Why We Must Care About Animal Consciousness: Against Carruthers’ Nihilism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2025.e94823Keywords:
Animal Consciousness, Science of Consciousness, Philosophy of Consciousness, Carruthers, Representation, Animal CognitionAbstract
One of the most challenging positions in contemporary philosophy of animal consciousness is that proposed by Peter Carruthers (2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2020). According to Carruthers, there is no fact of the matter about whether animals instantiate conscious states. This radical conclusion arises from the conjunction of two theses he endorses: the global workspace theory and the phenomenal concept strategy. This paper argues against Carruthers’ radical viewpoint. Its structure is as follows. First, I will present Carruthers’ theses on consciousness, such as the all-or-nothing characterization of consciousness and the distinction between ‘qualia realism’ and ‘qualia irrealism’. Subsequently, I will provide a brief overview of the global workspace theory and the phenomenal concept strategy. Next, I will reconstruct the arguments that underpin Carruthers’ skepticism about attributing consciousness to animals. Finally, I will present two arguments that challenge Carruthers’ position, highlighting inherent contradictions within his project. Contrary to Carruthers’ controversial assertion (2020, p. 18), I will conclude that animal consciousness deserves attention from both philosophy and the cognitive sciences.
References
Allen, C. 2004. Animal Pain. Noûs 38(4): 617-643.
Allen, C.; Trestman, M. Animal Consciousness. In: E. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2016 edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/consciousness-animal . Access 31.12.2024.
Andrews, K. 2020. The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Andrews, K. 2024. “All animals are conscious”: Shifting The Null Hypothesis in Consciousness science. Mind & Language 39(3): 415-433.
Baars, B. 1988. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barcellos, V. M. 2022. Como Atribuir Consciência aos Animais. Master’s Dissertation in Philosophy. Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro, p. 186.
Barlev, M.; Schtulman, A. 2021. Minds, Bodies, Spirits, and Gods: Does Widespread Belief in Disembodied Beings Imply That We Are Inherent Dualists?. Psychological Review 128(6): 1007-1021.
Bayne, T.; Shea, N. 2020. Consciousness, Concepts, and Natural Kinds. Philosophical Topics 48(1): 65-84.
Beer, R. D. 2000. Dynamical Approaches to Cognitive Science. Trends in Cognitive Science 4(3): 91-99.
Berent, I. 2020. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Berent, I. 2024. Consciousness Isn’t “Hard” – It’s Human Psychology That Makes It So. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2024(1).
Bickle, J. 2003. Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account. Dordrecht: Springer Dordrecht.
Birch, J. 2020. Global Workspace Theory and Animal Consciousness. Philosophical Topics 48(1): 21-38. [Accessed version: https://philpapers.org/archive/BIRGWT.pdf]
Birch, J. 2021. The Hatching of Consciousness. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43(121): 1-12.
Birch, J. 2022. The Search for Invertebrate Consciousness. Noûs 56(1): 133-153.
Birch, J.; Schnell, A. K.; Clayton, N. S. 2020. Dimensions of Animal Consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24(10): 789-801.
Block, N. 1995. On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18(2): 227-247.
Block, N. 2009. Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences, p.1111-1122. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Block, N. 2011. Perceptual Consciousness Overflows Cognitive Access. Trends in Cognitive Science 15(12):567-575.
Block, N. 2023. The Border Between Seeing and Thinking. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bloom, P. 2004. Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Humans. New York: Basic Books.
Borg, E. 2008. Intention-Based Semantics. In: E. L. Lepore; B. C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, p.250-266. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Browning, H.; Birch, J. 2022. Animal Sentience. Philosophy Compass 17(5):e12822.
Browning, H.; Veit, W. 2020. The Measurement Problem of Consciousness. Philosophical Topics 48(1): 85-108.
Browning, H.; Veit, W. 2022. The Sentience Shift in Animal Research. The New Bioethics 28: 299-314.
Bugelski, B. R.; Alampay, D. A. 1961. The Role of Frequency in Developing Perceptual Sets. Canadian Journal of Psychology 15(4): 205-211.
Burge, T. 1979. Individualism and the Mental. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4(1): 73-122.
Burge, T. 2010. Origins of Objectivity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Burge, T. 2022. Perception: First Form of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Butlin, P.; Long, R.; Elmoznino, E.; Bengio, Y.; Birch, J. et al. 2023. Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness. Arxiv preprint.
Carruthers, P. 1992. The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carruthers, P. 2000. Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carruthers, P. 2005. Why the Question of Animal Consciousness Might Not Matter Very Much. Philosophical Psychology 18(1): 83-102.
Carruthers, P. 2017. In Defense of First-Order Representationalism. Journal of Consciousness Studies 24(5-6): 74-87.
