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Thesis ID: CBB001562257

A Controversy about Animal Consciousness (2003)

University of Washington
Marks, Charles E.
Publication date: 2003
Language: English

Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Marks, Charles E.
Physical Details: 243 pp.

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Descartes notoriously argued that non-human animals are unconscious automata, lacking both mentality and consciousness. Though Descartes's claim about animals has generally been viewed with scepticism, scientific opinion in the 20 th century tended to favor the Cartesian position with respect to animals, as exemplified by the long tenure of behaviorism. Today, despite the fact that behaviorism is no longer favored in science, Descartes's position is still far from dead. His views, and the controversy he started three hundred years ago, have been resurrected and given new life in a recent heated debate between biologists and ethologists. On one side of the debate are the neobehaviorists who argue that scientists should avoid describing or explaining animal behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and conscious states. On the other side, the neoanthropomorphists claim there is no scientifically valid reason to assume that animals and humans are separated by some sort of unbridgeable gap when it comes to mental states and consciousness. Judging from this latest disagreement among scientists who study animals, it seems that we are no closer to resolving Descartes's controversy about animals in the 21st century than we were in the 17th century. Is it possible that Descartes was correct after all and animals really are not conscious? I argue in this thesis that there really are good reasons to believe that Descartes was wrong and that at least some animal species are conscious. But those reasons are not, for the most part, the ones usually cited by modern- day proponents of animal consciousness who rely on reasons based on behavioral evidence. Instead, we must adopt a completely different approach to the question of animal consciousness that draws support from neurobiology and neuroanatomy, the cognitive neurosciences, information processing theory, and adaptive evolutionary biology. I argue that with an interdisciplinary approach that draws on several sources of evidence, we can, in fact, provide scientifically valid reasons for claiming that at least some species of animal are most likely conscious.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2003): 525. UMI order no. 3079214.

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