A good dog, sir, deserves a good bone.—Ben Jonson, 1633
These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hidey-holes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”
That is technical language, but it speaks to a riddle age-old and instinctive. These thoughts begin, for most of us, typically, in childhood, when we are making eye contact with a pet or wild animal. I go back to our first family dog, a preternaturally intelligent-seeming Labrador mix, the kind of dog who herds playing children away from the street at birthday parties, an animal who could sense if you were down and would nuzzle against you for hours, as if actually sharing your pain. I can still hear people, guests and relatives, talking about how smart she was. “Smarter than some people I know!” But when you looked into her eyes—mahogany discs set back in the grizzled black of her face—what was there? I remember the question forming in my mind: can she think? The way my own brain felt to me, the sensation of existing inside a consciousness, was it like that in there?
For most of the history of our species, we seem to have assumed it was. Trying to recapture the thought life of prehistoric peoples is a game wise heads tend to leave alone, but if there’s a consistent motif in the artwork made between four thousand and forty thousand years ago, it’s animal-human hybrids, drawings and carvings and statuettes showing part man or woman and part something else—lion or bird or bear. Animals knew things, possessed their forms of wisdom. They were beings in a world of countless beings. Taking their lives was a meaningful act, to be prayed for beforehand and atoned for afterward, suggesting that beasts were allowed some kind of right. We used our power over them constantly and violently, but stopped short of telling ourselves that creatures of alien biology could not be sentient or that they were incapable of true suffering and pleasure. Needing their bodies, we killed them in spite of those things.
Only with the Greeks does there enter the notion of a formal divide between our species, our animal, and every other on earth. Today in Greece you can walk by a field and hear two farmers talking about an alogo, a horse. An a-logos. No logos, no language. That’s where one of their words for horse comes from. The animal has no speech; it has no reason. It has no reason because it has no speech. Plato and Aristotle were clear on that. Admire animals aesthetically, perhaps, or sentimentally; otherwise they’re here to be used. Mute equaled brute. As time went by, the word for speech became the very word for rationality, the logos, an identification taken up by the early Christians, with fateful results. For them the matter was even simpler. The animals lack souls. They are all animal, whereas we are part divine.
And yet, if you put aside church dogma, and lean in to look at the Bible itself, or at the Christian tradition, the picture is more complicated. In the Book of Isaiah, God says that the day will come when the beasts of the field will “honor” Him. If there’s a characteristic of personal identity more defining than the capacity to honor, it’s hard to come up with. We remember St. Francis, going aside to preach to the little birds, his “sisters.” Needless to say he represented a radical extreme, conclusions of which regarding the right way of being in the world would not seem reasonable to most of the people who have his statue in their gardens. In one of his salutations, that of virtues, he goes as far as to say that human beings desiring true holiness should make themselves “subject” to the animals, “and not to men alone, but also to all beasts.” If God grants that wild animals eat you, lie down, let them do “whatsoever they will,” it’s what He wanted.
Deeper than that, though, in the New Testament, in the Gospel According to Luke, there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.” Sparrows are an important animal for Jesus. In the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a boy Jesus, playing in mud by the river, fashions twelve sparrows out of clay—again the number is mentioned—until a fellow Jew, happening to pass, rebukes him for breaking the Sabbath laws (against “smoothing,” perhaps), at which point Jesus claps and says, “Go!”, and the sparrows fly away chirping. They are not, He says, forgotten. So God remembers them, bears them in mind. Stranger still, He cares about their deaths. In the Gospel According to Matthew we’re told, “Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Think about that. If the bird dies on the branch, and the bird has no immortal soul, and is from that moment only inanimate matter, already basically dust, how can it be “with” God as it’s falling? And not in some abstract all-of-creation sense but in the very way that we are with Him, the explicit point of the verse: the line right before it is “fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.” If sparrows lack souls, if the logos liveth not in them, Jesus isn’t making any sense in Matthew 10:28–29. The passage may make no sense anyway. The sparrow population shows little sign of divine ministrations: two years ago the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds placed house sparrows on its “Red List” of globally threatened species.
Charles Darwin supposedly said that the suffering of the lower animals throughout time was more than he could bear to think of. That feels, if slightly neurotic, more scrupulously observed.
The modern conversation on animal consciousness proceeds, with the rest of the Enlightenment, from the mind of René Descartes, whose take on animals was vividly (and approvingly) paraphrased by the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche: they “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” Descartes’ term for them was automata—windup toys, like the Renaissance protorobots he’d seen as a boy in the gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, “hydraulic statues” that moved and made music and even appeared to speak as they sprinkled the plants. This is how it was with animals, Descartes held. We look at them—they seem so full of depth, so like us, but it’s an illusion. Everything they do can be attached by causal chain to some process, some natural event. Picture two kittens next to each other, watching a cat toy fly around, their heads making precisely the same movements at precisely the same time, as if choreographed, two little fleshy machines made of nerves and electricity, obeying their mechanical mandate.
