Bekoff and Dawkins on animal consciousness

Here is another post that I originally made on a discussion thread in the Facebook group Reducing wild-animal suffering. It's in reply to two articles: (1) "Dawkins' Dangerous Idea: We Really Don't Know If Animals Are Conscious" by Marc Bekoff, and (2) "Convincing the Unconvinced That Animal Welfare Matters" by Marian Stamp Dawkins.

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Thanks for sharing the pieces by Bekoff and Dawkins. I admire both of those authors, and I can definitely see where both sides are coming from.

I think the most important distinction that needs to be made is between “certainty” in science and “certainty” in ethics. Dawkins is right that science should remain skeptical of animal consciousness and that we should seek out proof independent of existing assumptions. Scientists don't like to stamp a statement as "true" until they're really sure about it from lots of angles.

But while Dawkins is correct that we don't know "for certain" whether animals are conscious, this statement is misleading to many laypeople who assume that she must mean the odds are around 50%. I don't know what she thinks the odds actually are, but I would give above a 90% chance of chicken consciousness and above, say, 93% for pig consciousness. With odds like that, it's best to say that the case is proved or else the public will misunderstand. Many people are not motivated by less than absolute certainty, and I think Bekoff is right that emphasizing scientific doubt is going to hurt animals on average. (Just look at what talking about uncertainty does for the global-warming debate.)

Now, Dawkins is totally correct that we don't understand exactly why animals are conscious. Indeed, we don't even know why people are conscious. What exactly does being conscious allow you to do that you can't do if you're not conscious? As blindsight shows, you can walk and avoid objects without being conscious of them. And as Libet's famous free-will studies showed, you can decide to move your hand half a second before you become conscious of your choice. If we ourselves didn't experience our consciousness through our own minds, then we would definitely have scientific doubts about whether people are conscious, too.

There are lots of excellent studies demonstrating sophisticated, self-reflective behavior in animals that Bekoff and others take to imply consciousness, and indeed these are excellent pieces of evidence. However, they are not conclusive proof of consciousness because we can't even prove that humans are conscious using such tests at the present time. (In the future, once we really understand how consciousness works in the brain, we should be able to assess consciousness just by looking at the brain itself. But that is a long way off.)

So I think arguably the strongest reason we should believe animals are conscious is that they're close to us on the evolutionary tree, and their brain structures are remarkably similar. In "New evidence of animal consciousness" (2004), Donald R. Griffin and Gayle B. Speck note that "the search for neural correlates of consciousness has not found any consciousness-producing structure or process that is limited to human brains" (p. 1). And in "Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being" (2012), Kent C. Berridge and Morten L. Kringelbach comment:

Progress has been facilitated by the recognition that hedonic brain mechanisms are largely shared between humans and other mammals, allowing application of conclusions from animal studies to a better understanding of human pleasures. […] 

Some might be surprised by high similarity across species, or by substantial subcortical contributions, at least if one thinks of pleasure as uniquely human and as emerging only at the top of the brain. The neural similarity indicates an early phylogenetic appearance of neural circuits for pleasure and a conservation of those circuits, including deep brain circuits, in the elaboration of later species, including humans.

There must be dozens of other papers that could be quoted in a similar fashion. Based on this, a probability for mammal and bird consciousness as low as 50% is completely unreasonable, IMHO.

Now, what about the effort that Dawkins proposes: Making people care about animals for human-welfare reasons? If we could press a button to do this, I'd be in favor of it. But when we're parceling out our scarce resources for helping animals, I think this undertaking should go pretty low on the priority list. It's great if we can help animals in the short term in this way, but if we're going to prevent future humans from multiplying wild-animal suffering into the galaxy or simulating vast numbers of suffering sub-human minds to make a profit, we had better make sure our descendants actually care about animals. The situations that cause harm to animals in the future may well benefit humans at that point -- we have no idea.

Finally, I did like this statement from Dawkins, as quoted in Bekoff's article: " ... it is much, much better for animals if we remain skeptical and agnostic [about consciousness] ... Militantly agnostic if necessary, because this keeps alive the possibility that a large number of species have some sort of conscious experiences ... For all we know, many animals, not just the clever ones and not just the overtly emotional ones, also have conscious experiences." (p. 177) This is how I feel about insects. They easily may not be conscious (I'd give a ~55% probability that they are not), but we should actively consider the implications if they are conscious because of their great numbers. It's totally appropriate to talk about probabilities and expected values in the right context, but my complaint to Dawkins is that among the general public, the language of uncertainty makes people confused and less motivated.

