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  1. Meaning generation for animals, humans and artificial agents. An evolutionary perspective on the philosophy of information. (IS4SI 2017).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Meanings are present everywhere in our environment and within ourselves. But these meanings do not exist by themselves. They are associated to information and have to be created, to be generated by agents. The Meaning Generator System (MGS) has been developed on a system approach to model meaning generation in agents following an evolutionary perspective. The agents can be natural or artificial. The MGS generates meaningful information (a meaning) when it receives information that has a connection with an internal constraint (...)
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  2. Proposal for an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness linked to a human specific anxiety (Neurex 2018).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    This presentation is about an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness linked to a human specific anxiety. It is a continuation of other works (2011 Book chapter, 2014 TSC Poster). AIM: Present a scenario describing an evolutionary nature of self-consciousness that introduces a human specific anxiety which is active in our human lives. METHOD: The scenario starts with our pre-human ancestors which were capable to manage representations and to partly identify with their conspecifics (Olds 2006, DeWaal 2008). These identifications brought our ancestors (...)
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  3. Proposal for an evolutionary synergy linking anxiety management to self-consciousness (ESPP2021 Poster).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Representing oneself as an existing entity and having intense fear of the unknown are human specificities. Self-consciousness and anxiety states are characteristics of our human minds. We propose that these two characteristics share a common evolutionary history during which they acted in synergy for the build-up of our human minds. We present that perspective by using an evolutionary scenario for self-consciousness in which anxiety management plays a key role. Such evolutionary background can introduce new relations between philosophy of mind and (...)
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  4. Consciousness of oneself as object and as subject. Proposal for an evolutionary approach (TSC 2014).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    We humans experience ourselves as objects and as subjects. The distinction initiated by Kant between consciousness of oneself as object and consciousness of oneself as subject was a strict one. The rigidity of that distinction has been challenged by philosophers from the continental and the analytic traditions [1]. From another perspective, researches about animal self-awareness are widening the horizon of studies relative to the nature of self-consciousness [2]. These various perspectives introduce the interest about addressing consciousness of oneself as object (...)
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  5. Evolution as connecting first-person and third-person perspectives of consciousness (ASSC12 2008).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    First-person and third-person perspectives are different items of human consciousness. Feeling the taste of a fruit or being consciously part of a group eating fruits call for different perspectives of consciousness. The latter is about objective reality (third-person data). The former is about subjective experience (first-person data) and cannot be described entirely by objective reality. We propose to look at how these two perspectives could be rooted in an evolutionary origin of human consciousness, and somehow be connected. Our starting point (...)
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  6. Evolutionary advantages of inter-subjectivity and self-consciousness through improvements of action programs (TSC 2010).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Evolutionary advantages of consciousness and intersubjectivity are part of current philosophical debates on the nature of consciousness. Both are linked and intersubjectivity is sometimes considered as a form of consciousness [1]. Regarding the evolution of consciousness, studies tend to focus on phenomenal consciousness [2]. We would like here to bring the focus on self-consciousness and continue the build up of a corresponding evolutionary scenario. We also propose to introduce a possible evolutionary link between self-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Our starting point (...)
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  7. Information, Constraint and Meaning. From the pre-biotic world to a possible post human one. An evolutionary approach (IS4SI 2017).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    The presentation proposes to complement an existing development on meaning generation for animals, humans and artificial agents by looking at what could have existed at pre-biotic times and what could be a post-human meaning generation. The core of the approach is based on an existing model for meaning generation: the Meaning Generator System (MGS). The MGS is part of an agent submitted to an internal constraint. The MGS generates a meaning when it receives an information that has a connection with (...)
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  8. A novel approach for identifying a human-like self-conscious behavior.Gianpiero Negri - manuscript
    In this paper a possible extension of Turing test [1] will be presented, which is intended to overcome the limits highlighted by several researchers and scientists in the last seventy years. The main problem related to the execution in Turing test is substantially dealing with the trouble in identification of a human-like intelligence based on a pure evaluation of external behavior of a machine. In this work first of all a description of classical Turing test will be done. After that, (...)
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  9. Avoiding Anthropomoralism.Julian Friedland - forthcoming - Between the Species.
    The Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation, which has been endorsed by hundreds of influential academic ethicists, calls for establishing a vegan economy by banning what it refers to as all unnecessary animal suffering, including fishing. It does so by appeal to the moral principle of equal consideration of comparable interests. I argue that this principle is misapplied by discounting morally relevant cognitive capacities of self-conscious and volitional personhood as distinguished from merely sentient non-personhood. I describe it as a kind of (...)
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  10. Tracing the origins of consciousness.Jorge Morales - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (4):767-771.
    Darwin’s theory is often illustrated with depictions of different finch beaks or with lined-up skeletons displaying subtle bone-structure changes throughout evolutionary history. In The Deep Histor...
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  11. Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest, by Peter Carruthers. [REVIEW]Matthias Michel - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (4):619–623.
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  12. Dimensions of Animal Consciousness.Jonathan Birch, Alexandra K. Schnell & Nicola S. Clayton - 2020 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24 (10):789-801.
    How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for (...)
