Neuroscience of animal consciousness: still agnostic after all.
Front Psychol October 9, 2024 Yoram Gutfreund 5 citations
Whether non-human animals possess conscious awareness is a long-debated philosophical question that cannot be settled by direct observation, only inference. This opinion paper critically examines two prominent studies—one claiming sensory consciousness in crows based on neural activity predicting perceptual decisions, and another claiming perceptual awareness in rhesus monkeys based on behavioral responses resembling human conscious and subliminal perception. The author argues that both studies conflate cognition (perception, decision-making, learning) with consciousness (subjective feeling). The crow study cannot distinguish neural correlates of perceptual decision from those of consciousness; the monkey study relies on human subjective reports, creating a circular argument. The author concludes that animal consciousness remains a matter of belief, not scientific validation, advocating an agnostic stance.