then, it
has seemed more and more urgent to address the question of the distribution of
consciousness across the animal kingdom—as witnessed by The
Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (Low et al. 2012), signed by
Stephen Hawking and numerous other leading scientists at the Francis Crick
Memorial Conference on
July 7, 2012.
I will not be challenging the continuities between human and animal minds in this book. On the contrary, I will be emphasizing them here, as I have done previously (Carruthers 2004a, 2006, 2009, 2013a, 2013b, 2015a). But the resulting focus on animal consciousness is a mistake. This is not because animals aren’t conscious, but because there is no fact of the matter. Given our best theory of human consciousness—which is a fully reductive form of global-workspace theory, I shall argue—any answer to the question of animal consciousness will involve an important element of stipulation. Even supposing we had full knowledge of the mental states and cognitive organization of an animal, still the further question whether any of those states are conscious ones wouldn’t admit of a factual answer, I will suggest. As a result, the question is of no scientific significance. Nor does the issue have the sort of moral importance that many people assume. Sympathy for an animal can be grounded in knowledge of its desires and other mental states, independently of the question of consciousness.
How I propose to get us to that point won’t be reviewed here. (Readers interested in looking ahead should note that each chapter begins with a brief abstract and finishes with a concluding summary.) All I will say at this point is that the question of consciousness in animals has been overblown because the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness in humans has been overblown. Consciousness in humans only matters because some people have found it deeply puzzling—led especially by philosophers with their thought experiments, of course. Once those puzzles are removed, we can move on to more important matters.
Perhaps I should say something here, though, about how I myself arrived at this point, since I have published views on these topics that differ markedly from those defended here. As some readers may know, I previously defended a particular form of higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, known as “dual-content theory” (Carruthers 2000, 2005a). I also argued in those books that it is an implication of higher-order theories generally that most species of animal are not phenomenally conscious. At the same time, I argued that we should take the mental states of animals quite seriously, accepting that they have belief-like states, desire-like states, and perceptual states of various sorts (Carruthers 2004a, 2006), while also arguing that the absence of phenomenal consciousness from animals doesn’t really matter much (Carruthers 1999, 2004b, 2005b).
Over the decade and more that followed I hardly thought about the consciousness issue at all, and published barely anything on the topic. But at the back of my mind I was becoming increasingly uneasy about the theory I had defended. First, it lacks any form of empirical support that isn’t also possessed by first-order global-workspace theories.[2] Second, it requires one to be committed to a particular type of account of the determinants of intentional content (namely, a specific version of the view that the content of a state depends, in part, on what consumer systems for that state are apt to do with it or infer from it). And third, I was gradually coming to feel that the arguments I had used to motivate dual-content theory over first-order theories of a global-workspace sort weren’t very powerful. Finally, I took the plunge (Carruthers 2017b), recanted the view, and committed to global-workspace theory instead.
I had always assumed that first-order theories of the sort defended by Bernard Baars (1988), Michael Tye (1995), and others would imply that phenomenal consciousness is very widespread in the animal kingdom, being possessed even by invertebrates like ants and bees (Carruthers 2007). But having come to accept a first-order theory for myself, and beginning to think more deeply about its implications, I was not so sure. So I arranged to teach a graduate seminar in Fall 2017 to address the topic. Over the course of that seminar I came to think that global-workspace theorists of the sort that I had become should say, not that most other animals are phenomenally conscious (nor that they aren’t), but that there is no fact of the matter. And that is the view I am defending in this book. One carry-over from my previous views, however, is that the issue doesn’t matter much. (Another is the fundamental role played by phenomenal concepts in resolving the puzzles surrounding phenomenal consciousness.) Somewhat ironically, my ultimate goal in the present book is to persuade people that they can—and should—stop thinking about the consciousness question altogether.
I am grateful to a number of people for their help, advice, and criticism. I am especially grateful to the graduate students who suffered through my first attempts to rethink the topic, and who helped me clarify my ideas. They are: Casey Enos, Chris Masciari, Shen Pan, Aida Roige, Julius Schönherr, Moonyoung Song, and Raven Zhang. Moreover, Heather Adair, Chris Masciari, Shen Pan, Aida Roige, Julius Schoenherr, and Samuel Warren volunteered to read much of an early draft of the book, providing valuable feedback. In addition, I am grateful to Keith Frankish, Luke McGowan, Lizzie Schechter, and Benedicte Veillet for comments on earlier versions of some or all of this material, and to the anonymous referees who critiqued it.
Some portions of this book are drawn from a pair of recent papers of mine, and I am grateful to the editors and publishers in question for permission to make use of it. The two papers are: [1] Comparative psychology without consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 63 (2018), 47-60; and [2] The problem of animal consciousness. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 92 (2018), 179-205.
[1] I shall refer to nonhuman animals as “animals” throughout—although humans, too, are animals, of course. This is for simplicity only. It is certainly not intended as a commitment to any sort of Cartesian human exceptionalism.
[2] Indeed, the chapter newly written for my 2005a (chapter 6) noted that the space between global-workspace-type theories and my own dual-content theory might be quite small.