First Impressions of The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

(by Jonny)

In a recently fascinating move, various researchers at a meeting at Cambridge University, including cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists, signed a declaration voicing their support for the notion that homologous circuits and activity within non-human animal brains demonstrates consciousness. Any such exciting claim requires careful reading. Their declaration is summarazied thus:

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that  non-human  animals have the neuroanatomical,  neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

The problem with the declaration is that it is far too quick to throw around important words, like “affective states”, “emotions” and more importantly “consciousness” without carefully defining them. This isn’t pedantry, it is a necessity given the ambiguity of key concepts within the debate.

This photograph proves cats are much more like humans than first thought.

The idea of looking at neural correlates for demonstrating consciousness is interesting in itself, and I do think it has some value. The logic seems founded on the idea of looking at the neural activity when humans are performing or undergoing x (presumably taking x to involve some unquestionably “affective” or “emotional” state), then discovering some parallel activity in animal. But without much hint of their reasoning (and yes I understand this is just a declaration but this seems to me to be the keystone), the declaration takes this parallel activity to be obviously a sign of consciousness. In short, we need a good clear definition of consciousness before we start talking about it in important contexts. I’m not saying the signees are wrong in their conclusions, but that they are overly ambitious for a two page declaration, or out of touch with the necessities of the debate.

As an aside, here are my two favourite comments from the article about this on io9:

“ if science says this is correct, it is. end of story.”

And,

“Animals don't have souls or a conscience, they were put here on the Earth to serve man. This is the truth from the Lord our God himself as written in his Holy Bible.”

It’s nice to a see a variety of constructive opinion keeping the debate alive!