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  13. Bovine Prospection, the Mesocorticolimbic Pathways, and Neuroethics: Is a Cow’s Future Like Ours?Gary Comstock - 2020 - In L. Syd M. Johnson, Andrew Fenton & Adam Shriver (eds.), Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 73-97.
    What can neuroscience tell us, if anything, about the capacities of cows to think about the future? The question is important if having the right to a future requires the ability to think about one’s future. To think about one’s future involves the mental state of prospection, in which we direct our attention to things yet to come. I distinguish several kinds of prospection, identify the behavioral markers of future thinking, and survey what is known about the neuroanatomy of future-directed (...)
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  14. What Do We Need to Know to Know that Animals are Conscious of What They Know?Gary Comstock - 2019 - Animal Behavior and Cognition 6 (4):289-308.
    In this paper I argue for the following six claims: 1) The problem is that some think metacognition and consciousness are dissociable. 2) The solution is not to revive associationist explanations; 3) …nor is the solution to identify metacognition with Carruthers’ gatekeeping mechanism. 4) The solution is to define conscious metacognition; 5) … devise an empirical test for it in humans; and 6) … apply it to animals.
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  15. Neo-Thomism and the Problem of Animal Suffering.B. Kyle Keltz - 2019 - Nova et Vetera 17 (1):93-125.
    Proponents of the problem of animal suffering claim that the millions of years of apparent nonhuman animal pain and suffering provides evidence against the existence of God. Neo-Cartesianism attempts to avoid this problem mainly by denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness in nonhuman animals. However, neo-Cartesian options regarding animal minds have failed to compel many. In this essay, I explore an answer to the problem of animal suffering inspired by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Instead of focusing on phenomenal consciousness, (...)
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  16. Animal Consciousness (Routledge handbook of consciousness ch.29).Sean Allen-Hermanson - 2018 - In Rocco J. Gennaro (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Consciousness. Routledge.
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  17. Getting It Together: Psychological Unity and Deflationary Accounts of Animal Metacognition.Gary Comstock & William A. Bauer - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (4):431-451.
    Experimenters claim some nonhuman mammals have metacognition. If correct, the results indicate some animal minds are more complex than ordinarily presumed. However, some philosophers argue for a deflationary reading of metacognition experiments, suggesting that the results can be explained in first-order terms. We agree with the deflationary interpretation of the data but we argue that the metacognition research forces the need to recognize a heretofore underappreciated feature in the theory of animal minds, which we call Unity. The disparate mental states (...)
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  18. Animal Consciousness.Rocco J. Gennaro - 2018 - Springer: Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior.
    This chapter addresses the extent to which nonhuman animals are conscious. Most important perhaps is what criteria should be used in making such a determination.
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  19. Animal suicide: An account worth giving? Commentary on Peña-Guzmán on Animal Suicide.Irina Mikhalevich - 2018 - Animal Sentience 20 (19).
    Peña-Guzmán (2017) argues that empirical evidence and evolutionary theory compel us to treat the phenomenon of suicide as continuous in the animal kingdom. He defends a “continuist” account in which suicide is a multiply-realizable phenomenon characterized by self-injurious and self-annihilative behaviors. This view is problematic for several reasons. First, it appears to mischaracterize the Darwinian view that mind is continuous in nature. Second, by focusing only on surface-level features of behavior, it groups causally and etiologically disparate phenomena under a single (...)
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  20. Animals as reflexive thinkers: The aponoian paradigm.Mark Rowlands & Susana Monsó - 2017 - In Linda Kalof (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 319-341.
    The ability to engage in reflexive thought—in thought about thought or about other mental states more generally—is regarded as a complex intellectual achievement that is beyond the capacities of most nonhuman animals. To the extent that reflexive thought capacities are believed necessary for the possession of many other psychological states or capacities, including consciousness, belief, emotion, and empathy, the inability of animals to engage in reflexive thought calls into question their other psychological abilities. This chapter attacks the idea that reflexive (...)
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  21. Why Animals are Persons.Tony Cheng - 2016 - Animal Sentience 1 (10):5-6.
    Rowlands’s case for attributing personhood to lower animals is ultimately convincing, but along the way he fails to highlight several distinctions that are crucial for his argument: Personhood vs. personal identity; the first person vs. its mental episodes; and pre- reflective awareness in general vs. one specific case of it.
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  22. Levels of Consciousness.Wojciech Pisula - 2016 - Open Journal of Philosophy 6 (1):51-58.
    Consciousness attracts the attention of researchers representing various disciplines. Hence, there is a demand for a theoretical tool that could integrate data and theoretical concepts originating from distinct fields. The paper proposes to use the framework of the theory of integrative levels. The development and the definitions of the concept of levels are briefly discussed. The final part of the paper presents a proposal for incorporating the levels of consciousness into the framework of the integrative levels theory.
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  23. The Moral Insignificance of Self‐consciousness.Joshua Shepherd - 2016 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (4).
