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Consciousness: Animal Consciousness
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Philosophers have been describing phenomenal consciousness for centuries. René Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy in the seventeenth century, containing extensive descriptions of what it is to be conscious. Descartes described conscious experience as ideas such as imaginings and perceptions laid out in space and time that are viewed from a point. Like Aristotle he defines ideas as extended things: "Now among these figures, it is not those imprinted on the external sense organs, or on the internal surface of the brain, which should be taken to be ideas - but only those which are traced in the spirits on the surface of gland H (where the seat of the imagination and the 'common sense' is located). That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses"(Treatise on Man). "Gland H" is the pineal gland and animal "spirits" are an early analogy for electrical activity.
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Perhaps more sophisticated attempts to spell out the functions of consciousness are similarly doomed. But Allen & Bekoff (1997, ch. 8) suggest that progress might be made by investigating the capacities of animals to adjust to their own perceptual errors. Not all adjustments to error provide grounds for suspecting that consciousness is involved, but in cases where an organism can adjust to a perceptual error while retaining the capacity to exploit the content of the erroneous perception, then there may be a robust sense in which the animal internally distinguishes its own appearance states from other judgments about the world. (Humans, for instance, have conscious visual experiences that they know are misleading — i.e., visual illusions — yet they can exploit the erroneous content of these experiences for various purposes, such as deceiving others or answering questions about how things appear to them.) Given that there are theoretical grounds for identifying conscious experiences with “appearance states”, attempts to discover whether animals have such capacities might be a good place to start looking for animal consciousness. It is important... to emphasize that such capacities are not themselves intended to be definitive or in any way criterial for consciousness.
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Bugiman, rats don’t have access to the higher levels of human consciousness. So while experimental reactions done on rats may align with humans at the lower end of the scale, they won’t align with people on the higher end. Rats don’t set goals and make plans to achieve them in the way that humans do. In order for a scientist to even treat animals in the disrespectful manner you described, s/he would have to be well below the level of love. These experiments reflect more on the level of consciousness of the scientists than they do on the rats.
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Because of the fact that humans can express themselves by language, unlike all other animals, it is tempting to equate language abilities and consciousness. There are ... speechless humans (infants, Kaspar Hauser, accident victims), to who consciousness is attributed despite language lost or not yet acquired. Also consciousness does not change by the acquisition of a new language. Consciousness is therefore one of the conditions for the language acquisition; missing language ability is however no reference to missing consciousness.
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If compensating for small sets of neurons is not a plausible function for consciousness, what might be? The commonsensical answer would be that consciousness “tells” the organism about events in the environment, or, in the case of pain and other proprioceptive sensations, about the state of the body. But this answer begs the question against opponents of attributing conscious states to animals for it fails to respect the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and mere awareness (in the uncontroversial sense of detection) of environmental or bodily events. Opponents of attributing the phenomenal consciousness to animals are not committed to denying the more general kind of consciousness of various external and bodily events, so there is no logical entailment from awareness of things in the environment or the body to animal sentience.
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The pragmatic advantage of this approach is that it transforms consciousness into an empirical problem that is approachable experimentally. Instead of asking ‘What is consciousness?’, one asks ‘What parts of the brain are active, or in what special way are they active, when someone does something consciously?’ One experimental approach that is proving fruitful is to monitor the activity of different parts of the cerebral cortex (with microelectrodes in animals, or with imaging techniques in human beings) while the retinal image is unchanging but the content of consciousness changes. For instance, how does activity in the brain change as a person or animal shifts attention from one thing to another? What happens when they view ambiguous visual images that can appear, at one moment, to be one thing, but, at another instant, to be something else?
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Animal Consciousness