The creationist site Evolution News recently posted an article entitled What Does It Mean to Say “Lobsters Are Conscious”? The thrust of this article is to use research about animal sentience to uphold mind-body dualism while simultaneously downplaying the similarities between human and animal minds. In short, the author Denyse O’Leary is trying to have her cake and eat it too.

The article describes the recent New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a short statement signed by biologists, psychologists, neurologists, philosophers, and other scholars. The declaration is reproduced in its entirety below.

Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.

Against materialism

O’Leary response to the declaration follows.

It isn’t realistic to expect the current generation of researchers to grasp the significance of the fact that they are the ones formulating the ideas and studying the questions and that the flies, bees, fungi, and viruses are not. Science, remember, is supposed to explain away the human mind (eliminative materialism) — if not today, then surely tomorrow or someday.

First, nothing in the declaration suggests an immaterial consciousness or an inability to explain consciousness, nor does it claim that animals should have any sort of specific similarities to human behavior (like studying questions). Second, eliminative materialism is not the program of science and says little about what science is about or should be doing. Eliminative materialism is a philosophical position formulated as a response to the type/token problem in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.

This problem is illustrated by currency. A dollar is a type of currency which can be instantiated by physically different tokens (a coin or a paper bill). A law of economics that says something about currency cannot be reduced to physics, the argument goes, because clearly the physical properties of the tokens has nothing to do with the economic function of currency. By extension, there are psychological phenomena (e.g. pain) that may be instantiated in physically different ways, for example in an octopus brain or in a human brain. Such psychological phenomena, then, must not be able to be reduced to physics.

The eliminative materialist response is to eliminate concepts that are multiply instantiated. How does this work in practice? Taking currency as an example, the eliminative materialist would say that currency doesn’t properly exist; it is an imaginary concept (a social construction) that makes it easier to talk about something that is actually more complex. From this perspective an economic law concerning currency is not about the physical tokens, which are worthless outside of human minds. Instead, such a law is about people’s behavior patterns. People behave as if monetary tokens have value and as a result those tokens can be exchanged for goods and services. It has nothing to do with the physical tokens and everything to do with people’s brains.

O’Leary says that “explain[ing] away the human mind” is eliminative materialism and that this is the goal of science. Characterizing eliminative materialism as “explaining away” is somewhat fair, this is not the goal of science, nor is it the goal of many individual scientists. Most scientists are not eliminative materialists. This is part of the evangelical strategy that casts science and Christianity as two diametrically opposed perspectives. They would have you believe, for example, that evolution and atheism go hand in hand. In actuality, scientists are not all atheists and not all atheists are materialists.

Against animal rights

Lest you think that affirming animal consciousness implies animals should have rights, O’Leary sets the record straight.

A bigger problem, of course, is the continuing refusal to see the difference between an inquiring human mind and the brain of a bee foraging for honey. In an age of animal rights and nature rights, that will be costly for human rights.

If all these scientists thought there was little difference between a bee brain and a human brain, their declaration would almost certainly be worded more strongly. It literally says there is a “realistic possibility of conscious experience.” I don’t think O’Leary’s concern is about radical animal rights activists, it’s about any attempt to improve animal welfare. Evangelicals are strongly speciesist and believe humans were given dominion over the animals by God. If I had to guess, many of them would probably like fewer animal rights.

Even aside from all that, O’Leary seems to ignore the benefits of conservation to humans. Taking her example of bees, they are currently at risk from human activity, and we’re screwed if they die out. Agriculture still relies on insects to pollinate plants. It’s not always human rights versus animal rights, it’s often mutually beneficial for humans to protect animal species.

Unasked questions

Why would God give animals consciousness, and how is consciousness related to the soul? I find these questions to be pretty damning to the typical evangelical view, but of course O’Leary does not address anything like that here. Evangelicals desperately want a strong separation between humans and animals, seeing them as categorically different, but all scientific evidence suggests that humans are animals. Among that evidence is the fact that animals appear to be sentient (something certain people of the past such as Descartes used say separated humans from animals).

Overall, the article comes across as polemical and unreflective. O’Leary is using the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness as a jumping off point to push her perspective on substance dualism and human exceptionalism. (Note that O’Leary previously wrote an article describing a “war on human exceptionalism.”)