Carruthers, P. 2018a. The Problem of Animal Consciousness. Proceedings and Address of the APA 92: 179-205.
Carruthers, P. 2018b. Comparative Psychology Without Consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 63: 47-60.
Carruthers, P. 2019. Human and Animals Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest. New York: Oxford University Press.
Carruthers, P. 2020. Stop Caring about Consciousness. Philosophical Topics 48(1): 1-20.
Carruthers, P. 2024. Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. J. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. J. 2018. The Meta-Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 25(9-10): 6-61.
Chalmers, D. J. 2023. Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?. Arxiv preprint.
Chemero, A. 2000. Anti-Representationalism and the Dynamical Stance. Philosophy of Science 67(4): 625-647.
Chemero, A. 2009. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. 2015. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. 2023. The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. New York: Pantheon Books.
Dawkins, M. S. 2021. The Science of Animal Welfare: Understanding What Animals Want. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: Norton and Company.
Dehaene, S.; Kerszberg, M.; Changeux, J.-P. 1998. A Neuronal Model of a Global Workspace in Effortful Cognitive Tasks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 95(24): 14529-14534.
Dehaene, S. 2014. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Penguin Books.
Dennett, D. C. 1995a. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Dennett, D. C. 1995b. Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why. Social Research 62(3): 691-710.
Devitt, M. 2021. Three Mistakes About Semantic Intentions. In: F. Macagno; A. Capone (Eds.), Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Theoretical Developments, p.9-20. Cham: Springer.
Díaz, R. 2021. Do People Think Consciousness Poses a Hard Problem?: Empirical Evidence on the Meta-Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28(3-4): 55-75.
Dung, L. 2022. Does Illusionism Imply Skepticism of Animal Consciousness?. Synthese 200(3):1-19.
Edelman, D. B.; Seth, A. K. 2009. Animal Consciousness: A Synthetic Approach. Trends in Neuroscience 32(9): 476-484.
Elgendi, M.; Parmod, K.; Barbic, S., Howard, N.; Abbott, D.; Chichoki, A. 2018. Subliminal Priming – State of Art and Future Perspectives. Behavioral Sciences 8(6): 54.
Favela, L. H. 2024. The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment. New York: Routledge.
Favela, L. H.; Machery, E. 2023. Investigating the Concept of Representation in the Neural and Psychological Sciences. Frontiers in Psychology 14: 1165622.
Frankish, K. 2016. Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 23: 11-39.
Frankish, K. 2023. What is Illusionism?. Klēsis Revue Philosophique 55.
Futuyma, D. J. 2021. How Birds Evolve: What Science Reveals about Their Origins, Lives, and Diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Futuyma, D. J.; Kirkpatrick, M. 2022. Evolution. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Godfrey-Smith, P. 2016. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Godfrey-Smith, P. 2020. Gradualism and the Evolution of Experience. Philosophical Topics 48(1): 201-220.
Grice, H. P. 1957. Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66(3): 377-388.
Henrich, J. 2021. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Picador.
Henrich, J.; Heine, S. J.; Norenzayan, A. 2010. The Weirdest People in the World?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3): 61-83.
Hohwy, J. 2013. The Predictive Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hutto, D. D.; Myin, E. 2013. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D.; Myin, E. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jamieson, D. 1998. Science, Knowledge, and Animal Minds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98(1): 79-102.
Lau, H. 2022. In Consciousness We Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lee, A. Y. 2022. Degrees of Consciousness. Noûs 57(3):553-575.
Levine, J. 1983. Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64(4): 354-361.
Machery, E.; Mallon, R.; Nichols, S.; Stich, S. P. 2004. Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style. Cognition 92(3): B1-B12.
Mallon, R.; Machery, E.; Nichols, S.; Stich, S. 2009. Against Arguments from Reference. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79(2): 332-356.
Mashour, G. A.; Roelfsema, P.; Changeux, J-P.; Dehaene, S. 2020. Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis. Neuron 105(5): 776-798.
Melloni, L.; Mudrik, L.; Pitts, M.; Bendtz, K.; Ferrante, O.; Gorska, U.; Hirschhorn, R.; Khalaf, A.; Kozma, C.; Lepauvre, A.; Ling, L.; Mazumder, D.; Richter, D.; Zhou, H.; Blumenfeld, H.; Boly, M.; Chalmers, D. J.; Devore, S.; Fallon, F.; de Lange, F. P.; Jensen, O.; Kreiman, G.; Luo, H.; Panagiotaropoulos, T. I.; Dehaene, S.; Koch, C.; Tononi, G. 2023. An Adversarial Collaboration Protocol for Testing Contrasting Predictions of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theory. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0268577.
Michel, M. 2021. Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Laid to Rest. The Philosophical Review 130(4): 619-623.
