21 Facts About Animal consciousness

In humans, Animal consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known.

Animal consciousness said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself.

Animal consciousness has been actively researched for over one hundred years.

Thomas Henry Huxley defends in an essay titled On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History an epiphenomenalist theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a causally inert effect of neural activity—"as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery".

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About forty meanings attributed to the term Animal consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences.

Animal consciousness is a biological process that will eventually be explained in terms of molecular signaling pathways used by interacting populations of nerve cells.

However, this view has been criticized because Animal consciousness has yet to be shown to be a process, and the so-called "hard problem" of relating Animal consciousness directly to brain activity remains elusive.

Phenomenal Animal consciousness has many different experienced qualities, often referred to as qualia.

Phenomenal Animal consciousness is usually Animal consciousness of something or about something, a property known as intentionality in philosophy of mind.

LeDoux argues the only differences between an emotional and non-emotion state of Animal consciousness are the underlying neural ingredients that contribute to the state.

Neural correlates of Animal consciousness constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept.

Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolution Animal consciousness emerged and about whether or not Animal consciousness has survival value.

In contrast, others have argued that the recursive circuitry underwriting Animal consciousness is much more primitive, having evolved initially in pre-mammalian species because it improves the capacity for interaction with both social and natural environments by providing an energy-saving "neutral" gear in an otherwise energy-expensive motor output machine.

Daniel Povinelli suggests that large, tree-climbing apes evolved Animal consciousness to take into account one's own mass when moving safely among tree branches.

Concept of Animal consciousness can refer to voluntary action, awareness, or wakefulness.

Primary Animal consciousness can be defined as simple awareness that includes perception and emotion.

Still, these scientists concede that higher order Animal consciousness does involve the cortex and complex communication between different areas of the brain.

Secondary consciousness is seen in animals with semantic capabilities, such as the four great apes.

Animal consciousness's added that many types of birds have very sophisticated language systems.

Advocates of the idea of a secondary Animal consciousness, self-recognition serves as a critical component and a key defining measure.