First of all, I must insist that veganism is not “just about the ‘animals'”, but as I’ve said so many times, primarily focussed on human behaviour and interaction. Of course it is about how we behave towards members of other species, but it’s misleading to confuse veganism with the idea of vegetarianism which avoids honey, dairy and eggs, which is a very different. That in itself is fuel for a long blog post, but not this one. This one is about how consciousness exists. I’ll probably do this off the top of my head, which of course contains the thing in the image above.
It’s important not to confuse people who sound off on vegan groups online with actual vegans. Many of them would self-identify with vegans, to be sure, but the psychology of online interaction will tend to skew the view of anything if that’s all one goes on. However, it seems to be very common for people who present themselves as vegan online to consider insects to be outside their circle of compassion and baldly assert that they’re not conscious. This is of course often because it suits them to do so, although it may also be due to having absorbed a particular kind of dogma about consciousness, which they often feel should be based on scientific evidence. There is, however, a major problem with using scientific evidence to back up a view of consciousness. There isn’t any.
Okay, so that was a bit glib. Clearly if there were no evidence for consciousness or its absence a lot of patients would be in serious trouble when their level of consciousness was assessed, and in fact we do do things like whisper “are you asleep?” to our recumbent partners in the middle of the night when the argument isn’t over yet, but that particular argument is poor. In fact a dreaming partner is conscious, although not demonstrably so by another, and likewise someone who is awake but concentrating hard may well not respond to attempts to converse with them. Hence that particular probe may not succeed, and even shouting at a deaf person, for example, may not elicit a response. Locked-in syndrome is a particularly horrifying instance of how consciousness can exist in the absence of easily observable evidence. Likewise, there’s no reason to suppose that there are no species who are constitutionally “locked-in”, such as plants and bivalves.
The appeal is usually to the idea of possessing a complex nervous system, and sometimes much more specifically to the notion of structures like the cerebral cortex. This is suspiciously convenient, and it’s not where I’m going to start.
I would say, though without particularly rigorous evidence, that the earliest attempt to solve the mind-body problem is psychophysical dualism. That is, that there is a physical body accompanied by a non-physical seat of consciousness interacting with it. This is, for example, what the Ancient Egyptians believed, and many indigenous people believe the same thing. Simply because it’s an apparently primitive belief doesn’t make it incorrect, but there are philosophical problems with it. For instance, how does the soul interact with the body when they are so fundamentally different? Two possible solutions offered here are that of pre-ordained harmony and the idea of a go-between of some kind. Pre-ordained harmony is similar to “correlation is not causation”. The idea is that there is no interaction but that it’s more like having two clocks which happen to tell the same time, because they’ve both been set to do so. Likewise, the events of the physical and spiritual worlds happen in step with each other, but are not directly connected moment to moment. The problem with this is that it means that our sensations and will are merely coincidentally the same as events in the physical world, and therefore that the physical world itself could be completely dispensed with without having any influence, because that’s the premise, on our consciousness. Hence this collapses into what’s called idealism: the idea that all of reality is simply mental in nature and there is no physical reality. It also seems to require some kind of creator, although not necessarily because, for instance, karma could be evoked as an iron law of nature which causes this to happen. After all, there is an ultimate causal connection between two clocks which tell the same time even if it’s just the cultural convention of measuring time in that way, and the connection between the soul and the body could be equally indirect. The other solution is the existence of some kind of intermediate medium between the two. This doesn’t work because it doubles the problem rather than solving it, since there would then have to be answers to how both the physical and the mental interact with that intermediary.
Note that I’m not saying any of these views is untrue, simply pointing out their problems. Dualism makes it easier to explain things like past life memories and near-death experiences, for example, although of course many would choose to explain those by denying their existence. Abrahamic religions are often seen as tied to dualism, but in fact so far as I can tell only Sikhism, Islam and possibly Baha’i are. Judaism and Christianity can be physicalist with respect to humans, which brings me to physicalism.
Physicalism is the belief that there are only physical entities, i.e. there is no spirit, soul, supernatural beings or anything similar. It’s close to being the default scientistic position and that which tends to be advocated by people who see themselves as skeptics with a K. In terms of the mind, it would have to account for consciousness. Statements about physical processes in the brain, for example, cannot substitute for statements about experiences. For instance, I think that for most people yellow is the brightest colour, that is, the most like white, so I could say that “the wavelength of light which stimulates the red cone cells maximally produces a similar state in the visual cortex to the maximal stimulation of rod cells”, but this is not identical in meaning to “yellow is the brightest colour” even if it’s necessary and sufficient for that to be the case. This is of course to some extent so because when we first used language we had no idea how the brain worked, but there’s still a problem with being that brain but not saying the same thing to mean the same thing. Subjectivity is no closer to being explained through this kind of physicalism than it was before, although to some extent this is a straw man.
