We could easily place pressure sensors in the tail of a robotic cat to activate a screech when stepped on-and we would not think it suffered pain. When I accidentally stamped on my cat's tail and she screeched and shot out of the room, I was sure I had hurt her. Why does it matter? One reason is suffering. In the A team's view, there is no point in asking when or why “consciousness itself” evolved or what its function is because “consciousness itself” does not exist. Either consciousness just is the activity of bodies and brains, or it inevitably comes along with everything we so obviously share with other animals. On the other side is the A Team: scholars who reject the possibility of zombies and think the hard problem is, to quote philosopher Patricia Churchland, a “hornswoggle problem” that obfuscates the issue. If that is so, consciousness must be a special additional capacity that we might have evolved either with or without and, many would say, are lucky to have. Believing in zombies means that other animals might conceivably be seeing, hearing, eating and mating “all in the dark” with no subjective experience at all. Members of this group agonize about the hard problem and believe in the possibility of the philosopher's “zombie,” an imagined creature that is indistinguishable from you or me but has no consciousness. Dennett described them in a heated debate. On one side is the “B Team,” as philosopher Daniel C. The answer to this question divides consciousness researchers down the middle. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Įven worse is the “hard problem” of consciousness: How does subjective experience arise from objective brain activity? How can physical neurons, with all their chemical and electrical communications, create the feeling of pain, the glorious red of the sunset or the taste of fine claret? This is a problem of dualism: How can mind arise from matter? Indeed, does it? ![]() ![]() If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. Consider: Is it like something to be a whole octopus, to be its central brain or to be a single octopus arm? The science of consciousness provides no easy way of finding out. Only a third of your neurons are in a central brain the rest are in the nerve cords in each of your eight arms, one for each arm. You have eight curly, grippy, sensitive arms for getting around and catching prey but no skeleton, and so you can squeeze yourself through tiny spaces. We share a lot with bats: we, too, have ears and can imagine our arms as wings. If there is something (anything) it is like for the bat, it is conscious. We may try to imagine what it is like to sleep upside down or to navigate the world using sonar, but does it feel like anything at all? The crux here is this: If there is nothing it is like to be a bat, we can say it is not conscious. We do not even have a clear definition beyond appealing to a famous question asked by philosopher Thomas Nagel back in 1974: What is it like to be a bat? Nagel chose bats because they live such very different lives from our own. The question is hard because although your own consciousness may seem the most obvious thing in the world, it is perhaps the hardest to study. Could it really be that we alone have an extra special something-this marvelous inner world of subjective experience? Yet the more biology we learn, the more obvious it is that we share not only anatomy, physiology and genetics with other animals but also systems of vision, hearing, memory and emotional expression. And in the 17th century French philosopher René Descartes argued that other animals have only reflex behaviors. ![]() In medieval Christianity the “great chain of being” placed humans on a level above soulless animals and below only God and the angels. ![]() Might we humans be the only species on this planet to be truly conscious? Might lobsters and lions, beetles and bats be unconscious automata, responding to their worlds with no hint of conscious experience? Aristotle thought so, claiming that humans have rational souls but that other animals have only the instincts needed to survive.
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