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Do animals have self-awareness?

2022-08-03T10:29:42.355Z


Imagining ourselves inside their mind to know what it is like to be a dog or a cat is as impossible as imagining ourselves in the mind of any other person


I know that you have no doubt that your pet, dog or cat, is a conscious animal, that is, that it is aware of things that happen and has thoughts that imply forecasts, desires and intentions.

They know, for example, when you come home or when you go to give them food.

However, imagining ourselves inside their mind to know what it is like to be a dog or a cat is as impossible as imagining ourselves in the mind of any other person, because the main and most genuine characteristic of consciousness, including that of animals, is subjectivity. : my consciousness is mine, only mine, yours is yours, only yours.

No one can penetrate directly into another person's mind as we do into our own.

Neither in that of any animal.

We do it indirectly, because from their behavior and what people tell us, we intuit that they are beings as aware as we are.

But animals do not speak, and since we cannot penetrate their minds, it is not enough for us to know their behavior to know if, in addition to consciousness, they also have self-awareness, that is, if they are not only aware of things that happen, but also they realize that they realize, as we people do.

Self-awareness, thinking that we think, is the highest cognitive capacity of the human mind, but we still don't know how the brain makes it possible.

Everything indicates that it must be a meta-representation process, that is, that what is represented in the neurons of some part of the brain has, in turn, a double representation in some other part of it.

A double representation of this type seems to exist in the insula, a fold of the temporal cortex of the brain involved in the interoceptive sense that allows us to know things like that when something hurts it is ourselves who hurts, to feel pain and to feel at the same time. time that it is you who feels it, a self-conscious perception that certain animal species may also have to some extent.

Some animal behavior researchers have suggested that one way to tell if a species is self-aware is to see if those animals recognize themselves when they see themselves in a mirror.

A cat, for example, when he first sees himself in a mirror, behaves in such a way as to indicate that he believes that what he is seeing is another cat.

With repeated introductions he can learn and come to know that it is he himself who appears in that mirror, but that capacity for immediate self-recognition does not seem innate in his species.

It does seem so in at least three more evolved mammalian species: chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants and dolphins.

Although, in any case, we are never exempt from some doubt, even in those three species,

In the case of chimpanzees, a resource to know if they recognize themselves in a mirror is to paint a color signal on their face, for example, with lipstick.

If, when looking in the mirror for the first time, the animal touches with its fingers the place on its face where it sees that mark, that seems convincing evidence that it believes it is seeing itself.

We would also need to know whether an adult human would recognize himself in the unlikely event that he had never seen himself in a mirror before.

In any case, the mirror test is not exempt from criticism because it implies the unproven hypothesis that this recognition is a test of self-awareness.

There are also those who believe that non-recognition in the mirror does not necessarily indicate that the animal is not self-aware.

But perhaps the best way to get out of doubt is to redefine the concept of self-awareness, allowing it to include simpler cognitive abilities that are part of it.

Self-awareness, for example, could begin with faculties such as knowing that "this body is mine", "I am something different from others", "this territory is mine", etc., until progressively reaching the capacity that allows one to feel that one himself is the subject of those thoughts and attribute those same faculties to other congeners.

Some animal species such as those indicated could already have some of these most basic abilities that promote self-awareness.

Functional neuroimaging, on the other hand,

It might also help if we saw that the parts of the brain that are activated when a person thinks about their own thoughts are parts that are also activated in the brains of supposedly self-aware species.

It still remains to be tested.

Self-awareness elevates the capabilities of the human mind to an exponential level.

That is why when we reflect on our own knowledge and our own thoughts we can imagine splendid and happy futures, but those same reflections can also enhance our negative feelings when we reflect on the consequences of certain situations or illnesses, or when we have feelings of guilt or shame .

Those who are convinced that animals do not have self-awareness and, therefore, do not think about their own thoughts, must also believe that this frees them from suffering as unnecessary as it is unfair in a world where, unfortunately, they are not always well treated.

Gray matter

it is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior.

The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships with other people.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-08-03

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