From the viewpoint of veganism, physicalism doesn’t seem to allow any kind of let-out for justifying carnism because it strongly suggests that similar brains will also be conscious and therefore capable of suffering. And this is the point where it becomes possible for people who are keen on continuing to be party to the exploitation of other species to seek to identify structures or processes which only take place in the human brain, or perhaps apes generally, which are the basis of consciousness. However, to be fair to them it certainly appears to this conscious mind that there are parts of the nervous system which are not conscious at all and also events which can slip in and out of our awareness, such as breathing and pain. The existence of distraction does suggest that this is so, and that consciousness is not a property of the entire brain. However, we only have our own word for that. By this I mean that we may always dissociate as part of our essence. Dissociative personalities, also known as multiple personalities, are usually associated with trauma in childhood by the psychiatric profession, and there’s a secondary issue regarding iatrogenic dissociation similar to false memory syndrome. However, some dissociative personalities embrace the view and seek to de-medicalise it, and it may be that for all we know, we are always accompanied by silent personalities coexisting with us within the same skull. Certainly the severance of the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two cortical hemispheres, appears to produce two identities. In cases where conjoined twins share a head, with two faces and bodies, there appear to be two people involved rather than one. Other phenomena are also of interest here. For instance, if you ask someone to judge the gradient of a slope by gesturing and speaking, their gesture, i.e. the slope of their hand, will often be more accurate than what they say orally, and there’s also “blindsight”, where someone blind due to brain damage will always be able to guess what they can see even though they’re not conscious of seeing it. It’s also been shown that we are better at guessing objects situated in our blind spots even without context and when they have only ever been in that location in our visual fields, which is very hard to account for as there are no visual receptors there. We are stranger beings than we imagine ourselves to be, and we may always be in a sense “possessed” by other versions of ourselves.
This, of course, is hard to test for and is a little like non-baryonic dark matter in that it’s a claim that there is a non-communicating consciousness inside everyone but it’s made to fit the bill exactly while being non-falsifiable. However, our own consciousness is so hard to test for that there’s no absolute reason not to be solipsistic, although we generally aren’t. Clearly we assume others to be conscious but the mere fact that stimuli lead to relevant and appropriate responses doesn’t mean there is associated consciousness, which can’t be directly observed except within ourselves. This is one motivation for the idea of logical behaviorism, which I think of as an American idea hence the spelling. This is the theory that there is nothing to consciousness but that which can be observed by others. Thoughts are simply sotto voce vocalisations, anger nothing but the likes of raised heartbeat and acts interpreted as aggressive or violent, and so on. This sounds like the kind of theory of consciousness which only people with no inner life could take seriously or think up. Methodological behaviourism acknowledges the existence of internal mental states but considers them outside the scope of scientific investigation, and perhaps less important than that which can be observed. It may be worthwhile to approach a specific domain of psychological activity in this way, and it doesn’t aim to be a theory of consciousness in its methodological form, but the question arises of what could be the “companion” thesis to methodological behaviourism, and also whether it’s actually helpful to separate the two in this way. It does make sense to try to place mentality outside a special realm, and we learn about each others mental states partly based on our observation, but it seems to miss something important. There are theories of the emotions that we label bodily sensations as feelings based on the context in which we feel them, which is very similar. I subscribe to this to a limited degree. For instance, I don’t believe a robot would be able to have humanoid experience of the world unless its “mind” provided visceral sensations such as a hammering heart and blushing to its consciousness. However, that isn’t all there is to emotion. I also think most of us are instinctively predisposed towards empathy, meaning that we aren’t merely learning from observation in the same way as we might learn that rain never falls out of a clear sky, but are born with the potential for that knowledge.
Behaviorism portrays the mind as a “black box” with inputs and outputs without regard to what’s going on inside it. A somewhat more sophisticated model of the mind is functionalism. This is the idea that the mind is a network of modules with functions and connections forming inputs and outputs to a whole system, with stimuli and responses on the outside. Although this happens to be made of brain cells in our case, nothing rules out it being made of something else, such as hydraulics or electrical circuitry and it would still count as having consciousness and mental states provided those states were functionally equivalent to a real wakeful person having experiences. To my mind, the biggest problem with this idea is that it could be done by committee. You could have a room full of people, say 1728 of them, each tasked with passing pieces of paper around and modifying them according to the instructions on the pieces of paper they receive, each doing exactly the same thing as 1/1728 of your brain was doing (which is a little under a millilitre of brain tissue). Each of these people would have their own identity and consciousness and yet we’re asked to believe that the entire activity of the room of people also has the consciousness of a individual in their own right. This is counterintuitive. However, as a panpsychist, maybe I have to believe that this is so, and that individual parts of the brain are themselves conscious, not just the brain as a whole.
