In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bees doing something extraordinary: the diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in an activity that could only be described as play.
With small wooden balls, the bees they pushed and turned them. The behavior had no obvious relationship to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by scientists. Apparently it was just for fun.
The playful bee study is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of the animal mind cited this month, reinforcing a new statement that extends scientific support to the fact that a broader set of animals than formally recognized previously has conscience.
For decades, there has been broad consensus among scientists that animals similar to us—the great apes, for example—have conscious experience, even if their consciousness is different from ours.
In recent years, however, researchers have begun to recognize that consciousness may also be widespread among animals very different from humans, including invertebrates with completely different and much simpler nervous systems.
The new statement, signed by biologists and philosophers, formally adopts this point of view. It says, in part: “Empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians, and fish) and many invertebrates (including, at a minimum, cephalopod molluscs, decapod crustaceans, and insects) .”
Inspired by recent research findings describing complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the paper represents a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness.
The four-paragraph New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was unveiled on April 19 at a one-day conference called “The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” held at New York University. .
Led by philosopher and cognitive scientist Kristin Andrews of the University of York in Ontario, philosopher and environmental scientist Jeff Sebo of New York University, and philosopher Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the declaration has already been signed by 39 researchers, including psychologists Nicola Clayton and Irene Pepperberg, neuroscientists Anil Seth and Christof Koch, zoologist Lars Chittka and philosophers David Chalmers and Peter Godfrey-Smith.
The statement focuses on the most basic type of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Broadly speaking, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature—an idea enunciated by philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential 1974 essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” (What’s it like to be a bat?).
Even though a creature is very different from us, Nagel wrote: “fundamentally, an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like for that organism to be. (…) We can call this the subjective character of experience.”
If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it has the capacity to experience feelings such as pain, pleasure, or hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-consciousness.
“I hope the statement (draws) more attention to the issues of non-human consciousness and the ethical challenges that accompany the possibility of conscious experiences far beyond the human,” wrote Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex.
“I hope this stimulates discussion, informs animal welfare policy and practice, and encourages understanding and recognition that we have much more in common with other animals than with things like ChatGPT.”
A growing awareness
The statement began to take shape last year, following conversations between Sebo, Andrews and Birch. “The three of us were talking about how much has happened in the last 10, 15 years in the science of animal consciousness,” recalls Sebo. We now know, for example, that octopuses feel pain.
Studies on fish have found that cleaner wrasses appear to pass a version of the “mirror test,” which indicates a degree of self-recognition, and that zebrafish show signs of curiosity.
In the insect world, bees exhibit apparent playful behavior, while Drosophila fruit flies have distinct sleep patterns influenced by their social environment. Meanwhile, crayfish exhibit anxiety-like states—and these states can be altered by anti-anxiety medications.
These and other signs of conscious states in animals that had long been considered less than conscious have excited and challenged biologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers of mind. “Many people have accepted for some time that, for example, mammals and birds are conscious or have a high probability of being conscious, but less attention has been paid to other vertebrate and, especially, invertebrate taxa,” Sebo said.
In conversations and meetings, experts largely agreed that these animals must have consciousness. However, this newly formed consensus was not being communicated to the general public, including other scientists and policymakers.
So the three researchers decided to write a clear and concise statement and distribute it among their colleagues for approval. The statement is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather “to indicate where we think the field is now and where the field is going,” Sebo said.
The new statement updates the latest effort to establish a scientific consensus on animal consciousness. In 2012, researchers published the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which stated that a number of non-human animals, including but not limited to mammals and birds, have “the capacity to exhibit purposeful behaviors” and that “humans do not are the only ones to possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
The new statement expands the scope of its predecessor and is also more carefully worded, Seth wrote. “She does not attempt to do science by diktat (forceful determination), but emphasizes what we should take seriously regarding animal consciousness and relevant ethics, given the evidence and theories we have.”
He wrote that he was “not in favor of avalanches of open letters and the like,” but that he ultimately “came to the conclusion that this statement was very much worth supporting.”
