Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Birch, Jonathan
• Schnell, Alexandra K.
• Clayton, Nicola S.

Titel

Dimensions of Animal Consciousness

Ist Teil von

• Trends in cognitive sciences, 2020-10, Vol.24 (10), p.789-801

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for that species. On this framework, there is no single scale along which species can be ranked as more or less conscious. Rather, each species has its own distinctive consciousness profile. In recent years, debates about animal consciousness have moved on from the question of whether any non-human animals are conscious to the questions of which animals are conscious and what form their conscious experiences take.There is an emerging consensus that current evidence supports attributing some form of consciousness to other mammals, birds, and at least some cephalopod molluscs (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish).If we try to make sense of variation across the animal kingdom using a single sliding scale, ranking species as ‘more conscious’ or ‘less conscious’ than others, we will inevitably neglect important dimensions of variation.There is a need for a multidimensional framework that allows the conscious states of animals to vary continuously along many different dimensions, so that a species has its own distinctive consciousness profile.