Functionalism is quite relevant to the question of plant consciousness. A mimosa, insectivorous plant and a forest can all be thought of as networking internally or externally in this way, in such a way that they have internal states observable from outside but no brain cells as we would understand them. In fact many plants engage in gradual movements, such as flowers opening and closing with daylight, sunflowers following the Sun and the “sleep movements” of legume leaves. And I’m afraid that I am one of those cartoon vegans who do believe plants are conscious (and use the appropriate conjugation in relative clauses, which may be connected). It still makes sense to be vegan though, because it minimises suffering through the destruction and injury of living plants.
The next stage along from this is anomalous monism and the associated concept of supervenience, which I like to imagine is some kind of futuristic portaloo and is the subject of my MA dissertation. This is an example of losing control of the creative process because I’m actually panpsychist and although supervenience applies to other areas of philosophy than just the nature of consciousness, it is quite significant for it and is also at odds with the idea of panpsychism. Supervenient properties are basically emergent. That is, they depend for their existence on a subset of a number of other properties in a system or situation but not specifically on any one of them. This is where the “anomalous” bit comes in. There can be laws describing mental states, such as the duration of short-term memory or the number of items one is able to think of at once, or the fact that yellow is the “brightest” colour and indigo the “darkest”, and laws describing physical brain states, but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets of events and states. The “monism” bit is about there only be one fundamental kind of “stuff”, so there aren’t physical and mental substances, just one kind of substance with two manifestations, one physical and one conscious. Psychology is irreducible to physics but both psychology and physics have the same basis. Because supervenience has things in common with dialectic, upon which Marxism appears to be based, although it’s not at all clear that Marxism actually needs it as a philosophical basis, the idea of supervenience and by extension possibly also anomalous monism could have political significance. For instance, due to the Marxist view that religion and belief in the supernatural only exists because of political exploitation, it would reject psychophysical dualism because there is in its view no such thing as a soul. This could have practical consequences. For instance, it may be that consciousness can only exist dynamically – it never emerges in the instant – and dynamism and viewing things in their historical context are central to dialectical materialism and therefore Marxism.
Beyond this is probably a fairly well-defined approach to consciousness which is nevertheless difficult to pin down. It originates in existentialism and phenomenology and is also linked to Marxism because that’s simply the way Western philosophical thought went. Derrida and others attempted to centre reality on language, and since humans alone are seen as capable of language and therefore thought, this view would also tend to reject the idea that other species are conscious. That said, such works as Carol Adams’s ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’, which is in this tradition, looks at vegetarianism and by implication veganism in a post-modern way, drawing parallels between the exploitation of women and that of other species. More recently some vegans have equated feminism and veganism because female animals are disproportionately exploited due to the consumption of dairy and eggs. I disagree with this because it would entail that men could not be vegan because they can’t be feminist. They could only support veganism at best, and this seems like an absurd position which makes the word “vegan” meaningless. To me, Adams’s book tries to answer the wrong question, namely “why are so many feminists vegetarian or vegan?”. My perception of the situation is that remarkably few feminists are vegetarian or vegan and the real question is “why are there so few vegan feminists?”. I think the answer to that is that they are influenced by critical theory and therefore centre consciousness on the use of language and other cultural aspects unique to humans, or at least only initiated by humans. For instance, non-human primate use of language allows individuals into the inner sanctum of consciousness but rejects all others, so Koko and Washoe were conscious but not a chimpanzee or gorilla living in the wild, who can presumably therefore be slaughtered without it being murder according to them. Possibly one cause of this attitude is the suspicion of grand narratives, which however allows conservative values to colonise the space which is not being defended and supported in a radical way. Their approach reminds me of Descartes’ assertion that dogs were not conscious simply because God had not provided them with souls, despite the fact that their bodies were significantly similar to ours down to minute details.
Vegans often seek to support their position rationally, and that’s the right thing to do to some extent although many of us arrived here by emotional means, such as by watching ‘Earthlings’ or ‘The Animals Film’. I didn’t. I got here, so far as I can tell, through concluding quite coldly and dispassionately that it was morally required of me. I don’t now, that is as an adult, feel any horror at cruelty to animals. It’s a simple logical equation that it’s wrong to cause avoidable suffering. However, those who, like me, believe their veganism to be based on rationality often assert that consciousness is confined to vertebrates and perhaps cephalopods and some arthropods rather than being universal, and therefore seek to base consciousness in specific structures and functions of, for example, the vertebrate brain or see it as an emergent property of a complex nervous system or something functionally equivalent to that.