Descartes’ view drew immediate controversy. Writers such as the naturalist John Ray, in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), protested on behalf of “the common sense of mankind” that if “beasts were automata or machines, they could have no sense, or perception of pleasure, or pain…which is contrary to the doleful significations they make when beaten, or tormented.” A view with which most of us can sympathize, but one that rests to a regrettable extent on naked anthropomorphism—their screams sound like ours, and so must mean the same thing.
“Luna & Luna no. 2,” from Lepidoptera Portraits, 2007. Photograph by Harri Kallio. © Harri Kallio, courtesy of the artist.
Thomas Hobbes, writing soon after Descartes’ death, proposed more philosophically salient qualifications to Descartes’ theory. First, he points out, there is more overlap between us and the beasts than Descartes allowed. Beasts have memory (they can learn sequences of events, avoiding negative outcomes), and they can at least engage with speech (dogs learn our commands). Hobbes even claims—somewhat vaguely—that beasts possess a form of imagination brought about “by words or other voluntary signs,” one that we “generally call understanding.” What they don’t have, he says, is an understanding of their own “conceptions and thoughts.” They are not self-conscious. They are not, as we might put it today, “meta.” Hobbes identifies this self-consciousness as the divine spark.
Hobbes’ contemporary, the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, hesitated to make even that kind of essential distinction between us and them. The difference was rather one of degree, or more than that, one of kind. He writes in Ethics,
Hence it follows that the emotions of the animals which are called irrational…only differ from man’s emotions to the extent that brute nature differs from human nature. Horse and man are alike carried away by the desire of procreation, but the desire of the former is equine, the desire of the latter is human…Thus, although each individual lives content and rejoices in that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being, yet the life, wherein each is content and rejoices, is nothing else but the idea, or soul, of the said individual…It follows from the foregoing proposition that there is no small difference between the joy which actuates, say, a drunkard, and the joy possessed by a philosopher.
Apart from the general point—horses feel horse joy, cats feel cat joy, etc.—Spinoza makes two less familiar but equally significant claims. The first is his lovely definition of the soul: that it is in some way wrapped up with, coextensive with, the “essence” of the creature possessing it. The particular nature in which every creature is able to rejoice precisely by being most entirely itself is the soul. That settles the matter of whether animals have souls. Of course they do. The horse has a horse soul, the fish has a fish soul. The second claim is Spinoza’s radical—but instantly persuasive—statement that one human being’s essence could be unintelligible to another. The drunkard is a different type of human being than the philosopher, but he is also a different creature, full stop. Are we so sure that species identification is proof against the canyons of misapprehension that separate us from, say, the monkey spider? This could be a frightening thought: accepting that no two consciousnesses can ever have transparency, or at any rate can never have certainty about it, leaves us on some level cosmically alone. Spinoza takes the notion in stride. He’d be more prone to say, Well, no doubt we sometimes understand each other.
Suprisingly, perhaps, these thoughts did not lead Spinoza to a recommendation of total empathy with the animal kingdom, as the animal-rights activist in us would hope. He is fairly cold-eyed, even cold-hearted, writing,
It is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is founded rather on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason. The rational quest of what is useful to us further teaches us the necessity of associating ourselves with our fellow men, but not with beasts, or things, whose nature is different from our own; we have the same rights in respect to them as they have in respect to us. Nay, as everyone’s right is defined by his virtue, or power, men have far greater rights over beasts than beasts have over men. Still I do not deny that beasts feel: what I deny is that we may not consult our own advantage and use them as we please, treating them in the way which best suits us; for their nature is not like ours.
In order to understand this, we have to know something about Spinoza’s definition of fundamental or natural right, which comes very close to meaning, simply, power. We have the right to do with them “as we please,” just as they have the “right” to eat us, if the meeting happens on ground more favorable to them. Spinoza isn’t trying to argue that we shouldn’t act kindly toward them, when we can, but he does imply that we needn’t feel guilty about it, when we treat them violently. It’s our right. It suits us.
The whole “animal consciousness” problem remained more or less static for the next two hundred years. Which is to say, it remained philosophical, and retained more or less the contours of the dispute as it had existed among Descartes and his contemporaries, one side arguing that animals did not possess reason or the capacity for meaningful self-awareness, the other countering that we really have no idea what they think, and given that they often seem to undergo states equivalent to our own, why shouldn’t we assume that they do? After all, absence of proof isn’t proof of absence. But it isn’t proof of presence, either, and that’s what science wants.
There were flashes. Scattered experiments on animal behavior began to occur around the 1780s, and, of course, throughout the nineteenth century an enormous amount of direct observation was taking place—people were bumping up against the question more than ever. But mostly it was like arguing about the existence of life on other planets, or some other topic considered inescapably mysterious.
