Are there good arguments that animals are conscious?

 Let’s set aside any particular theories about the nature of consciousness. Are there any good generic arguments that might be offered for thinking that animals are conscious?

There are two obvious arguments to try to make. Independently, I think that they are rather weak. 

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1. The Argument from Behavior

Animals seem to act in ways that we do, when we are conscious. Animals can be respond to stimuli, be it visual, tactile, nociceptive, etc. In something like the way that we do. They learn to take in information about the environment and use it to pursue goals that are similar to ours. We typically think that conscious experiences cause our behavior. So it is natural to infer that conscious experiences cause their behavior as well.

On a simplistic way of reading this argument, we learn from ourselves that certain kinds of behavior are signs of conscious experiences. Retracting one’s limb in a certain forceful fashion is a sign of pain. When we observe that same behavior in others, we are inclined to make the inference that the other has the experience of which the behavior is a sign.

This way of reading the argument is not very compelling. It is extremely plausible that conscious behavior can be mimicked by nonconscious things. We could build a contraption to act as if it were conscious (at least to the degree that animals do) when in fact it wasn't. There is no a priori reason to think that just because a certain behavior is a sign of consciousness in us, it must be a sign of consciousness wherever it exists.

On a second way of reading the argument (or perhaps something of an elaboration on the first), there is an inference to the best explanation according to which the best explanation of the behavior is a certain conscious state. We know that conscious experiences produce certain behaviors. We don’t know what else might produce those behaviors. Therefore, the best explanation for the behavior is the conscious experience.

The problem is that consciousness isn't obviously any better of an explanation of a creatures behavior than nonconscious neural activity. If we don't know what kinds of activity are sufficient for consciousness, we don't have any good reason to think that there couldn't be neural activity that wasn't conscious but produced the same result. That hypothesis seems plausible, and provides just as good an explanation of the observed behavior.  The fact that a particular behavior is typically the result of a certain conscious experience in us is little reason to think that it must be in other animals as well. 

Suppose that an enterprising inventor came up with an artificial “fish” that could mimic the behavior of a normal fish perfectly, but that its brain would be nothing like that of a normal fish. Are we inclined to be equally confident that it has conscious experiences as that fish do?

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2. The Argument from Physiology

Animals act something like us. But they also have brains that are something like ours. The reason why I feel more inclined to attribute consciousness to a real fish than to an artificial fish capable of passing the Tiny Turing Test is that real fish have neuron-filled brains. So perhaps we could argue that animals, by virtue of having brains that are like ours, are likely to be conscious if we are.

The problem is that our brains are not all that much like those of other animals, as critics of animal consciousness have vociferously maintained. Our brains are like those of other apes, sure. But even still, there are significant changes that have happened in the hominid neocortex over the past few million years. Based on actual similarities, the physiological argument is going to have to boil down to the fact that animals have neurons like ours that are engaged in something like the same vague gross structures or functional roles as ours. But when you get down to the details, our brains are rather different from those of other animals. Our neocortex, where consciousness probably resides, plays a significantly different role in human cognition than it does in other animals.

Most people are not as inclined to attribute consciousness to their cerebellum as they are to other animals. But our cortex probably shares nearly as much in common, physiologically, with our cerebellum as it does with the forebrains of some of the more distant animals we would be fairly inclined to call conscious (such as octopi).

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So I don’t think that either argument works very well. Do they work better together? Perhaps it helps the inference to the best explanation if animals have brains that are somewhat like ours. But if they are not much like ours, it can’t be much of a help.

Perhaps there is another better argument out there. I think it is reasonable to think that it is something bordering on an analytic truth that animals are conscious – perhaps part of what we mean by consciousness ought to take into account that animals should count. But apart from this, and apart from opting for some particular theory of consciousness, I suspect that we just don’t know. This goes against most of what I have long thought. I used to think it was just obvious that animals, even fish and lizards and birds and octopi, were conscious. Now, (though I side with Papineau in thinking that the whole concept is vague or ambiguous), I see the issue as much less straightforward. 

In any case. I don't think that there are many great theory-independent arguments for consciousness in animals. If you’ve got no commitments to a particular theory of consciousness, you’ve got very little reason for thinking that animals are or are not conscious. This is doubly true for dualists, who, although they possess a theory, don't have much evidence to go on when it comes to the physical grounds of consciousness.