Dualism maintains a rigid distinction between the realms of mind and matter. A variety of approaches have been proposed. The mind–body problem in philosophy examines the relationship between mind and matter, and in particular the relationship between consciousness and the brain. René Descartes argued that only humans are conscious, and not other animals Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neural substrates.' In 2012, a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which 'unequivocally' asserted that 'humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. A more recent review concluded in 1985 that 'the best approach is to use experiment (especially psychophysics) and observation to trace the dawning and ontogeny of self-consciousness, perception, communication, intention, beliefs, and reflection in normal human fetuses, infants, and children'. In 1927, the American functional psychologist Harvey Carr argued that any valid measure or understanding of awareness in animals depends on 'an accurate and complete knowledge of its essential conditions in man'. Īnimal consciousness has been actively researched for over one hundred years. Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive- Donald Griffin's 2001 book Animal Minds reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.

Other thinkers, such as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.

He said that an organism is conscious 'if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism-something it is like for the organism' and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, for example, has sometimes been criticised for providing a rationale for the mistreatment of animals because he argued that only humans are conscious. Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form because animals, lacking the ability to use human language, cannot tell us about their experiences. The topic of animal consciousness is beset with a number of difficulties. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Īnimal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within a non-human animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 'near human-like levels of consciousness' have been observed in the grey parrot.

Sentience define