In On the Origin of Species, Darwin made the intriguing claim that among the naturalists he knew it was consistently the case that the better a researcher got to know a certain species, the more each individual animal’s actions appeared attributable to “reason and the less to unlearnt instinct.” The more you knew, the more you suspected that they were rational. That marks an important pivot, that thought, insofar as it took place in the mind of someone devoted to extremely close and meticulous study of living animals, a mind that had trained itself not to sentimentalize. Even at so intimate a range of scrutiny, looking not just at apes and dogs but also at birds and worms, Darwin rediscovered that feeling, which even children know. Or which children believe, as a mechanist might say.
Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
It’s Darwin who finally wrenches these questions away from the salon and into the lab, where they’ve mostly stayed. We stand now at the end of a century’s intense scientific research on the interiors of animal minds—it’s been roughly a hundred years since the publication of Edward L. Thorndike’s Animal Intelligence (1911). Thorndike, a psychologist at Columbia University, designed the famous “puzzle boxes,” from which he challenged poor cats to escape, concluding that they possessed a kind of reward-and-repeat mechanism but not what he called “insight” (suggesting among other things that vagueness of terms has been a hereditary pitfall of the field).
The sheer number and variety of experiments carried out in the twentieth century—and with, if anything, a renewed intensity in the twenty-first—exceeds summary. Reasoning, language, neurology, the science of emotions—every chamber where “consciousness” is thought to hide has been probed. Birds and chimps and dolphins have been made to look at themselves in mirrors—to observe whether, on the basis of what they see, they groom or preen (a measure, if somewhat arbitrary, of self-awareness). Dolphins have been found to grieve. Primates have learned symbolic or sign languages and then been interrogated with them. Their answers show thinking but have proved stubbornly open to interpretation on the issue of “consciousness,” with critics warning, as always, about the dangers of anthropomorphism, animal-rights bias, etc.
Regardless, though, of whether they can talk to us, we’ve learned more and more about the complex ways in which they talk to each other. Entomologists mastered the dance code of the bees and spoke it to them, using a tiny bee-puppet. (For the bees it may have been as if the puppet had a strange accent). In more recent years the numerous calls that elephants make to one another across 150-mile distances have been recorded and decoded. Evidently the individual animals can tell each other apart. So there are conversations of some kind taking place. Zoologists have observed elephants having, for instance, a “departure conversation” at a watering hole, rustling their great heads together in a “rumbling,” communicating about the decision to leave; the water is no good here, we should move on. Who knows what they’re saying. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand it. It may, as it turns out, be truer to say that we wouldn’t understand it very well.
If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. This was made boldly clear when the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” pointed out that those “neurological substrates” necessary for consciousness (whatever “consciousness” is) belong to “all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.” The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.
Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.—Thomas Browne, 1658
The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay in 1974 titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” in which he put forward perhaps the least overweening, most useful definition of “animal consciousness” ever written, one that channels Spinoza’s phrase about “that nature belonging to him wherein he has his being.” Animal consciousness occurs, Nagel wrote, when “there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” The strangeness of his syntax carries the genuine texture of the problem. We’ll probably never be able to step far enough outside of our species-reality to say much about what is going on with them, beyond saying how like or unlike us they are. Many things are conscious on the earth, and we are one, and our consciousness feels like this; one of the things it causes us to do is doubt the existence of the consciousness of the other millions of species. But it also allows us to imagine a time when we might stop doing that.
In Michel de Montaigne’s excellent passage on animal minds in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” in which he writes about playing with his cat and wonders who is playing with whom, there is a funny and deceptively profound final sentence: “We divert each other with monkey tricks,” he writes. Meaning he and the cat. Both human being and cat are compared with a third animal. They are monkeys to each other, strange animals to each other. (The man is all but literally a monkey to the cat.) All three creatures involved in Montaigne’s metaphor are revealed as points on a continuum, and none of them understands the others very well. This is what the study of animal consciousness can teach us, finally—that we possess an animal consciousness.
