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Consciousness: Questions
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Self-consciousness refers to an organism's capacity for second-order representation of the organism's own mental states. Because of its second-order character (“thought about thought”) the capacity for self consciousness is closely related to questions about “theory of mind” in nonhuman animals — whether any animals are capable of attributing mental states to others. Questions about self-consciousness and theory of mind in animals are a matter of active scientific controversy, with the most attention focused on chimpanzees and to a more limited extent on the other great apes. As attested by this controversy (and unlike questions about animal sentience) questions about self-consciousness in animals are commonly regarded as tractable by empirical means.
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The scientific or systematic study of the phenomena of consciousness is modern. Particular mental operations... attracted the attention of acute thinkers from ancient times. Some of the phenomena connected with volition, such as motive, intention, choice, and the like, owing to their ethical importance, were elaborately investigated and described by early Christian moralists; whilst some of our cognitive operations were a subject of interest to the earliest Greek philosophers in their speculations on the problem of human knowledge. The common character, however, of all branches of philosophy in the ancient world, was objective, an inquiry into the nature of being and becoming in general, and of certain forms of being in particular. Even when epistemological questions, investigations into the nature of knowing, were undertaken, as e.g. by the School of Democritus, there seems to have been very little effort made to test the theories by careful comparison with the actual experience of our consciousness. Accordingly, crude hypotheses received a considerable amount of support.
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The fact remains that for most philosophers of mind, the topic of animal consciousness is of peripheral interest to their main project of understanding the ontology of consciousness. Because of their focus on ontological rather than epistemological issues, there is often quite a disconnect between philosophers and scientists on these issues. But there are encouraging signs that interdisciplinary work between philosophers and behavioral scientists is beginning to lay the groundwork for addressing some questions about animal consciousness in a philosophically sophisticated yet empirically tractable way.
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There are now various approaches to understand where and how in the brain consciousness arises from neural activity, none of which is universally accepted. Difficulties among these approaches are reviewed, and a missing ingredient is proposed here to help adjudicate between them, that of “perspectivalness.” In addition to a suitable temporal duration and information content of the relevant bound brain activity, this extra component is posited as being a further important ingredient for the creation of consciousness from neural activity. It guides the development of what is termed the “Central Representation,” which is supposed to be present in all mammals and extended in humans to support self-consciousness as well as phenomenal consciousness. Experimental evidence and a theoretical framework for the existence of the central representation are presented, which relates the extra component to specific buffer working memory sites in the inferior parietal lobes, acting as attentional coordinators on the spatial maps making up the central representation. The article closes with a discussion of various open questions.
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One question is to what extent other primates, whales and dolphins, or grey parrots have consciousness. These issues are of great interest and controversy not only to scientists, but ... to animal rights lawyers.
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