Waking From The Nightmare

Friday, 6 December 2024, 12:55 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

The mystery of consciousness is as old as there have been people conscious that they were conscious. However most people, including philosophers and scientists, don’t know what they mean by consciousness. That confusion is compounded when speculating on whether animals other than humans are conscious. And now we have the question of AI sentience.

The term consciousness ranges from humans as the only a sentient creature, to including higher mammals such as elephants and orcas as conscious beings, to maintaining that consciousness pervades all life and the universe as a whole.

What is the difference between consciousness and sentience? Buddhists ascribe sentience to all animals, and say even lower forms of life are sentient.

Scientifically and philosophically however, sentience refers to being conscious that one is a conscious being. Anthropologically, it means self-awareness — awareness of the self as a distinct entity (as distinguished from self-knowing, which refers to the moment-to-moment awareness of what one is actually thinking, feeling and doing).

Given this definition – awareness of a self -- it’s almost certain that humans are the only sentient animals on this planet. That doesn’t mean that other animals don’t have consciousness, just that they don’t have personal identity.

Clearly, to have awareness of a self a creature has to have constructed a self, and possess an image of oneself as a distinct individual.

The mirror test is perhaps the best indicator of self-awareness in this rudimentary sense. The experiment involves placing a mirror before a captive chimpanzee or other animal in such a way that it becomes accustomed to its reflection. After some days, the experimenter then paints a large red dot on the forehead of the chimp while it’s asleep (a process requiring a mild anesthesia).

Advertisement - scroll to continue reading

When the chimp awakens and sees its reflection in the mirror, it will pause, touch and study the dot, thus indicating it has, at minimum, a before-image of itself stored in memory that does not conform to the image now being reflected in the mirror.

Not all primates have this basic level of self-awareness, but neither do human babies. At some early point in our development however, we form an image of ourselves. Unlike chimps, that image becomes more and more complex, entrenched and detrimental to our development as human beings. We assume it has independent reality, and call it ‘me,’ the self.

We thus get stuck in images of ourselves and others, which prevents direct perception and insight, which are always of the moment. These entrenched images eventually stultify the brain, but most people think of “personal identity” as the highest value and the thing they most fear losing at death.

Would we say that the chimp, because it has rudimentary awareness of itself, has an inner life? Of course not. An inner life pertains to the capacity to be self-critically aware and ask questions about existence, consciousness and transcendence throughout one’s life. All humans have this capacity, though few develop it.

So it’s incredibly silly to say, “Before my kitties arrived in my home, I rarely had occasion to consider the inner lives of nonhumans. Does my cat even understand that she is — does she, in the way René Descartes conceived it, possess knowledge of a self?”

No, our cats and dogs do not “possess knowledge of a self,” because they neither are possessed by a self nor do they possess knowledge about the self. That isn’t to say animals are “automata,” as Descartes conceived them, “essentially mindless machines.”

In short, even the smartest animals, such as orcas, almost certainly lack the dubious subjective experience of a conscious, separate self. But that doesn’t make them devoid of consciousness.

On the other hand, it’s the height of anthropomorphizing, and reductio ad absurdum, to maintain there is “reason to suspect animals possess consciousness because we are animals and we possess consciousness.”

Cats, dogs and many other animals have limbic systems much like ours, but that certainly doesn’t mean that they feel and suffer as we humans do, much less “feel what it’s like to see the sunset or smell the rain on a spring morning.”

The philosophical and scientific intention in recent decades is to erase the huge difference between humans and other animals, in a misguided attempt to end the illusion of human separation from nature. Doing so has taken us further from self-understanding, and done nothing to diminish the “great moral catastrophe of food production facilities all over the world routinely treating nonhuman animals as Descartes saw them, as machines without feeling.”

Rather than speculate about the inner lives of cats or dogs, and worry about the ethical treatment of robots, we urgently need to tend to our own inner lives.

No matter what some neuroscientists say, consciousness is not synonymous with personal identity. Consciousness as we know it is a dream based on separation, symbol and memory, which has become a waking nightmare in the present world. Awakening is difficult, requiring diligent awareness and questioning, which is why the vast majority of people still adapt to their culture, however sick it is.

In a state of heightened awareness, there is a spontaneous quieting of thought and silence of mind. The state of being fully awake produces the same feeling about “normal’ consciousness that waking up from a dream produces about sleeping consciousness.

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin@gmail

© Scoop Media

Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail