Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that humans are not the only conscious creatures on the planet, and a resurgence of scientific work and public interest in the topic of animal consciousness, considerable scientific skepticism and divergent public opinion remains concerning what it actually means to say that animals are conscious. This project addresses two related research questions. How is consciousness conceptualized in different research contexts? Can the various and seemingly incompatible conceptualizations of animal consciousness be integrated or related in an evidence-based way?
Intellectual Merit
The project will use the methods of conceptual and logical analysis of scientific and philosophical positions to generate a series of research publications on this topic, and will initiate an "Online Tree of Consciousness" to serve as an open database for research, education, ethics, and policy in this area. The project will provide a clear characterization of existing concepts and methods from multiple disciplines. The goal is to integrate these into a single domain of discourse organized around phylogenetic relationships among the species that have been studied. This will allow different sorts of evidence (behavioral, neurophysiological, evolutionary, etc.) to be evaluated in their phylogenetic context, and should aid in the discovery of patterns in existing data as well as helping to identify systematically understudied areas.
Potential Broader Impacts
The project is expected to yield general recommendations and guidelines for future scientific work, greater conceptual clarity about the range of ideas about animal consciousness and how to study it, improved accessibility for policymakers and ethicists concerned with animal welfare to the latest research on consciousness, better access for social scientists to data relevant to the historical and sociological patterns of animal consciousness research, and easy access for educators looking to challenge students with one of the hardest and most fascinating conceptual problems facing any science.