Consciousness is referred to as the “hard problem”, and some believe it’s beyond human capabilities to solve. Others are not so pessimistic, if that’s the word. The issue has been divided into “easy” and “hard” problems, although the so-called “easy” problems are still not actually easy. The hard problem is how it can exist at all and the “easy” ones are to do with how the brain actually works in various conscious processes such as learning and perception. It’s sometimes claimed that the “hard” problem is just a collection of all the “easy” problems. There’s also a similar precedent in the nature of life. It used to be thought that there was a fundamental division between living and non-living matter, so that for example olive oil was fundamentally different from crude oil. This ended when urea was synthesised in the early nineteenth century. There could, likewise, be a similar spurious division between conscious and unconscious matter. It may not be that all matter is conscious, as I think it is, so much that the difference between conscious and unconscious matter is yet to be ascertained precisely. But I have to say that it really doesn’t feel like that, and that there’s something about consciousness that’s irreducible. Idealism, the belief that everything is mental, would solve that problem while introducing others, such as the problem of not everything being known, which is where Hegelian dialectic and German idealism comes in with its gradually unfolding reality.
Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, divides consciousness into three aspects: level of consciousness, sense of self and intentionality. Intentionality is “aboutness”. He considers these to be separately explicable. Of these, sense of self has been questioned as rather nebulous by various philosophers and religious perspectives, notably Buddhism and David Hume, because there seems to be no “I” we can actually point to, but rather a stream of consciousness happening together with nothing identifiable to link it. On the other hand, it does seem that there is some kind of consistent label attached internally to successive experiences happening in the same brain, if indeed that is where they’re happening, or how they’re happening. Intentionality is one of the classic properties of mental events considered to be the most distinctive features of them as opposed to anything else. However, I think that the state of samadhi can involve consciousness without intentionality, which raises questions for that being an essential feature of it, and would therefore need a different explanation. Level of consciousness is illustrated by becoming subject to and coming out of general anæsthesia. Consciousness can seem to be absent when the brain is most active, as with dreamless sleep as opposed to wakefulness, and waking and sleeping can exist independently of consciousness as in persistent vegetative states, so it seems that consciousness exists when different parts of the brain are relating to each other in particular ways. There are brain regions associated with consciousness but this doesn’t explain how this happens. From a vegan perspective, Seth believes that other species are conscious although he also seems to think there is a degree of consciousness depending on the species. On the other hand, because he also notes that some people see any kind of integrated information as equivalent to consciousness, which is pretty close to panpsychism, and this would extend consciousness considerably, possibly even to plants and particularly to various manifestations of information technology. He’s also concerned with the ideas of embodiment and prediction, that is, that consciousness is embodied (out of body experiences seem to involve having a kind of astral body) and involved with prediction and expectation. We find it much easier to be conscious of what we expect to perceive. It’s possible to swap bodies using VR devices and cause people to have embodied cognition of each others’ bodies, such as shaking hands with themselves.
I feel that this simply defers the problem of consciousness to activity in certain brain regions and functions without actually explaining it. That said, as a viable position recognising non-human consciousness, Seth’s position does support veganism. It also supports, as do some other positions, the idea that computers or perhaps the internet are conscious, which is another question veganism might need to take into consideration.
To summarise then:
- Psychophysical dualism is often associated with theism and the idea that some animate entities are simply endowed with souls and others not in an arbitrary fashion. Whereas it is a respectable position as such, which explains, for example, ESP if you accept that that exists, the arbitrariness is irrational.
- Logical behaviorism situates consciousness outside the apparent mind in a kind of social, observable realm. My position on this is that it’s just silly and denies an incontrovertible fact of experience.
- Functionalism would seem to require entities entirely unlike individual bodies to be conscious, but this is not problematic and would allow, for example, an anthill or termite castle to be a single mind. This could, however, lead to treating individual social insects as expendable.
- Anomalous monism has the merit of being potentially reconcilable with progressive views of the world and the social analysis of metaphysics, which is unfinished work on my part (and will probably always remain so), but ultimately has the potential of expanding the circle, as Peter Singer has put it, by other means.
- Critical theory type approaches are similar, but being language-centred rather too conveniently allow us to deny consciousness to anything which doesn’t have a voice, such as a child brought up in a neglectful environment which never acquired language (relative pronoun choice deliberate there).
- Anil Seth’s position is surprisingly sympathetic to veganism, probably because of his recognition that we are all animals.
This survey therefore shows that veganism tends to be supported as an ethical position from most of the perspectives mentioned, provided no special pleading is involved such as the unsupported idea that only humans are endowed with souls, that entities without language are conveniently unconscious or that there just are no internal mental states. The position that most enrages me is the Critical Theory one, because instead of aiming for liberation it merely doubles down on prejudice and excludes the oppressed while having quite shocking consequences for beings most people would regard as human and deserving of rights. But then veganism is at least as much about treating other humans well as it is about avoiding cruelty to other species.
A Box Of Chocolates 