    In this paper, I examine the claim that self-consciousness is highly morally significant, such that the fact that an entity is self-conscious generates strong moral reasons against harming or killing that entity. This claim is apparently very intuitive, but I argue it is false. I consider two ways to defend this claim: one indirect, the other direct. The best-known arguments relevant to self-consciousness's significance take the indirect route. I examine them and argue that in various ways they depend on unwarranted (...)
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  24. Empathy and morality in behaviour readers.Susana Monsó - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):671-690.
    It is tempting to assume that being a moral creature requires the capacity to attribute mental states to others, because a creature cannot be moral unless she is capable of comprehending how her actions can have an impact on the well-being of those around her. If this assumption were true, then mere behaviour readers could never qualify as moral, for they are incapable of conceptualising mental states and attributing them to others. In this paper, I argue against such an assumption (...)
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  25. Can Rats Reason?Savanah Stephane - 2015 - Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 2 (4):404-429.
    Since at least the mid-1980s claims have been made for rationality in rats. For example, that rats are capable of inferential reasoning (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006; Bunsey & Eichenbaum, 1996), or that they can make adaptive decisions about future behavior (Foote & Crystal, 2007), or that they are capable of knowledge in propositional-like form (Dickinson, 1985). The stakes are rather high, because these capacities imply concept possession and on some views (e.g., Rödl, 2007; Savanah, 2012) rationality indicates self-consciousness. (...)
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  26. The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition.Kristin Andrews - 2014 - Routledge.
    The study of animal cognition raises profound questions about the minds of animals and philosophy of mind itself. Aristotle argued that humans are the only animal to laugh, but in recent experiments rats have also been shown to laugh. In other experiments, dogs have been shown to respond appropriately to over two hundred words in human language. In this introduction to the philosophy of animal minds Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems and debates as they cut across (...)
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  27. The complex act of projecting oneself into the future.Stan Klein - 2013 - WIREs Cognitive Science 4:63-79.
    Research on future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) is highly active yet somewhat unruly. I believe this is due, in large part, to the complexity of both the tasks used to test FMTT and the concepts involved. Extraordinary care is a necessity when grappling with such complex and perplexing metaphysical constructs as self and time and their co-instantiation in memory. In this review, I first discuss the relation between future mental time travel and types of memory (episodic and semantic). I then (...)
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  28. Povinelli’s Problem and Introspection.Michael Roche - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (4):559-576.
    Povinelli’s Problem is a well-known methodological problem confronting those researching nonhuman primate cognition. In this paper I add a new wrinkle to this problem. The wrinkle concerns introspection, i.e., the ability to detect one’s own mental states. I argue that introspection either creates a new obstacle to solving Povinelli’s Problem, or creates a slightly different, but closely related, problem. I apply these arguments to Robert Lurz and Carla Krachun’s (Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2: 449–481, 2011) recent attempt at solving (...)
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  29. Selbstbewusstsein bei Tieren: begriffliche und methodologische Probleme.Florian L. Wüstholz - 2013 - Studia Philosophica 72:87-101.
    Are nonhuman non-linguistic animals self-conscious? And how is it possible to find out whether they are or not? This question raises two interrelated problems: the conceptual problem and the methodological problem. In order to approach an answer, it is first and foremost necessary to establish criteria for self-consciousness by considering the phenomenon and the abilities connected with it. Subsequently, one can survey the experimental paradigms. Do the experiments really show that the identified ability has to be used to successfully master (...)
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  30. Primitive Self-consciousness and Avian Cognition.Andy Lamey - 2012 - The Monist 95 (3):486-510.
    Recent work in moral theory has seen the refinement of theories of moral standing, which increasingly recognize a position of intermediate standing between fully self-conscious entities and those which are merely conscious. Among the most sophisticated concepts now used to denote such intermediate standing is that of primitive self-consciousness, which has been used to more precisely elucidate the moral standing of human newborns. New research into the structure of the avian brain offers a revised view of the cognitive abilities of (...)
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  31. Animal Consciousness In Hegel's Philosophy Of Subjective Spirit.Heikki Ikäheimo - 2010 - Hegel-Jahrbuch 2010 (1):180-185.
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  32. Minds that Matter: Seven Degrees of Moral Standing.Julian Friedland - 2004 - Between the Species 13 (4).
    Prominent non-speciesist attempts to determine the amount of moral standing properly attributable to conscious beings argue that certain non-human animals should be granted the highest consideration as self-conscious persons. Most of these theories also include a lesser moral standing for the sentient, or merely conscious, non-person. Thus, the standard approach has been to advocate a two-tiered theory—'sentience' or 'consciousness' and 'self-consciousness' or 'personhood'. While the first level seems to present little interpretative difficulty, the second has recently been criticized as a (...)
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  33. Individual Interests.Andrzej Elzanowski - 1998 - In Marc Bekoff & Carron A. Meaney (eds.), Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Greenwood Press. pp. 311--313.
    Having positive experience is, by defintion, in the interest of every subject. Whether being alive per se, in addition to having positive experiences, is in a subject's interest depends of her/his cognitive development. Only a reflectively self-conscious subject can take and thus have an interest in one's own individual existence and may not want to die regardless of the expected experience. Since most non-human subjects (except for a few mammalian and avian species) are not aware of their subjective existence they (...)
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