Behavioural and Neural Evidence for Conscious Sensation in Animals An Inescapable Avenue towards Biopsychism?

Abstract

Evidence for all sorts of cognition in animals is mounting. But is this accompanied by conscious sensation or phenomenology? To answer that question, it is noted that consciousness to us presents itself as a contrast: we are asleep or awake, we either see something or we don’t, each state or condition accompanied by distinct neural correlates. The contrast implicitly holds there is conscious sensation; you cannot lose what you didn’t have to begin with. So if there is similar behavioural and neural evidence for a conscious–unconscious contrast in any animal, there should be some sort of difference in the ‘what it is likes’ between the two extremes — for the animal in question. Findings from sleep, anaesthesia, blindsight, masking, and rivalry present unequivocal evidence for such a dichotomy in monkeys and — surprisingly — possibly insects. For other animals (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish) the situation is less clear, although mostly due to a lack of evidence rather than evidence to the contrary. Implications for theories of consciousness, and the role of neural versus behavioural findings, are discussed.