Researchers show conscious processes in birds' brains for the first time

[Jim__]

From phys.org:

By measuring brain signals, a neuroscience research group at the University of Tübingen has demonstrated for the first time that corvid songbirds possess subjective experiences. Simultaneously recording behavior and brain activity enabled the group headed by Professor Andreas Nieder to show that crows are capable of consciously perceiving sensory input. Until now this type of consciousness has only been witnessed in humans and other primates, which have completely different brain structures to birds. "The results of our study opens up a new way of looking at the evolution of awareness and its neurobiological constraints," says Nieder. The study has been published in the journal Science on September 24, 2020.

For humans and our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom, the nonhuman primates, our ability to perceive things consciously is localized in the cerebral cortex. Over many years research has discussed whether animals with brains that are structured completely differently, without a cerebral cortex, are also endowed with conscious perception. Until now however there has been no experimental neurological data to support such a claim.

In order to track conscious processes in birds, the Tübingen scientists trained two crows: they had to signal whether they had seen a stimulus on a screen by moving their heads. Most of the stimuli were perceptually unambiguous: different trials presented either bright figures or no stimulus at all, and the crows reliably signaled the presence or absence of these stimuli, respectively. However, some stimuli were so faint that they were at the threshold of perception: for the same faint stimulus, the crows sometimes indicated that they had seen it, whereas in other cases they reported that there was no stimulus. Here, the subjective perception of the crows came into play.

While the crows responded to the visual stimuli, the researchers simultaneously recorded the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain. When the crows reported having seen something, the nerve cells were active in the period between presentation of the stimulus and the behavioral response. If they did not perceive a stimulus, the nerve cells remained silent. Surprisingly, it was possible to predict the subjective experience of the crows with regard to the stimulus based on the activity of the nerve cells. "Nerve cells that represent visual input without subjective components are expected to respond in the same way to a visual stimulus of constant intensity," explains Nieder, "Our results, however, conclusively show that nerve cells at higher processing levels of the crow's brain are influenced by subjective experience, or more precisely, produce subjective experiences."

a little bit more ...

[Loki Liesmith]

1. Ok this result does not demonstrate consciousness

It demonstrates *correlates of consciousness*

[soothsayer]

2. Consciousness is so interesting

I’m fascinated by Julian Jaynes’ theory that human consciousness arose between the Iliad and the Odyssey — the former showing people being directed by the gods, and the latter showing Odysseus making his own decisions.

[ihas2stinkyfeet]

3. i always wanted a pet crow.

the first time i saw “it’s a wonderful life” all i saw was that uncle billy had a squirrel AND a crow.
my dad had a pair of squirrels as a kid. he was alway trying to find a squirrel for me.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Amazing animals. So glad to see this. Thank you. n/t

[CatLady78]

5. Bookmarked

Last edited Sat Oct 3, 2020, 08:59 AM - Edit history (2)

Nicholas Carr's latest blog post touches on consciousness in a funny way:

What is it like to be a smartphone?

The longstanding assumption, a reflection of the anthropomorphic romanticism of computer scientists, science fiction writers, and internet entrepreneurs, has been that a self-aware computer would have a mind, and hence a consciousness, similar to our own. We, supreme programmers, would create machine consciousness in our own image.

The assumption is absurd, and not just because the sources and workings of our own consciousness remain unknown to us and hence unavailable as models for coders and engineers. Consciousness is entwined with being, and being with body, and a computer’s body and (speculatively) being have nothing in common with our own. A far more reasonable assumption is that the consciousness of a computer, should it arise, would be completely different from the consciousness of a human being. It would be so different that we probably wouldn’t even recognize it as a consciousness.

As the philosopher Thomas Nagel observed in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” his classic 1974 article, we humans are unable to inhabit the consciousness of any other animal. We can’t know the “subjective character” of other animals’ experience any more than they can understand ours. We are, however, able to see that, excepting perhaps the simplest of life forms, an animal has a consciousness — or at least a beingness. The animal, we understand, is a living thing with a mind, a sensorium, a nature. We know it feels like something to be that animal, even though we can’t know what that something is.

If we respected the complex inner lives of non-human life, factory farms would not exist. Species extinction would not be a casual byline while all kinds of banalities and trivialities fill our heads and dominate the news.

Philosophical questions like these would not arise:

Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/opinion/human-extinction-climate-change.html

Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?

To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial. Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon. Quite the opposite.

Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.

To be sure, nature itself is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony. Animals kill other animals regularly, often in ways that we (although not they) would consider cruel. But there is no other creature in nature whose predatory behavior is remotely as deep or as widespread as the behavior we display toward what the philosopher Christine Korsgaard aptly calls “our fellow creatures” in a sensitive book of the same name.

Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals. There is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase; it would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger. Moreover, those among us who believe that there is such a gap should perhaps become more familiar with the richness of lives of many of our conscious fellow creatures. Our own science is revealing that richness to us, ironically giving us a reason to eliminate it along with our own continued existence.

I ponder this question philosophically often although I am not what the thoughtless or vacuous could refer to as an "ecofascist". How is it that we see no tragedy in the suffering we inflict on non-human life? Why do we fail to see that the philosophical root of our callousness towards other humans is directly tied to this same vacuous self-absorption? Humanism being something that people at least pay lip service to.

I often think that when people make movies about aliens or ai maliciously killing us, it is really an exercise in human projection. We assume that they would be just like us-vacuous, callous, rapacious, opportunistic and predatory.
Only in movies "they" are not as self deceptive as we are.
They seem to be aware they are "evil" typically.
Of course I am no misanthrope. I don't think humans (at the species level) are evil...merely vacuous and trivial.
I am speaking of course of how a third party-an advanced, intelligent species without our own banal sentimentality about humans would view us. Which would not be the Dr.Who style commercial in defense of the species .

[Jim__]

6. Interesting post. I certainly agree with most of it.

I don't think humans are vacuous and trivial. We are animals, born of the earth just like all the other animals. We have been thrown into the world, surrounded by a certain set of people and a certain culture. We struggle to adapt to that culture. That culture was born as part of the human struggle to survive. We have largely transcended the struggle to survive; we reign over most other animals. But our culture doesn't yet seem to grasp this. People, as individuals, are coming to understand our connection to, and dependence upon, nature. But this individual understanding hasn't changed our culture, yet. Perhaps the hope is that individual changes eventually percolate upwards into the culture.