"""Mbwa mzuri, bwana, anastahili mfupa mzuri"" - Ben Jonson, 1633 - ""Hizi ni nyakati za kuchochea kwa mtu yeyote anayependezwa na maswali ya ufahamu wa wanyama.""" Katika kile kinachoonekana kama msingi wa kila mwezi, timu za kisayansi zinatangaza matokeo ya majaribio mapya, ikiongeza kwa ushahidi mwingi kwamba tumekuwa tukipunguza akili za wanyama, hata wale kati yetu ambao tumezipima sana. Utendaji mpya wa wanyama unaonekana katika mazingira ya asili, mara nyingi unahusisha kutumia zana au angalau udhibiti wa vitu, aina ya shughuli ambazo zilimwongoza mtaalamu mashuhuri wa wanyama Donald R. Griffin kuanzisha uwanja wa etolojia ya utambuzi (kufikiria kwa wanyama) mnamo 1978: octopus kukusanya mawe mbele ya mashimo yao ya kujificha, kwa jina la mfano mmoja wa hivi karibuni; au dolfini wakifunga sifongo za baharini kwenye mdomo wao ili kuchimba chakula kwenye sakafu ya bahari; au nyigu kutumia mawe madogo. "Wanabiolojia wa neva wamegundua kwamba ""miundo ya kibiolojia katika ubongo wetu wenyewe ambayo kwa kawaida huonwa kuwa inahusika na ufahamu"" sio nadra sana katika ufalme wa wanyama kama ilivyodhaniwa." Kwa kweli ni jambo la kawaida. "Kama ilivyoelezwa katika taarifa ya kimataifa ya The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals, ""watu si wa pekee katika kuwa na substrates neurological kwamba kuzalisha ufahamu,"" ni zaidi ya kuhitimisha kwamba tabia nyingi za wanyama kumbukumbu lazima kuchukuliwa ""mshikamano na hali ya hisia uzoefu.""" Mawazo haya huanza, kwa wengi wetu, kwa kawaida, katika utoto, wakati tunafanya mawasiliano ya macho na mnyama wa kufugwa au mnyama wa mwituni. Mbwa wa kwanza wa familia yetu, mchanganyiko wa Labrador, ambaye anaonekana kuwa na akili ya ajabu, ni aina ya mbwa ambaye huchukua watoto wachezaji kutoka mitaani kwenye karamu za siku za kuzaliwa, mnyama ambaye anaweza kuhisi ikiwa umeshuka na angekushambulia kwa masaa, kana kwamba kwa kweli anashiriki maumivu yako. Bado naweza kusikia watu, wageni na watu wa ukoo, wakizungumza juu ya jinsi alivyokuwa mwenye akili. <unk>Smarter kuliko baadhi ya watu najua! <unk> Lakini wakati wewe inaonekana katika macho yake <unk> mahogany disks kuweka nyuma katika grizzled nyeusi ya uso wake <unk> nini ilikuwa huko? Nakumbuka swali lililositawi akilini mwangu: Je, anaweza kufikiri? Jinsi ubongo wangu ulivyosikia, hisia ya kuwepo ndani ya ufahamu, ilikuwa hivyo huko? Kwa sehemu kubwa ya historia ya spishi yetu, inaonekana tumedhani hivyo. Kujaribu kuokoa maisha ya mawazo ya watu wa kabla ya historia ni mchezo wenye akili wanaelekea kuondoka peke yao, lakini kama kuna motif thabiti katika kazi ya sanaa iliyofanywa kati ya miaka elfu nne na elfu arobaini iliyopita, ni wanyama-binadamu mchanganyiko, michoro na kuchonga na sanamu kuonyesha sehemu ya mtu au mwanamke na sehemu ya kitu kingine - simba au ndege au dubu. Wanyama walijua mambo, walikuwa na aina zao za hekima. Walikuwa viumbe katika ulimwengu wa viumbe wasiohesabiwa. Kuua wanyama ni tendo lenye maana, ambalo linapaswa kusali kwa ajili yake kabla ya kuuawa na kulipia baada ya kifo, jambo linalodokeza kwamba wanyama wanaruhusiwa kuwa na haki fulani. Tulitumia nguvu zetu juu yao daima na kwa vurugu, lakini hatukujiambia kwamba viumbe wa biolojia ya kigeni hawawezi kuwa na hisia au kwamba hawakuweza kuteseka na kufurahia kweli. Kwa kuwa tulihitaji miili yao, tuliwaua licha ya mambo hayo. Ni kwa Wagiriki tu ambapo kuna wazo la mgawanyiko rasmi kati ya spishi zetu, wanyama wetu, na kila mtu mwingine duniani. Katika siku za leo, unaweza kutembea kwenye shamba na kusikia wakulima wawili wakizungumza juu ya farasi. An-logos. Hakuna alama, hakuna lugha. Hiyo ndiyo chanzo cha mojawapo ya maneno yao kwa ajili ya farasi. Mnyama hana usemi; hana sababu. Hauna sababu kwa sababu haina usemi. Plato na Aristotle walikuwa wazi juu ya hilo. Heshima wanyama aesthetically, labda, au sentimental; vinginevyo wao ni hapa kutumika. Mtu asiye na sauti ni sawa na mnyama. "Kama wakati ulivyopita, neno ""usemi"" likawa neno la ""haswa"" kwa sababu, ""logos,"" jina lililotumiwa na Wakristo wa mapema, na matokeo yake yakawa mabaya sana." Kwa wao jambo hilo lilikuwa rahisi hata zaidi. Wanyama hawana roho. Wote ni wanyama, ilhali sisi ni sehemu ya kimungu. Hata hivyo, ukiacha mafundisho ya kanisa na kukazia fikira Biblia yenyewe, au mapokeo ya Kikristo, picha ni ngumu zaidi. Katika kitabu cha Isaya, Mungu anasema kwamba siku itakuja wakati wanyama wa shambani watamtukuza. Kama kuna sifa ya utambulisho wa kibinafsi zaidi ya kufafanua kuliko uwezo wa kuheshimu, ni vigumu kuja na. "Tunamkumbuka Mtakatifu Francisko, akienda mbali kuhubiri kwa ndege wadogo, ""dada zake"" - Haijalishi kwamba yeye aliwakilisha ukali wa kimapinduzi, ambao hitimisho kuhusu njia sahihi ya kuwa katika ulimwengu haingeonekana kuwa na busara kwa watu wengi ambao wana sanamu yake katika bustani zao." "Katika moja ya salamu zake, ile ya wema, anaenda mbali sana kusema kwamba wanadamu wanaotaka utakatifu wa kweli wanapaswa kujifanya ""watu wa wanyama,"" na si kwa watu tu, bali pia kwa wanyama wote. ""Ikiwa Mungu anatoa kwamba wanyama wa mwituni wakuleme, ulale, wafanye kile wanachotaka, ni kile alichotaka." "Hata hivyo, katika Agano Jipya, katika Injili ya Luka, kuna mstari huo mzuri, mojawapo ya mstari mzuri zaidi katika Biblia, unaosema, ""Ikiwa Mungu anajali sana juu ya vipepeo, je, hufikiri anajali juu yako?""" Mtu amezoea sana kukaa juu ya nusu ya pili, ya kibinadamu, ya usawa, sehemu ya faraja, lakini unapoweka mkono wako juu ya hiyo na kuzingatia tu ya kwanza, ni ya kushangaza kidogo: Mungu anajali sana juu ya sparrows. Si hivyo tu, bali anawajali wao binafsi. "Je, si vipepeo watano wanaouzwa kwa senti mbili?"" Yesu akasema. "Hata hivyo, hakuna hata mmoja wao anayesahaulika machoni pa Mungu". Katika Injili ya Thomas ya utotoni, Yesu akiwa mtoto mchanga, akicheza kwenye matope kando ya mto, anatengeneza vipepeo kumi na wawili kutoka kwa udongo - tena nambari hiyo inatajwa - mpaka Myahudi mwenzake, akipita, anamkemea kwa kuvunja sheria za Sabato (kinyume cha "kupendeza", labda), wakati Yesu anapiga makofi na kusema, "Nenda!" na vipepeo hao wanaruka wakipiga kelele. Yeye asema kwamba hawajasahauliwa. Kwa hiyo Mungu anawakumbuka, anawakumbuka. Jambo la ajabu zaidi ni kwamba, Yeye huhangaikia kifo chao. "Katika Injili ya Mathayo, Yesu anasema, ""Hakuna hata mmoja wao atakayeshuka chini bila Baba yenu.""" Kama ndege anakufa juu ya tawi, na ndege hana nafsi isiyokufa, na ni kutoka wakati huo tu mambo yasiyo na uhai, tayari kimsingi vumbi, jinsi inaweza kuwa <unk>na<unk> Mungu kama ni <unk>kuanguka? "Hakuna kitu chochote ambacho kingeweza kuonekana katika sura hii, lakini ni kwamba ni kitu ambacho kingeweza kuonekana katika sura hii, na kwamba ni kitu ambacho kingeweza kuonekana katika sura hii, na kwamba kingeweza kuonekana katika sura hii, na kwamba kingeweza kuonekana katika sura hii, na kwamba kingeweza kuonekana katika sura hii.""" Huenda andiko hilo lisingekuwa na maana hata hivyo. "Kama ilivyoelezwa hapo juu, ""Sosaiti ya Kifalme ya Ulinzi wa Ndege"" iliweka ndege wa nyumbani kwenye orodha yake nyekundu ya spishi zinazotishiwa ulimwenguni." "Charles Darwin alisema kwamba ""mateso ya wanyama wa chini katika wakati wote yalikuwa zaidi kuliko alivyoshikilia kufikiria.""" Hiyo inahisi, kama kidogo neurotic, zaidi scrupulously kuchunguzwa. "Mwanamume wa karne ya 19 René Descartes aliandika: ""Wanyama hula bila furaha, hulia bila maumivu, hukua bila kujua; hawataki chochote, hawaogopi chochote, hawajui chochote."" - Nicolas Malebranche, mwanamume wa karne ya 19 ambaye aliandika ""Automat"" kama ""Vitu vya kuchezea vya Autobots"" (automatic wind-up toys) na ""Vitu vya kuchezea vya Hydraulic"" (hydraulic statues) kama alivyoona