As I was travelling home last weekend, I noticed two crows engaged in what seemed to be an act of pure joy. The exit off the highway results in an embankment of sorts, and the two ‘avian hedonists’ were just hovering over it, facing the wind, obviously lifted by the updraft resulting from the embankment. It was, in a sense, a bizarre sight. As I was queuing to exit the highway (Friday afternoon traffic is a bitch) I watched them for quite a while, and I couldn’t explain their behavior by any other means; they were just hovering, not hunting or climbing higher or involved in some mating ritual. Despite this being an admission to personal incredulity, I think they were just, as it were, chilling.
I’m sure almost everyone is aware of the fact that crows are ‘intelligent’, not just for birds, but for ‘other’ animals in general. They seem to have a fairly advanced social structure, for instance, and have the ability (it would seem) to learn from one another with greater ease than most birds. This got me thinking – how did they end up ‘playing’ their gliding game? Did one of them stumble upon it, with the other following suite? Did they both learn it from another bird? What does it mean to speak of birds enjoying something, or pursuing something simply because it is fun? What are the internal lives of crows like, and is it the same for these two crows as it is for all crows?
My love for crows is, to some extent, a feature of my love for nature. I am all too aware of humanities effect on the planet, on other species, and so on. But I’m also aware of our place in a greater scheme of things, a tree of life, having journeyed as far as other species alive today. My consciousness has been raised in this regard, I am less inclined to take up a in-group out-group stance towards other animals. I felt moved by the crows, intrigued, and awed. It is as if I’m running an operating system with a biology ‘hotkey’, with easy access to the facts and data that would lead to a more ‘naturalistic’ and ‘don’t harm the animals’ outlook.
Consciousness as a collection of programs (in the metaphorical sense of course) leads to some interesting implications. To illustrate this, we can set up a (false) dichotomy – either consciousness is entirely innate, meaning that all Homo Sapiens (or Sapiens Sapiens), regardless of their childhood, will be conscious, or it is entirely learned, a function of the social interactions and such. What do these extremes illustrate? The innate ‘wing’ proposes a view not dissimilar from the traditional view of consciousness, in that it was thought to involve a ‘soul’. God gave everyone a soul, apparently, and consciousness or conscious behavior was the result. Whether this all-or-nothing view involves a soul or simply a specific neuroanatomical group of units doesn’t matter (today at least), what matters is the all-or-nothing nature of this view and, as a result, the fact that all humans are conscious and conscious ‘to the same extent’.
The learned ‘wing’ would be forced to acknowledge that there can be ‘levels’ of consciousness, not in the medical sense (at least not only in that sense) but in the phenomenological and philosophical sense. Someone who lives in a highly social, stimulating and intellectual environment, for instance, could be ‘more conscious’ than someone who was raised by chimpanzees.
As is often the case, the truth likely resides somewhere in between. Except for the bit about a soul – that’s exceedingly unlikely to play any part in anything. If consciousness is a feature of the protons, neutrons and electrons in our brain, it means that it must result from some ‘minimal’ subset of physical structures. By this I mean that, it is possible to have a ‘minimum’ of requirements before a person is declared conscious. This could involve both distinct anatomical structures, which would likely develop in all humans, as well as a specific set of neural connections or pathways which could be influenced by the environment during childhood, for instance. The specific neural connections and ‘software’ could be the result of a combination of nature and nurture, or genes and memes. This seems likely, given the ‘recent’ evolutionary appearance of consciousness. And this is the view that modern neuroscience generally holds. As one can see, it’s much closer to the ‘learned’ extreme, leaving the possibility of ‘levels’ of consciousness open.
I’m sure that the proposition of differential awareness doesn’t go down well with everyone. To suggest that a professor of physics at Oxford University is more ‘consciousness’ than a young hunter in a Khoi-San tribe is surely going too far, you might exclaim. But why wouldn’t this be the case? If consciousness develops during childhood (and, to an extent, in later life) like language or abstract thinking, why wouldn’t there be a difference? I realize my example is decidedly colonially biased, but it is simply an example.
As I mentioned before, a lot of the details depend on what is meant by ‘consciousness’. But part of the definition usually includes an awareness of the outside and internal world, and an ability to have subjective experiences related to these worlds. It is something I’ll blog about in the near future, but seeing consciousness as something that develops, something which does not necessarily result purely from our being Homo Sapiens, has interesting implications, both ethically and intellectually. To admit that our internal lives, our propensity to be aware of the minds of other people, our insights into the workings of our minds, and so much more, is not present in equal measure in all humans is a fascinating concept.
And, in my opinion, it is an inevitable conclusion given what we know about the human mind. Your response to those crows might have been decidedly different from mine, but both of our phenomenological worlds might differ so much more from illiterate humans, for example, that we might, if push would ever come to shove, have different ethical considerations towards them than towards one another.
(Comments on Across the Synapse)