Consciousness And Moral Status Reading Group: Week 10
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###### tags: `Animal Consciousness`

:::info
- **Reading:** Birch, J., Schnell, A. K., & Clayton, N. S. (2020). Dimensions of animal consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
- **Date:** Sep 6, 2020 12:00 PM (LONDON)
- **Host:** MM
- **Reference:** - [Last week meeting](/@tanzor/value9)

:::

I found it interesting:
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- [name=MM] It seems like 'future research' is needed to answer any question about consciousness or experience, rather than about behaviour or neural processes:

> " Future research should focus on whether such behaviours involve experiences of anxiety, fear, stress, or grief"

> "Further research is required to explore the link between these abilities and self-consciousness"

> "Further research is required to assess whether they experience a conscious, pain-like state, but there is a serious risk that they do."

>[name=MM] We discussed how a leap of faith is necessary for all other entities, not only animals. I tried to claim that there's an important difference between saying "A leap of faith is required to substantiate the link between these abilities and self consciousness" and "Further research is needed".
- [name=UK] Lateralization as an index of unity, to prove that there’s integration despite some physical separation.
>[name=MM] Possibly related, why is integration *within a sense* (as in between eyes) considered a dimension of consciousness, and more specificially, one than increases as a function of integration?
- [name=Anna ] The idea that an octopus could have multiple (as many as 9) conscious perspectives on the world.
- [name=Nitzan] In which direction do different levels of unity correspond with levels of consciousness? one>few or vice versa?
>[name=MM] We asked what is more relvant for ethics, the unity of consciousness within an organism or the number of instances of consciousness within an organism.
- [name=Arianna] The metric by which we determine consciousness is fundamentally anthropocentric and so will always be biased towards humans.
- [name=Nadine] That they mention that tests of animal consciousness should be made to be suitable for the abilities and environment of the specific animal (respecting that differences in this should not mean that they have less advanced abilities, just different maybe)
- That crossmodal integration of information is used as a marker for consciousness

I wanted to discuss together:
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- [name=MM] In what sense are these dimensions of consciousnsess at all? What separates these from psychological/cognitive capacities? Are there cognitive capacities that are not dimensions of consciousness?
>[name=UK] There’s a difference between what can be done with\without consciousness, and what can count as a marker of consciousness. Often I find myself saying “well consciousness can’t be needed for X, because I can imagine a machine with X but no consciousness”. But that doesn’t mean X isn’t a marker for consciousness “in the wild”.
>>[name=MM] We discussed this in light of the separation between necessary and contingent conditions. While it is true that some of these dimensions are not necessarily related to consciousness (as in, they would be associated with consciousness in all possible worlds), thay are contingently true in our world (as may be evidenced by a correlation between these dimensions and the property of having consciousness). However, this can get circular if we deduce that someone is conscious by testing for these very dimensions.
> Where is the line drawn between pure neurological functions and consciousness… eg mechanical functionings of brain dont necessarily correlate to feelings of self etc.
- [name=Nadine] Which of these dimensions of consciousness is most important for morality? Or are they all equally (un)important?
>[name=MM] Do all of them matter in virtue of their relation/interaction with evaluative richness?
- [name=Nitzan] How does every dimension the authors propose relate to moral worth. I believe that only E-richness is directly linked, while all others are relevant only through their interactions with E-richness.
- [name=UK] Must a sense of a “narrative self” (“awareness of oneself as the persisting subject of a stream of experiences”) involve Theory of Mind (ToM)? In that, is the “narrative self” a social construct that is learned?
>[name=MM] Some developmental evidence that the two are related, both showing [similar developmental trajectories](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2044-835X.1994.tb00643.x?casa_token=m3TkzG8aanIAAAAA:9dMsZbV3q9i45AMxWp9oW2HtqVsrvZX_kIur0k1BEGa9UludSXoPCdBSUMzNkLuWuM0OqVz7WJEdf48)
- [name=Nitzan] Similarities between humans and animals in facial expressions - are these valid evidence for common experiential features (given that also for humans we use such expressions to deduce on others' mental states)?

Random thoughts here:
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- A crow playing in snow:
{%youtube 3dWw9GLcOeA%}

- 
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- [name=Anna ]The paper suggests that an animal could be trained to respond differently to perceptions of continuous and discrete stimuli to test whether there is a threshold at which animals switch from categorising a stimulus as discrete to continuous. Is such a perceptual 'skill' really a sign of consciousness?
>[name=MM] Excellent point! See this [recent study](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6511/1626.full) and [critic over its interpretation](https://twitter.com/neurograce/status/1310562911673348097)
- we may have multiple streams of conscioussness but one sense of 'self'
- [name=Nadine] In the absence of any clear evidence either way, does it not make way more sense to assume that animals ARE conscious than to assume they are not?
>[name=MM] :thumbsup:
- [name=MM] interesting that mind is used as a transitive verb for evaluative consciousness.

## Notes
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