akiwa mvulana katika bustani ya Saint-Germain-en-Laye." Hivyo ndivyo ilivyokuwa na wanyama, Descartes alidai. Tunawatazama - wanaonekana kuwa na kina kirefu sana, kama sisi, lakini ni udanganyifu. Kila kitu wanachofanya kinaweza kushikamana na mchakato fulani, tukio fulani la asili. "Hebu wazia watoto wawili wa paka wakiwa karibu, wakitazama kichezeo cha paka kikiwa kinaruka, vichwa vyao vikifanya harakati sawa kwa wakati mmoja, kama kwamba vimechorwa, mashine mbili ndogo zenye nyama zilizotengenezwa kwa neva na umeme, zikitii amri yao ya kiufundi.""" Maoni ya Descartes yalisababisha ubishi mara moja. "Mwandishi John Ray, katika kitabu chake The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), alidai kwamba ""kama wanyama wangekuwa mashine, hawangeweza kuwa na hisia, au hisia za furaha au maumivu, ambayo ni kinyume na maana mbaya wanayofanya wanapopigwa au kuteswa.""" <unk>Luna & Luna hakuna. "Kutoka kwa ""Lepidoptera Portraits""" Picha: Harri Kallio. © Harri Kallio, kwa neema ya msanii. Thomas Hobbes, akiandika muda mfupi baada ya kifo cha Descartes, alipendekeza sifa zaidi za kifalsafa kwa nadharia ya Descartes. Kwanza, yeye aonyesha, kuna kufanana zaidi kati yetu na wanyama kuliko Descartes aliruhusu. Wanyama wana kumbukumbu (wanaweza kujifunza mfululizo wa matukio, kuepuka matokeo mabaya), na wanaweza angalau kushiriki na hotuba (mbwa kujifunza amri zetu). Hobbes hata anadai - kwa njia isiyo wazi - kwamba wanyama wana aina ya mawazo yanayotokana na maneno au ishara nyingine za hiari, ambayo sisi kwa ujumla tunaita uelewa. Wao si, kama tunaweza kuiweka leo, <unk>meta.<unk> Hobbes hutambua hii kujitambua kama cheche ya kimungu. "Hobbes aliwahi kumshutumu mwanafalsafa wa Kiyahudi Baruch Spinoza kwa kusema ""Hakuna tofauti kati ya watu na vitu.""" Tofauti ilikuwa badala moja ya shahada, au zaidi ya kwamba, moja ya aina. "Kama ilivyoelezwa katika kitabu cha Ethics, ""Hivyo inavyotokea kwamba hisia za wanyama ambazo huitwa zisizo za akili hutofautiana na hisia za binadamu kwa kiasi tu ambacho asili ya wanyama hutofautiana na asili ya binadamu.""" """Mwanaume na farasi wana tamaa ya kuzaa, lakini ya kwanza ni ya farasi, na ya pili ni ya binadamu."" - H.W.B. Lewis, ""Hata kama kila mtu anaishi kwa furaha na kufurahia asili yake, na kwa hiyo yeye ni mtu, lakini maisha ambayo kila mtu ana furaha na kufurahia ni kitu kingine ila wazo au roho ya mtu huyo."" - H.W.B." Mbali na uhakika wa jumla - farasi kuhisi farasi furaha, paka kuhisi paka furaha, nk - Spinoza hufanya madai mawili chini ya kawaida lakini sawa muhimu. Ya kwanza ni ufafanuzi wake mzuri wa nafsi: kwamba kwa njia fulani imefungwa na, inaunganishwa na, "kiini" cha kiumbe anayemiliki. Asili ya pekee ambayo kila kiumbe anaweza kufurahia kwa kuwa yeye mwenyewe kabisa ni nafsi. Hilo linatatua suala la ikiwa wanyama wana nafsi. Bila shaka wanajua. Farasi ana roho ya farasi, samaki ana roho ya samaki. Madai ya pili ni Spinoza ya kimkakati - lakini mara moja ya kushawishi - taarifa kwamba kiini cha mwanadamu mmoja inaweza kuwa incomprehensible kwa mwingine. Mlevi ni aina tofauti ya binadamu kuliko mwanafalsafa, lakini pia ni kiumbe tofauti, hatua kamili. Je, tuna uhakika kwamba utambulisho wa spishi ni uthibitisho dhidi ya maporomoko ya misapprehension kwamba kututofautisha na, kusema, nyani nyani? Hii inaweza kuwa wazo la kutisha: kukubali kwamba hakuna fahamu mbili zinaweza kuwa na uwazi, au kwa kiwango chochote haiwezi kuwa na uhakika juu yake, inatuacha katika kiwango fulani cha kipekee. Spinoza huchukua wazo hilo kwa utulivu. Angekuwa na mwelekeo zaidi wa kusema, Naam, bila shaka nyakati nyingine tunaelewana. "Hata hivyo, Spinoza alishindwa kueleza kwa usahihi kwamba ""hakuna mtu anayejaribu kuharibu haki za wanyama kama sisi.""" "Ameandika hivi: ""Ni wazi kwamba sheria inayopinga kuchinjwa kwa wanyama inategemea imani ya uwongo na huruma ya