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Consciousness

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Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior

This chapter will address the extent to which nonhuman animals are conscious. Most important perhaps is what criteria should be used in making such a determination. We have certainly come a long way from the Cartesian view that animals are mere “automata” and do not even have conscious experience. In addition to the obvious and significant behavioral similarities between humans and many animals, much more is known today about our neurophysiological and genetic similarities. Still, there are some grey areas and genuine difficulties in interpreting some experimental results pertaining to animal cognition and in analyzing the comparative neuroanatomy.

The more general “problem of other minds,” including the so-called argument by analogy, is introduced in the section “Animals and the Problem of Other Minds”. In the section “Lloyd Morgan’s Canon and Parsimony,” “Morgan’s Canon” and the related principle of simplicity is addressed especially as they pertain to attributions of animal...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, IN, USA

    Rocco J. Gennaro

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  1. Rocco J. Gennaro
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Correspondence to Rocco J. Gennaro .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University , Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Jennifer Vonk

  2. Department of Psychology, Oakland University Department of Psychology, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd Shackelford

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  1. Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, USA

    Sarah Dunphy-Lelii

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Gennaro, R.J. (2018). Consciousness. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1611-1

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