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Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher of science at the University of Sydney who has worked extensively with octopuses, believes the complex behaviors these creatures exhibit – including problem solving, tool use and playful behavior – can only be interpreted as indicators of consciousness.
“They have this attentive involvement with things, with us and with new objects, which makes it very difficult not to think that there is a lot going on inside them,” he said.
He noted that recent work analyzing pain and dream states in octopuses “points in the same direction (…) in the sense that the experience is a real part of their lives.”
Although many of the animals mentioned in the statement have very different brains and nervous systems than humans, researchers say this need not be a barrier to consciousness. For example, a bee’s brain contains only about a million neurons, compared to about 86 billion in the case of humans.
But each of these bee neurons may be as structurally complex as an oak tree. The network of connections they form is also incredibly dense, with each neuron coming into contact with perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 others.
The nervous system of a octopus, on the other hand, is complex in other respects. Your organization is highly distributed rather than centralized; a severed arm can exhibit many of the same behaviors as the intact animal.
The result, Andrews said, is that “we may not need as much equipment as we thought” to achieve consciousness. She noted, for example, that even a cerebral cortex—the outer layer of the mammalian brain believed to play a role in attention, perception, memory, and other important aspects of consciousness—may not be necessary for the simplest phenomenal consciousness targeted. in the declaration.
“There has been a lot of debate about the consciousness of fish, and a lot of that has been due to the fact that they don’t have the brain structures that we see in mammals,” she said.
“But when we look at birds and reptiles and amphibians, they have very different brain structures and different evolutionary pressures, and yet we are finding that some of these brain structures do the same kind of work that the cerebral cortex does in humans.”
Godfrey-Smith agreed, noting that behaviors indicative of consciousness “may exist in an architecture that appears completely foreign to the architecture of vertebrates or humans.”
While the statement has implications for the treatment of animals and, more importantly, the prevention of animal suffering, Sebo noted that the focus must go beyond pain. It’s not enough for people to prevent animals in captivity from experiencing body pain and discomfort, he said.
“We also have to offer them the kinds of enrichment and opportunities that allow them to express their instincts, explore their environments, engage in social systems, and be the kinds of complex agents that they are.”
But the consequences of assigning the “conscious” label to a wider range of animals—especially animals whose interests we are not accustomed to considering—are not simple. For example, our relationship with insects can be “inevitably a little adversarial,” said Godfrey-Smith.
Some pests eat crops, and mosquitoes can transmit diseases. “The idea that we could just make peace with mosquitoes is very different from the idea that we could make peace with fish and octopus,” he said.
Likewise, little attention is paid to the well-being of insects such as Drosophila, which are widely used in biological research. “We think about the well-being of cattle and mice in research, but we never think about the well-being of insects,” said Matilda Gibbons, who researches the neural basis of consciousness at the University of Pennsylvania and signed the statement.
While scientific bodies have created some standards for the treatment of laboratory mice, it is unclear whether today’s declaration will lead to new standards for the treatment of insects. But new scientific discoveries sometimes generate new policies.
A Great Britainfor example, enacted legislation to increase protections for octopuses, crabs and lobsters after a report from the London School of Economics indicated that these animals can experience pain, distress or harm.
Although the statement makes no mention of artificial intelligence, the question of possible AI consciousness has been on the minds of animal consciousness researchers.
“It is very unlikely that current AI systems are conscious,” Sebo said. However, what he learned about the minds of animals “makes me stop and want to approach the subject with caution and humility.”
Andrews hopes the statement will spur more research into animals that have often been ignored, a move that has the potential to further expand our awareness of the scope of consciousness in the animal world.
“All these nematode worms and fruit flies that are in almost every university — study the consciousness in them,” she said. “You already have them. Someone in your lab will need a project. Make this project a conscience project. Imagine that!”
Original story republished with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. Read original content at Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare.
This content was translated with the help of Artificial Intelligence tools and reviewed by our editorial team. Find out more in our AI Policy.