Mylopoulos, M. 2022. Neurobiological Theories of Consciousness. In: B. D. Young; C. D. Jennings (Eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction, p. 280-293. New York: Routledge.
Nagel, T. 1974. What is it Like to Be a Bat?. Philosophical Review 83: 435-450.
Neander, K. 1991. Functions as Selected Effects: The Conceptual Analyst’s Defense. Philosophy of Science 58(2): 168-184.
Neander, K. 2017. A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
O’Regan, J. K. 2011. Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
O’Regan, J. K.; Noë, A. 2001. A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(5): 939-973.
Papale, P.; Wang, F.; Morgan, A. T.; Chen, X.; Gilhuis, A.; Petro, L. S.; Muckli, L.; Roelfsema, P. R.; Self, M. W. 2023. The Representation of Occluded Image Regions in Area V1 of Monkeys and Humans. Current Biology 33(18): 3865-3871.
Papineau, D. 2002. Thinking About Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Papineau, D. 2021. The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Papineau, D. n.d. Consciousness is not the Key to Moral Standing. Unpublished manuscript.
Prinz, J. 2012. The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.
Prinz, J. 2018. Attention, Working Memory, and Animal Consciousness. In: K. Andrews; J. Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, p.185-195. New York: Routledge.
Reber, A. S.; Baluška, F.; Miller Jr. W. B. 2023. The Sentient Cell: The Cellular Foundations of Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosenthal, D. M. 1993. State Consciousness and Transitive Consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 2: 355-363.
Rosenthal, D. M. 2005. Consciousness and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schiffer, S. R. 1972. Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schiffer, S. R. 1982. Intention-Based Semantics. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23(2): 119-156.
Schnell, A. K.; Amodio, P.; Boeckle, M.; Clayton, N. S. 2021. How Intelligent is a Cephalopod? Lessons from Comparative Cognition. Biological Reviews 96(1): 162-178.
Schulte, P. 2023. Where Mind Begins: Radical Gradualism about Representation. In: S. F. Souza Filho (ed.), 1° Conferência Virtual de Filosofia da Mente do Recife.
Schwitzgebel, E. 2023. Borderline Consciousness, When It’s Neither Determinately True nor Determinately False that Experience is Present. Philosophical Studies 180: 3415-3439.
Searle, J. 1994. Animal Minds. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19(1): 206-219.
Searle, J. 1997. The Mystery of Consciousness. New York: New York Review of Books.
Segundo-Ortin, M.; Paco, C. 2023. Plant Sentience? Between Romanticism and Denial: Science. Animal Sentience 33(1): 1-32.
Seth, A. K.; Dienes, Z.; Cleeremans, A.; Overgaard, M.; Pessoa, L. 2008. Measuring Consciousness: Relating Behavioural and Neurophysiological Approaches. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(8): 314-321.
Seth, A. K.; Bayne, T. 2022. Theories of Consciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23: 439-452.
Shea, N. 2018. Representation in Cognitive Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shevlin, H. 2021. Non-Human Consciousness and the Specificity Problem: A Modest Theoretical Proposal. Mind and Language 36(2): 297-314.
Simon, J. A. 2017. Vagueness and Zombies: Why ‘Phenomenally Conscious’ has No Borderline Cases. Philosophical Studies 174: 2105-2123.
Souza Filho, S. F. 2022. Can Constancy Mechanisms Draw the Limits of Intentionality?. Disputatio 14(65): 133-156.
Sytsma, J.; Fischer, E. 2023. ‘Experience’, Ordinary and Philosophical: A Corpus Study. Synthese 201: 210.
Sytsma, J.; Machery, E. 2010. Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience. Philosophical Studies 151: 299-327.
Sytsma, J.; Ozdemir, E. 2019. No Problem: Evidence that the Concept of Phenomenal Consciousness is Not Widespread. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26(9-10): 241-256.
Tomasello, M. 2023. Social Cognition and Metacognition in Great Apes: A Theory. Animal Cognition 26: 25-35.
Tononi, G.; Koch, C. 2015. Consciousness: Here, There and Everywhere?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370(1668).
Tye, M. 2017. Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are Animals Conscious?. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tye, M. 2021. Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness: Through the Looking Glass. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tye, M. 2024. How Can We Tell if a Machine is Conscious?. Inquiry: 1-19.
de Waal, F. 2016. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Animals Are?. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
de Weerd, C. R. 2024. A Credence-Based Theory-Heavy Approach to Non-Human Consciousness. Synthese 203: 171.
Wynne, C. D. L.; Udell, M. A. R. 2021. Animal Cognition: Evolution, Behavior and Cognition. 3rd ed. London: Red Globe Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Victor Machado Barcellos
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Principia http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/index is licenced under a Creative Commons - Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Não a obras derivadas 3.0 Unported.
Base available in www.periodicos.ufsc.br.
