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Collection of Articles on Animal Consciousness
16 years ago
A decent collection of well-informed scientiffic (some philosophical, some neurological/psychological) papers on all maters pertaining to animal consciousness.
Most of them lean somewhat towards the existence of consciousness in one form or another in various kinds of animals, or stating that the question is irrelevant for different reasons. So I figure, if you like thinking (and if you liked Nagel's paper "What is it like to be a bat?"), you'd be interested in this stuff.
There's been a lack of activity from me, mostly since I was occupied with reading this thing... I wanted to read them all, write introductions of each, and to collect freely available links for all the articles contained within' instead of just posting the torrent (because you know - torrents are icky icky warez things, atleast usually), but I quit halfway, since the ones I read were all quite good, and I couldn't find a single one that wasn't already available free online. So... yes, I have reason to believe this isn't piracy, merely a handy collection of the papers already available free off charge.
Thinking is a good thing.
Have fun.
Most of them lean somewhat towards the existence of consciousness in one form or another in various kinds of animals, or stating that the question is irrelevant for different reasons. So I figure, if you like thinking (and if you liked Nagel's paper "What is it like to be a bat?"), you'd be interested in this stuff.
There's been a lack of activity from me, mostly since I was occupied with reading this thing... I wanted to read them all, write introductions of each, and to collect freely available links for all the articles contained within' instead of just posting the torrent (because you know - torrents are icky icky warez things, atleast usually), but I quit halfway, since the ones I read were all quite good, and I couldn't find a single one that wasn't already available free online. So... yes, I have reason to believe this isn't piracy, merely a handy collection of the papers already available free off charge.
Thinking is a good thing.
Have fun.
About "What it is like to be a bat?":
I think it will be eventually possible to develop models of consciousness which can be applied to other animals too. Human consciousness is heavily realiant on the particular combination of senses we use the most, so it is hard to imagine the subjective experience of a bat or even a native blind person, but we know that sensory organs are just input we experience consciously in a certain way, while the brain doesn't store images or sounds as a PC would do, but something more abstract, like neuron connections and activation patterns.
At this level there are probably some common ways of handling information. Humans use mostly vision to get a perception of physical space while bats use mostly the sonar, but the kind of information they are gathering is similar, it is still analisys of a 3D space with ability to spot textures, patterns etc. There are many possible ways to do this kind of analisys, but most animals require a way to analyze 3D space remotely, in more or less precise ways.
I don't know much about the topic, I have only red a handful of essays about neurology/cognitive science, but my guess is that similar analogies at the level of information processing might be a starting point for a proper theory of consciousness, one which is not limited to the human point of view. Too bad we know incredibly little about non-human brains so far (and also about non-human anatomy... dammit, I need puffin anatomy tables and maybe they don't even exist ).