Do you think I have consciousness? What’s the difference?

Very simple: you go to brain researchers and doctors, ask them what the mechanism is by which our experiences work chemically, and find out whether animals have such a mechanism too.

Shlomo, that’s the problem of other minds. You can speak, and you’re a person like me, so it’s reasonable that what you describe as happening inside you is similar to what I experience inside myself. With animals there is no such consideration. Absolute certainty, of course, you never have about anything.

Sam, yes, very simple indeed. Good luck with that. 🙂

This isn’t really aimed at Sam, because it has already been done. Biologists have been doing experiments like these for close to a hundred years, with very good results. Just open a good ethology book. Most of them have a chapter on this.

The Elephant is completely right. This is a simple way to check. I studied this in a physiology course as part of a general enrichment course at the Hebrew University. The results are, generally speaking, that animals’ brains are less developed, and that includes the size of the cortex, which in human beings is significantly larger and much more convoluted than in a chimpanzee, for example. In addition, neurotransmitter secretion is lower. But the system is the same. You can compare this to the brains of babies. What consciousness do they have? From when do they have it? It’s just that their brain isn’t developed, and as the brain becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes more conscious. Conclusion: it’s not correct to speak of consciousness as a dichotomous variable—either there is consciousness or there isn’t. Rather, it’s a continuous variable. And it is definitely reasonable that animals have it at some level or another. And anyone who wants to argue that they don’t because there’s no certainty about anything (the honored Rabbi) — that statement also applies to the question of human consciousness! And if he accepts the assumption that human beings have consciousness, then it’s reasonable to assume that animals also have some sort of consciousness.

Is the Rabbi going to respond? Based on what’s being said here, animals also have a ‘soul,’ according to the Rabbi’s view that the mental cannot arise from matter alone.

Someone who assumes that the mental is nothing but an expression of a more sophisticated brain can indeed test this easily. But that itself is the dispute, and regarding that I know of no way—easy or otherwise—to test that claim. It reminds me of the claims made by artificial intelligence people about the consciousness and will of computers with advanced artificial intelligence (as in the movie Her, where a person falls in love with a program). I wrote several columns about this in the past.
And as for the ad hominem, I stopped being impressed long ago by what people learn in such courses when it comes to philosophical questions. The number of mistakes made by brain researchers on these topics is truly disgraceful.
What is or isn’t reasonable is a matter of taste. The question was whether one can “know”—that is, make a scientific claim and bring scientific evidence—on this topic. As far as I know, no.

Shlomo,
The question is not about a soul but about mental functions (consciousness, choice, and the like).

The analogy is not only in the nervous systems, but also in similar behaviors. In other words, regarding animal consciousness one can construct an argument similar to the one you gave to the person who mentioned the problem of other minds.

Open an ethology book and start reading. Philosophy without science is lame, and science without philosophy is barren. This is one of the fields in which engagement with philosophical issues happens all the time, both by researchers in the field and by philosophers active in it, precisely because of the importance of philosophical issues for methodology and for understanding the findings.

It is indeed true that there is quite a bit of philosophy there, and as I have written many times, there are also failures. I have also explained more than once the problem of multidisciplinarity, where each expert contributes in his own aspect and errs in the other aspects, and no correct picture emerges from the combination.
Yes, I have read a bit in the field. Bottom line, these are impressions. And it is not true that the inferences are similar to the question of other minds. And indeed, even regarding that, it is hard to say to someone who denies the existence of others that there is a scientific way to know it.

What I meant was that if animals really do have mental functions, then according to the Rabbi’s view they also have a soul. You’ve written several times that in your opinion the explanation for mental experiences is dualism.

So? I didn’t understand the comment.