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Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience , awareness , subjectivity , qualia , the ability to experience or to feel , wakefulness , having a sense ...
Far more animals than previously thought likely have consciousness, top scientists say in a new declaration — including fish, lobsters and octopus. Recent research backs them up.
A group of prominent scientists issued the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which stated that "the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including insects and octopuses ...
On the one hand, one hypothesis proposes that some non-human animals have complex cognitive processes which allow them to attribute mental states to other individuals, sometimes called "mind-reading" while another proposes that non-human animals lack these skills and depend on more simple learning processes such as associative learning; [4] or ...
Watson authored the article Self-consciousness and the Rights of Nonhuman Animals and Nature, which argued that most animals do not have rights such as the rights for freedom or from unnecessary suffering because they are not moral agents, do not possess self-consciousness, free will, or have the capability for understanding moral principles or the physical capability to act according to given ...
Regarding animal consciousness, the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, publicly proclaimed on 7 July 2012 at Cambridge University, states that many non-human animals possess the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states, and can exhibit intentional behaviors.
Monkeys and chimpanzees do learn to do this, as do pigeons if they are given a great deal of practice with many different stimuli. However, because the sample is presented first, successful matching might mean that the animal is simply choosing the most recently seen "familiar" item rather than the conceptually "same" item.
O'Hearne then proposes that animals do not understand death with the full consciousness of self with which humans regard death; therefore, to kill an animal quickly and painlessly is ethical. [17] O'Hearne's final point is that people cannot be friends with animals because we do not understand them. As an example, he uses the bat.