wanawake badala ya sababu nzuri.""" Utafiti wa kiakili wa kile kinachotufaa zaidi hutufundisha umuhimu wa kujiunga na wenzetu, lakini si kwa wanyama au vitu ambavyo asili yao ni tofauti na yetu; tuna haki sawa kwa wao kama wanavyo kwa sisi. La, kwa kuwa haki ya kila mtu hufafanuliwa na wema wake, au nguvu, watu wana haki kubwa zaidi juu ya wanyama kuliko wanyama wanavyo juu ya watu. Hata hivyo, mimi sikukataa kwamba wanyama wana hisia; kile ninachokataa ni kwamba hatuwezi kujadili faida yetu wenyewe na kuwatumia kama tunavyotaka, kuwachukulia kwa njia inayotufaa zaidi; kwa sababu asili yao si kama yetu. "Kwa hivyo, kwa sababu ya hali hii, ni muhimu sana kuelewa ufafanuzi wa Spinoza wa ""haki ya asili"" na ""haki ya msingi"" ambayo inahusiana na ""haki ya asili.""" Tuna haki ya kufanya nao kama tunavyopenda, kama vile wana haki ya kutula, ikiwa mkutano utafanyika kwenye ardhi inayopendeza zaidi kwao. Spinoza hajaribu kusema kwamba hatupaswi kuwaonyesha fadhili, tunapoweza, lakini anamaanisha kwamba hatupaswi kuhisi hatia tunapowatendea kwa jeuri. Ni haki yetu. Inatufaa. Tatizo lote la "fahamu ya wanyama" lilibaki kuwa na hali ya kawaida kwa miaka mia mbili iliyofuata. "Hiyo ni kusema, ilibaki ya kifalsafa, na ilidumisha zaidi au chini ya mipaka ya mzozo kama ilivyokuwa kati ya Descartes na wenzake, upande mmoja ukisema kwamba wanyama hawakuwa na sababu au uwezo wa kujijua kwa maana, upande mwingine ukisema kwamba kwa kweli hatujui wanafikiria nini, na kwa kuwa mara nyingi wanaonekana kupitia hali sawa na zetu, kwa nini tusidhani wanafanya hivyo?""" Baada ya yote, kukosekana kwa uthibitisho si uthibitisho wa kukosekana. Lakini si uthibitisho wa uwepo, ama, na kwamba ni nini sayansi anataka. Kulikuwa na milipuko. Majaribio ya tabia ya wanyama yalianza karibu na miaka ya 1780 na, bila shaka, katika karne ya kumi na tisa kiasi kikubwa cha uchunguzi wa moja kwa moja ulikuwa ukifanyika - watu walikuwa wakikumbana na swali hilo zaidi kuliko hapo awali. Lakini zaidi ilikuwa kama kujadili juu ya kuwepo kwa maisha kwenye sayari nyingine, au mada nyingine yoyote kuchukuliwa inescapably siri. Katika kitabu chake The Origin of Species, Darwin alidai kwamba, miongoni mwa wataalamu wa asili, mara nyingi, kadiri mtafiti alivyojua aina fulani, ndivyo kila mnyama alivyofanya kwa sababu na si kwa sababu ya hisia zake. "Hiyo ni hatua muhimu, kwa kuwa ilitokea katika akili ya mtu aliyejitolea kwa utafiti wa karibu sana na wa kina wa wanyama walio hai, akili ambayo ilikuwa imejizoeza yenyewe kutokuwa na hisia.""" Hata katika uchunguzi wa kina sana, akitazama si tu nyani na mbwa bali pia ndege na minyoo, Darwin alipata tena hisia hiyo, ambayo hata watoto wanaijua. Au ambayo watoto wanaamini, kama mechanic angeweza kusema. Mashamba ya ngano na kunguru, na Vincent van Gogh, 1890. Jumba la Makumbusho la Van Gogh, Amsterdam. Ni Darwin ambaye hatimaye wrenches maswali haya mbali na salon na katika maabara, ambapo wao wamekuwa zaidi ya kukaa. "Hii ni sehemu ya utafiti wa kisayansi wa karne moja kuhusu ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama"" na ""akili ya wanyama.""" Thorndike, mwanasaikolojia katika Chuo Kikuu cha Columbia, iliyoundwa maarufu "puzzle masanduku" ambayo yeye changamoto paka maskini kutoroka, akihitimisha kwamba walikuwa na aina ya thawabu-na-kurudia utaratibu lakini si kile alichokiita "maono" (kuonyesha miongoni mwa mambo mengine kwamba vagueness ya maneno imekuwa pitfall urithi wa uwanja). Idadi kubwa na aina ya majaribio yaliyofanywa katika karne ya ishirini - na kwa, kama kitu chochote, nguvu mpya katika ishirini na moja - inazidi muhtasari. Uhakika, lugha, neurolojia, sayansi ya hisia - kila chumba ambapo "fahamu" ni walidhani ya kujificha imekuwa probed. Ndege na chimp na dolphins wamekuwa kufanywa kuangalia wenyewe katika vioo - kuchunguza kama, kwa msingi wa kile wanaona, wao groom au preen (kiwango, kama kiasi fulani arbitrary, ya kujitambua). Wanyama hao wanaitwa dolphins, na wanaonekana kuwa na huzuni. Wanyama hao wamejifunza lugha za ishara na kisha kuhojiwa pamoja nao. Majibu yao yanaonyesha kufikiri lakini yamethibitika kuwa wazi kwa tafsiri juu ya suala la "fahamu", na wakosoaji wanahadhari, kama kawaida, juu ya hatari za anthropomorphism, upendeleo wa haki za wanyama, nk. Hata hivyo, bila kujali kama wanaweza kuzungumza nasi, tumejifunza mengi zaidi na zaidi kuhusu njia tata ambazo wao huzungumza na kila mmoja. Wataalamu wa wadudu walijua vizuri kanuni za dansi za nyuki na kuzizungumza kwa kutumia mwanasesere mdogo wa nyuki. (Kwa nyuki huenda ikawa ilikuwa kana kwamba mwanasesere huyo alikuwa na lafudhi ya ajabu). Katika miaka ya hivi karibuni, sauti nyingi ambazo tembo hufanya kwa kila mmoja wao katika umbali wa maili 150 zimerekodiwa na kufasiriwa. Ni wazi kwamba wanyama mmoja-mmoja wanaweza kutofautisha wengine. Kwa hiyo kuna mazungumzo ya aina fulani yanayoendelea. Wataalamu wa wanyama wameona tembo wakifanya mazungumzo ya kuondoka kwenye shimo la maji, wakizungusha vichwa vyao vikubwa pamoja kwa sauti kubwa, wakizungumza juu ya uamuzi wa kuondoka; maji hayana faida hapa, tunapaswa kuendelea. Ni nani anayejua wanachosema. Ludwig Wittgenstein alisema kwamba ikiwa simba angeweza kuzungumza, hatungeweza kuelewana naye. Inaweza, kama inavyotokea, kuwa kweli zaidi kusema kwamba hatungeelewa vizuri sana. "Ikiwa tunatupa kando kiwango cha ufahamu wa kibinafsi - na kwa kweli, ni jinsi gani ya kiburi na kiburi ni kwamba kuchukua sifa ya ufahamu tunao juu ya viumbe vyote na kuifanya juu ya safu ya safu, kuitangaza kuwa ufafanuzi halisi wa ufahamu (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg aliandika kitu cha busara katika vitabu vyake, kwa athari ya: ""mtu tu anaweza kuchora picha ya kibinafsi, lakini mtu tu anataka kufanya hivyo"") - inakuwa inawezekana kusema angalau yafuatayo:" Kuna aina nyingi za wanyama wanaoweza kuipata, na kuna aina nyingi zaidi kuliko ilivyofikiriwa. "Hii ilionyeshwa wazi wakati ""Tangazo la Cambridge juu ya Ufahamu"" lilipokazia kwamba ""substrate za neva"" zinazohitajika kwa ufahamu (yaani ufahamu) ni za ""samaki wote na ndege, na viumbe vingine vingi, ikiwa ni pamoja na octopus.""" Angalau tunaweza kufanya ni kuwa na heshima sahihi kwa ujinga wetu. "Mwanadamu ni mnyama wa hali ya juu, mwenye fahari katika majivu na mwenye fahari katika kaburi."" - Thomas Browne, 1658 Thomas Nagel, mwanasayansi, aliandika insha mnamo 1974 yenye kichwa ""Je, ni kama kuwa popo?"" ambayo alitoa labda ufafanuzi wa chini zaidi, muhimu zaidi wa ""fahamu ya wanyama"" ambayo imeandikwa, moja ambayo inatoa Spinoza kuhusu ""asili inayomilikiwa ambayo yeye ana kuwa.""" "Hatutakuwa na uwezo wa kwenda mbali sana nje ya hali halisi ya spishi zetu kusema mengi juu ya kile kinachoendelea nao, zaidi ya kusema jinsi wanavyofanana au tofauti na sisi. """ """Vitu vingi duniani vina ufahamu, na sisi ni moja, na ufahamu wetu unahisi hivi: moja ya mambo ambayo inatufanya tufanye ni kutilia shaka kuwepo kwa ufahamu wa mamilioni ya spishi nyingine." Lakini pia inatuwezesha kufikiria wakati ambapo tunaweza kuacha kufanya hivyo. "Mwanamume Michel de Montaigne aliandika katika kitabu chake ""Apology for Raymond Seband"" kwamba ""kila mtu anafanya kazi kwa mbwa wake na anajiuliza ni nani anafanya kazi na mbwa wake"" na kwamba ""kila mtu anafanya kazi kwa mbwa wake.""" Yaani yeye na paka. Mtu na paka wanalinganishwa na mnyama wa tatu. Wao ni nyani kwa kila mmoja, wanyama wa ajabu kwa kila mmoja. (Mtu huyo ni kama nyani kwa paka.) Viumbe wote watatu wanaohusika katika mfano wa Montaigne wanafunuliwa kama pointi kwenye mfululizo, na hakuna hata mmoja wao anayeelewa wengine vizuri sana. Hii ni nini utafiti wa fahamu ya wanyama inaweza kutufundisha, hatimaye <unk> kwamba tuna fahamu ya wanyama.