Normal Beliefs: An Insanity Defense?

I am a primate running patchwork cognitive algorithms on relatively fragile wetware. We know that brain devices fail at relatively high rates. 19% of the US population has a mental illness of some sort, with a small fraction of these cases involving serious insanity or delusion. In addition, some people simply lack certain normal abilities, such as the 7% of males who are colorblind.

I and many of my associates have extraordinarily strange beliefs. Many of these are weird facts -- e.g., that an exact copy of me exists within a radius of 10^(10^29) meters. But others are logical conclusions (e.g., that libertarian free will is incoherent) and methodological notions (e.g., that Occam's razor makes the parallelism solution to the mind-body problem astronomically improbable). These latter kinds of beliefs theoretically involve certainty or near certainty.

But given my understanding of the frailty of human beliefs in general -- to say nothing of the tempting possibility that correct knowledge is out of the question, or that all of these statements are entirely meaningless -- should I assign nonzero probability to the possibility that I'm wrong about these conceptual matters?

One answer is to say "no": We all start with assumptions, and I'm making the assumptions that I'm making. This is my attitude toward things like Bayes' theorem and Occam's razor. In the same way that my impulse to prevent suffering is ultimately something that I want to do, "just because," so my faith in math and Bayesian epistemology is simply something the collection of atoms in my brain has chosen to have, and that's that. (I wonder: Is there any sense in which it would be possible to assign probability less than 1 to the Bayesian framework itself? Prima facie, this would be simply incoherent.)

But what about other, less foundational conclusions, like the incoherence of libertarian free will? It's not obvious to me that the negation of this conclusion would contradict my epistemological framework, since my position on the issue may stem from lack of imagination (I can't conceive of anything other than determinism or random behavior) rather than clear logical contradiction. On this point itself I'm uncertain -- maybe libertarian free will is logically impossible. But I'm not smart enough to be sure. And even if I felt sure, I very well might be mistaken, or even -- as suggested in the first paragraph -- completely insane.

Can probability be used to capture uncertainties of this type? In practice, the answer is clearly yes. I've done enough math homework problems to know that my probability of making an algebra mistake is not only nonzero but fairly high. And it's not incoherent to reason about errors of this type. For instance, if I do a utility calculation involving a complex algebraic formula, I may be uncertain as to whether I've made a sign error, in which case the answer would be negated. It's perfectly reasonable for me to assign, say, 90% probability to having done the computation correctly and 10% to having made the sign error and then multiply these by their corresponding utility-values-if-correct-computation. There's no mystery here: I'm just assigning probabilities over the conceptually unproblematic hypotheses "Brian got the right answer" vs. "Brian made a sign error."

In practice, of course, it's rarely useful to apply this sort of reasoning, because the number of wrong math answers is, needless to say, infinite. (Still, it might be useful to study the distribution of correct and incorrect answers that occur in practice. This reminds me of the suggestion by a friend that mathematicians might study the rates at which conjectures of certain types turn out to be true, in order to better estimate probabilities of theorems they can't actually prove. Indeed, statistical techniques have been used within the domain of automated theorem proving.) When someone objects to a rationalist's conclusion about such and such on the grounds that "Your cognitive algorithm might be flawed," the rationalist can usually reply, "Well, maybe, sure. But what am I going to do about it? Which element of the huge space of alternatives am I going to pick instead?"

Perhaps one answer to that question could be "Beliefs that fellow humans, running their own cognitive algorithms, have arrived at." After all, those people are primates trying to make sense of their environment just like you are, and it doesn't seem inconceivable that not only are you wrong but they're actually right. This would seem to suggest some degree of philosophical majoritarianism. Obviously we need to weight different people's beliefs according to the probability that their cognitive algorithms are sound, but we should keep in mind the fact that those weights are themselves circular.

How concerned should we be that, say, people who believe in parallelism of mind and body are actually correct?