Tense bees and shell-shocked crabs : are animals conscious?

Summary: In the seventeenth century, the famous French philosopher, Rene Descartes, held that nonhuman animals, lacking souls, are organic automata without any consciousness. This led him to participate in vivisections on dogs, dismissing their howls as mere noises. Voltaire later ridiculed Descartes' view; and it is certainly a position to which hardly anyone would subscribe today. But just which animals are conscious? Most people would admit mammals generally; but what about fish? Honeybees? Crabs? Turning to the artificial realm, what about suitably complex robots? These questions are hard to answer in part because feelings and experiences are subjective things, and we have no direct access to the feelings and experiences of others. Exacerbating the issue is the fact that there are differences between human brains and the brains of nonhuman creatures. The present book suggests a methodology for dealing with these questions, without endorsing any specific theory of the nature of consciousness (about which there is little agreement anyway), and offers concrete answers.