Animal Consciousness

Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself.[2][3] In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

• Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[5] Erik Hoel would like a word...
• Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled What Is it Like to Be a Bat? He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience their world in the way they do themselves.[9] Other thinkers, such as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.[10] Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive—Walter Veit's 2023 book A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.
• In 2024, a conference on "The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness" at New York University[158] produced The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.[14] This brief declaration, signed by over 500 scientists and academics, asserts that, in addition to the strong scientific support for consciousness in mammals and birds agreed on by Cambridge, there is also empirical evidence which "indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects)."[14][159] The declaration further asserts that "when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal".

See Complexitarian.