Animal consciousness

According to Martin Schonfield in “Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences” “In the old analytic climate, claims that animals are sentient raised methodological and ideological problems and seemed debatable at best.”(Schonfield p. 1) Claims that animals were self-aware or intelligent were regarded as unfounded. “The task of science in the past four centuries had been to demythologize the past.”(Schonfield p.1) Daniel C. Dennett in “Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why” states

There is also a disagreement with animals not having consciousness. “In dogs, cats, and other animals there is neither intelligence nor a spiritual soul in the usual sense, they eat without pleasure, they cry without pains they believe without knowing it and they desire nothing.” They say consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” that has no effect on behavioral and therefore cannot have an adaptive value. Further arguments revolve around the ability of animals to feel pain or suffering. Others have argued

Evidence of Absence? A paper on Animal Consciousness      Consciousness is a difficult term to grasp; so much so, that many scientists will not even attempt to define the term, much less search for it’s evidence. Most however, do agree that consciousness must include certain aspects; specifically cognition, self-awareness, memory, and abstract thought.      Lesley J. Rogers describes consciousness as, “related to awareness, intelligence

Do animals possess consciousness? Are animals programmed to be slaves to nature or do they possess consciousness: the ability to be aware of one’s surroundings? While we don’t know what animals think or say, we can speculate on their brain activity and behavior in nature. As Darwin has said, “We differ from our closest relatives in degree, not kind.” We may not be as different from the animal kingdom as we have thought. Alex, an African grey parrot, was subject to a scientific study for thirty

some more-so possess and express the opposite than others but everyone harbors them. As simplified above the female mind is the feminine mind; the animal mind. If we are to consider animal behavior, eating, sleeping, drinking, sex, raising children, and working (equivalence of foraging or hunting) would quickly be the words used to describe animal

Consciousness in Animals The conscious mind is a complex thing that has many questions that science is yet to answer. The conscious is composed by awareness and responsiveness in one’s mind, it is expressed by one’s emotions, thoughts, and actions. Consciousness to me is defined by the ability to be aware and responsive. Awareness is an element that distinguishes the conscious from the unconscious. To be aware is to be knowledgeable of your surroundings and to know what is happening in the world

Consciousness is the way beings have their own personal experiences in their minds. In other words, how they experience every day situations in their own personal view or perspective. Ned Block (1995) explains that “phenomenal consciousness is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something ‘it is like’ to be in that state.” Susan Blackmore (2012) said that consciousness was subjective; meaning consciousness is personal and cannot be shared with anyone else. Study

On page nine in the Blackmore article, it is stated that, “On the one hand, if consciousness is an extra added ingredient then we naturally want to ask why we have it. We want to ask what consciousness is for, what it does, and how we got it. On this view, it is easy to imagine that we might have evolved without it, and so we want to know why consciousness evolved, what advantages it gave us, and whether it evolved in other creatures too. On this view, the hard problem is indeed hard; and the task

the activity of all social, communicative animals, a rhetoric as potential energy that exists prior to not only speech but to the whole of communication. Twenty-five years later, writing in the same journal, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and affiliated with the same institution, Pennsylvania State University, Henry Johnstone identified rhetoric, as a philosophical activity, as one of the handful of activities that separate humankind from the rest of the animal kingdom. Kennedy expanded the particular activities

I think that consciousness is what makes us aware of our surroundings. It allows us to process all the surrounding stimulus to control the actions we take in response to that stimulus and makes up all our knowledge and understanding. Our minds contain all our inner thoughts and our processes to deduct logic and truth. In The Matrix, humans were put in a false reality, where they weren’t fully conscious of what was going on. When Neo first saw the real world, it took him some time to be fully conscious