The Function of Consciousness

Chapter 12: Animal Minds

Cartesianism: "Descartes believed ... all other animals are unfeeling automata" (166) as evidenced by their lack of language

Macphail: "animals are indeed Cartesian machines, and it is the availability of language that confers on us, first, the ability to be self-conscious and, second, the ability to feel." (1998: 233

Unknowability of what it's like to be them due to their different sensoria
Greenfield proposes, "consciousness increases with brain size across the animal kingdom" (2000: 180)
Searle claims, "Humans and higher animals are obviously conscious, but we do not know how far down the phylogenic scale consciousness extends." (1997: 5)

The self-consciousness question: "Do they have a sense of 'I' as a conscious being observing the world?" (170)

True deviousness requires a theory of mind, e.g., beliefs about what others believe

the better to deceive you with, my dear ... if I know, that you think, that I believe, that you want ....
the better not to be deceived by you, my dear

"Swiss ethnologist Hans Kummer watched for some 20 minutes while a female ... baboon gradually movers herself about two meters, while still sitting, until she was behind a rock where she began grooming a young male, behavior that would not be tolerated by the leading male. Had she worked out what the other baboon could and could not see

Argument that monkeys do not have a theory of mind (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990): they give the same number of alert calls regardless of whether the would-be alertees can see the threat or not.
Chimps do worse at the begging (what-do-you-see) task than 3 year olds.

"By 14 months of age toddlers can delay imitation for a week or more, and they seem to know when they are being imitated by adults and take pleasure in it' (Meltzoff, 1996)." (174)
Thorndike's (1898) definition: "learning to do an act from seeing it done."
"There is clear evidence of culture in chimpanzees, in that different groups of chimpanzees use different ways of processing food, fishing for termites with sticks, or using leaves to soak up water, but there is ongoing controversy over how much these cultural skills are learned by true imitation rather than by other kinds of social learning." (175)
"If the concept of self is a memeplex ... then it is the ability to imitate that gives humans a sense of self and hence self-consciousness." (176)
There are three paths to wisdom. Reflection, which is the noblest. Imitation, which is the easiest. Experience, which is the bitterest.

"Perhaps the kind of mind you get when you add language to it is so different from the kind of mind that you can have without language that calling them both minds is a mistake." (Dennett, 1996b: 17)
"Using true language means being able to put arbitrary symbols together in an unlimited number of ways using grammatical rules to convey different meanings." (177)
Other animals lack syntax: "the meaning of the symbols is fixed and new meanings cannot be made by combining them" (177)
First signs of Wahoe, Nym Chimsky, Alex the African grey parrot, etc. seem weak on their syntax.
"[S]peculation aside, it seems we humans are unique in our use of language." (178)

"The snake can have no notion of object constancy and no concept that there is one thing, a mouse, that it is catching and eating. There are just sights, and smells, and feels, and then nice food." (178)