Are humans the only living things on this planet with what we call consciousness? That would be pretty lonely. It’s a question that religions, philosophers, and lowly Roger Williams students have pondered for as long as they have been on Earth. It was the great Aristotle who proposed that humans have “rational souls” and animals only display behaviors that they “need to survive”. I call bullshit; humans generally behave in a way that increases survival too, but it doesn’t mean that we aren’t aware of what we’re doing. I agree that consciousness is a tool that helps humans survive, but I also think that other animals have some degree of consciousness.
*Full disclosure, I am feeling a little philosophical, and quite honestly not in the mood to do research. This post is almost entirely opinion – I’ll be writing a mostly theoretical discussion post rather than researching the depths of our consciousness…though I hope to broach that aspect at a later date.*
The real question I am pondering today is, why do humans assume that animals do not have consciousness? As I mentioned in the introduction, it has long been thought that animals do not have consciousness and simply act on survival instinct. New research is beginning to show that many of these preconceived notions may be skewed, or false altogether.
I believe the notion that humans are so much more complex than our animal counterparts is extremely exaggerated. I believe that we may be quite simple actually. In my opinion, most, if not all, human behaviors can be traced back to our primary goal – survive long enough to reproduce and raise our offspring. One of the core arguments of my premise is that humans are not inherently social beings – we became social because group acceptance is important to survival, positive social interactions led to favoritism amongst the leaders translating to more food and an improved position on the social hierarchy, higher social ranking made you a more attractive mate for partners, which increased your chances to reproduce. Other animals simply have different means of achieving the same goal as us: survival and reproduction. They don’t need the same type of shelter as us, social interaction is less (or more) important to some species, and the need for food differs depending on the animal, but each species has developed to what they are today with the sole purpose of increasing their chances at reproduction.
I believe (with little to no factual evidence) that there are two primary reasons that humans want to believe we are the only ones with consciousness. The first of which is to justify otherwise unethical behaviors. For the first reason, let’s use a cow as an example. To put it simply – we need to think that cows are just stupid simple creatures so we don’t feel bad about eating a hamburger. If we begin to think of cows as complex animals with social networks, who want to graze in the fields their whole lives, and have families – keeping them in a small pen for their whole lives to live in their own shit, separating them from their calves immediately at birth, stealing the milk that was intended to nourish that calf, and then putting a metal bolt between their eyes starts to feel a little gross. And that hamburger doesn’t taste quite as good anymore. I had friends as a kid who owned a dairy farm, and I still considered their treatment of these animals rather respectful – but there was one experience that I will never forget. Some quick background info for this story, my mother is a midwife and wanted me to witness the miracle of life. One night we get a call from our farmer friends and they tell us that a cow is about to give birth and we were welcome to come watch if we wanted. This cow was enormous (as you can imagine, it had another cow inside her) and was beginning to push the mucus-covered calf out just as we arrived. This animal gave everything she had to pushing her child out. Eventually (with a little help from our farmer friends) the calf came out, staggering around the pen still covered in parts of the placenta. Seemingly before the afterbirth came out and the mother could recover (to me and my mother’s horror), they separated the cow from her child. When I tell you this cow was screaming for her baby boy back, I mean it. After gestating her offspring for months, it was taken from her before she could even stand up again. You could literally hear the pain, despair, and sorrow in her cry, this was no stupid creature – it was a mother who knew exactly what had just happened. Okokokok I know that may have felt super off-topic and killed the mood, sorry about that. But here’s my point, if we don’t think of these animals as having any sort of consciousness, this whole process seems much more acceptable.
To expand upon this premise, it’s not just on the individual scale. In terms of pollution, deforestation, and climate change – we need to feel that it’s okay to destroy these animals’ habitats, and the only way to do that is by thinking of them as dumb bags of meat who don’t even know that they’re alive.
The second reason humans feel obligated to believe that we are the only animals with consciousness is to increase our own self-worth. For some reason, it is extremely important to humans to feel that we are the only species that is mentally aware, or conscious. I believe that much of this is not intentionally done to discredit how amazing other animals are, but instead to prop up how impressive the human experience is. This experience is so impressive, wild, and feels so human, that we have a difficult time admitting that our sense of being and self may be shared by other species. To go back to the first point I made, if we recognize that we are enduring a shared sense of being with other animals – we must reconcile with what we have done to them. We have farmed animals for their meat and byproducts, destroyed their habitats, and worn their pelts – each of which feels disgusting once you consider that each of them may have been fully aware of their existence. As humans, we feel the need to be better than everything else in the animal kingdom. To show that we are the conquerors. To prove this point, we enslave animals in zoos, we travel to the far reaches of our Earth to kill exotic animals and then hang them from our walls, and we feel the need to keep wild animals as pets and try to domesticate them (see: Tiger King). The primal part of our brain sees these animals as threats, and wants to show that they can conquer these wild beasts. Maybe it makes someone feel primal, or like more of a man to have a lion pelt rug. In order to prove that people are superior to animals, people will spend tens of thousands of dollars to travel to Africa and go hunting. These people will shoot a rhino from a half-mile away with a .450 – and in their minds it put them atop these animals in order of importance. Big game hunting is not done to celebrate the animal, but to humiliate it and diminish its order in the food chain. Once you think that the animal will not be reuniting with its offspring later that day, which will fuck up the young’s development and put them at risk of premature death by other animals – this type of hunting becomes a lot less fun.
If this post made you sad – me too. Although it’s difficult to talk about, it’s worth wondering why we assume that other animals are not conscious when they act in pursuit of the very same goals that humans do. Yes, consciousness is a tool that humans use to improve our chances of survival. But we should not assume that consciousness is simply limited to humans.
P.S. – Hey Professor Cutting, sorry if this blog wasn’t exactly what you were hoping for. I really use these posts as a creative outlet, which I really needed this morning. I can augment this post or write a new one that is more closely related to the topic you hoped I would research if you would like. Have a good one, hope you enjoyed.
Sources –
Blackmore, S. (2024, February 20). Are humans the only conscious animal? Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-humans-the-only-conscious-animal/
Post was edited by ChatGPT3.5