The existence and extent of animal suffering provides grounds for a serious evidential challenge to theism. In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, this strain of natural atheology has taken on substantially greater significance. In this essay we argue that there are at least four neo-Cartesian views on the nature of animal minds which would serve to deflect this evidential challenge.

A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain – spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and neurophysiology to clinical data – is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection, action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the vertebrate brain can be seen to form (...) a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain – culminating in the cerebral cortex of mammals – came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity, sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone. (Published Online May 1 2007) Key Words: action selection; anencephaly; central decision making; consciousness; control architectures; hydranencephaly; macrosystems; motivation; target selection; zona incerta. (shrink)

In an oft-quoted passage fromThe Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham addresses the issue of our treatment of animals with the following words: ‘the question is not, Can theyreason? nor, can theytalk? but, Can theysuffer?’ The point is well taken, for surely if animals suffer, they are legitimate objects of our moral concern. It is curious therefore, given the current interest in the moral status of animals, that Bentham's question has been assumed to be merely rhetorical. No-one has seriously (...) examined the claim, central to arguments for animal liberation and animal rights, that animals actually feel pain. Peter Singer'sAnimal Liberationis perhaps typical in this regard. His treatment of the issue covers a scant seven pages, after which he summarily announces that ‘there are no good reasons, scientific or philosophical, for denying that animals feel pain’. In this paper I shall suggest that the issue of animal pain is not so easily dispensed with, and that the evidence brought forward to demonstrate that animals feel pain is far from conclusive. (shrink)

The issue of abortion has evolved since 1967. In this paper, the shift in the discourses of abortion are discussed. The article suggests that abortion is used as a “back-up” method of family planning and that this is broadly acceptable. Although there is little public opposition to abortion as such, there are influences that undermine abortion provision as it now exists. Growing concern about the status of the fetus shapes a number of debates. For example the issue of what the (...) fetus feels during abortion influences abortion practice. Advances in technology and the increase in knowledge about the unborn fetus will not change a woman's decision about having a late termination. The article concludes with the idea that a woman is a moral, civilised human being that deserves the right to make decisions about her reproductive life. (shrink)

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the (...) door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance, and a double-aspect theory of information. (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of commentary on fetal pain has looked at the maturation of cortical pathways to decide a lower age limit for fetal pain. This approach assumes pain can be felt directly from neural activation and ignores psychological development. Here we propose that neural activation is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for phenomenological experience, including pain. Isolated neural activation is just one physical fact amongst an infinity of physical facts that requires order or structure to be isolated (...) and experienced. A new theoretical approach is necessary to understand essential phenomenological experience. We conjecture that infant caregiver interaction provides the necessary order or structure so that the infant can isolate fundamental sense experiences delivered by neural activity. Cortical structures provide the necessary neural basis for qualia but qualia are revealed as phenomenological only as the infant becomes a subjective self. (shrink)

It is widely believed by both scientists and philosophers that consciousness, as we experience it, was not always present in this universe, but emerged gradually from a more purely physical stratum in conjunction with the development of biological systems, and, in particular, nervous systems. But if one assumes that the physical foundation from which consciousness emerged is adequately described by classical physical theory then one is put in a quandry by the deterministic character of that theory. For the dynamical completeness (...) of classical physical theory entails that either the emerging structure causes actual violations of the deterministic laws or that this emerging structure makes no actual difference to the course of physical events. The second option seems implausible, because then there could be no feed back that would allow survival considerations to lead to the gradual development and.. (shrink)