Hedge(hog)ing Your Bets: Animal Consciousness, Ethics and the Wager Argument

I want to begin fleshing out an argument I've been mulling over. It’s far from a comprehensive thesis. Rather, I want to use this blog to sketch out some preliminary ideas. The argument takes off from the notion that whether or not animals are conscious informs the importance of human-animal interaction and dictates the course of animal ethics.

A hedgehog struggling to remain conscious... 

I want to explore the idea that treating animals as if they are conscious carries moral weight from the perspective of a cost-benefit analysis. The “wager argument” starts with the premise that we have a choice to treat animals either as if they are conscious or as if they are not. I will assume for now that consciousness includes the capacity to feel physical and emotional sensations, such as pain and pleasure, from a familiar first-person perspective (I’m strategically evading the problem of defining consciousness for now but I’m fully aware of its spectre- see below).

Animal's wagering. Not what I'm talking about.

The argument looks something like this: you are better off treating animals as if they are conscious beings, because if they are indeed conscious beings you have done good, but if they are not conscious beings then you have lost nothing. Alternatively, if you treat animals as if they are not conscious, and they are, you have caused harm. It is better to hedge your bet and assume animals are conscious.

To paraphrase Pascal, the argument says “if you gain you gain much, if you lose you lose little”. With Pascal’s wager your gain is something like eternal life, and the loss is avoidable annihilation. Some might include in the avoidance or progression to hell (though Pascal himself never mentions hell). For us, the gain is a better world, or the avoidance of a worse one.

Pascal.  I'll wager he Blaised his way through academia... (sorry).

Here's the argument in boring step-by-step premises:

P1 An animal is a being that is conscious or is not conscious.
P2 We may treat an animal as if they are conscious or as if they are not conscious.
P3 Treating a conscious being as if it is conscious or as if it is not conscious bares morally significant differences.
P4 Treating an animal as if it is not conscious and it is conscious will (practically) bare morally significant harm.
P5 Treating an animal as if is not conscious and it is not conscious will bare no morally significance difference.
P6 Treating an animal as if it conscious and it is not conscious will bare no or negligible morally significant difference.
P7 Treating an animal as if it conscious and it is conscious will (practically) bare morally significant good- or at the very least will bare no moral significance.
P8 We ought to behave in a way that promotes morally significant good, or at least avoids morally significant harm.
C We ought to treat animals as if they are conscious.

Note that by “practically” I mean that it does not necessarily follow as a logical result, but follows as a real-world likelihood.

The argument assumes that whether we think an animal is conscious or not makes a big difference to the way we ought to treat them. It also assumes that treating them as not conscious will lead to harm. How we flesh out "harm" is going to depend on our moral framework, and I think this argument most obviously fits into a consequentialist paradigm.

Regardless I think the idea pretty intuitive. If you believe your dog has the capacity for physical and emotional sensation, you are likely to treat her differently than if you think her experience of the world is much the same as a banana. Within medical testing, we may afford those animals we believe to be reasonably attributed consciousness with greater caution regarding harmful experiments. We may altogether exclude conscious beings from butchery, or at least any practice that might be painful. More radically, we may believe that any being we regard as conscious should be afforded the same sort of moral attention as humans. What matters is a “significant difference”- and this needs examined.

The premises obviously need to be elaborated upon, and I already have my own serious criticisms. Two in particular stand out: the problem of treating consciousness as simple and binary; and the assumption in premise 6 that treating animals as if they are conscious, when in fact they are not, will not result in morally significant harm (e.g. think of potential medical breakthroughs via “painful” animal experimentation or the health benefits of a diet that includes animal protein). I do believe the wager argument has strength to fight back against such criticisms but I don’t think it will come away unscathed. In the near future I’ll look at the argument in a little more detail and start examining these criticisms.   

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!

The Invisible Self

(by Joe)

"What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don't form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges - at certain times and places - that being which says "I." Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief of the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are."

My copy of the book looks like this.

There is a muddy area where my philosophical research and my political beliefs meet, and the above quote, from The Coming Insurrection (Invisible Committee, 2009: 31-2), sums it up nicely. The Coming Insurrection was written in 2007 by an anonymous collective (calling themselves 'The Invisible Committee') based in France, and it is clearly strongly influenced by the philosophy of that country, most notably the situationist movement of the 1960's, but also continental philosophy more broadly. It is pompous, vague and quite rightly criticised by many in the left-libertarian circles that I inhabit - Django over at Libcom described it as "a huge amount of hyperbole and literary flourish around some wafer-thin central propositions". Nonetheless, the approach towards the self expressed in the above extract appeals to me. 

Put very crudely, I think that the self is an illusion or an abstraction, a "narrative center of gravity" that helps guide our lives and our interactions with others (Dennett, 1992). The mechanisms behind this formation of the self have evolved for a reason, and for pragmatic reasons we shouldn't strive to eliminate it entirely, but to focus on it too much is unhealthy and unhelpful. Such a focus has, since the enlightenment, led to a heightened sense of individualism throughout the western world, one which I think is at the heart of our capitalist, consumerist and ultimately selfish culture. We can overcome this individualism by studying what the self truly is, and perhaps eventually realising that it doesn't truly exist. 

There is an obvious link with Buddhist philosophy here, one which I am currently trying to learn more about. There is also a somewhat less obvious link with embodied cognition, and in particular the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). If the self is an illusion constructed by our mind, and that mind is embedded in, or even extended into, its environment, then the self can be thought of as a product of that environment. This could have quite serious consequences, not only for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, but also for ethics and political philosophy.

Which brings us back to The Coming Insurrection. In the passage I quoted, they describe the sense of "inconsistency" that we feel when we realise that whilst the self is composed of our interactions with things in the world, those things "obviously are not me". The self is invisible, and however hard we try to look for it we can never find it. David Hume expressed a similar feeling when he wrote that "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception"(A Treatise of Human Nature: Book 1, Part 4, Section 6). We are what we do, and what we do is interact with the world. The focus on the individual over the last few hundred years has clouded that fact, and created an entity, the solid, 'real' self, that does not in fact exist. In coming to understand that who we are is so heavily dependent upon who others are, I hope we might eventually be able to learn to behave more compassionately and co-operatively with other people, as well as with our non-human environment. Satish Kumar embodies this hope in the phrase "You are, therefore I am" (Kumar, 2002), a play on Descarte's "I think, therefore I am", itself a perfect slogan for enlightenment individuality.

There is also an element of the absurd that is recognised, I think, by both Hume and the Invisible Committee. We are confronted with on the one hand an unshakable conviction in the existence of the self, and on the other with convincing evidence that no such thing exists. Similar absurdity can be found in our struggles with free will, moral realism and even scepticism about the external world. In each case a pragmatic route must be found, one that allows us to go on, but at the same time acknowledges the truths that we have learned about the world. In the case of the self, I think that this means accepting that we are a lot closer to the world around us than our privileged, first person view-point makes it seem, and that in order to survive in such a world we must understand and respect our place in it.

There's a lot more I'd like to say about a lot of things here, but I'll save it for future posts. Otherwise we might get complaints about the lack of monkeys!

Here you go.

Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. 1998. "The Extended Mind." Analysis 58: 7-19.

Hume, D. 1739.  A Treatise of Human Nature. Book 1, Part 4, Section 6: Of Personal Identity.

Dennett, D. 1992. "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity."

Invisible Committee, The. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles, LA: Semiotext(e). 

Kumar, S. 2002. You Are Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence. Totnes, UK: Green Books.