Considering Consciousness in Nonhuman Organisms

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When pondering consciousness, it’s easy to get caught up on if or not an organism exhibits the signs of consciousness instead of why an organism would evolve such a thing.

For example, take plants. They were able to evolve to be stagnant because their food (sunlight, water, and nutrients) were often rooted in one place. This mostly rules out having to evolve complex forms of consciousness, although simple to mediocrely complex consciousness should still be considered. They still must “trade” with fungi, evaluate, avoid, and deal with competition, and seek out nutrients in the soil when none are directly available. Some plants may even be “more conscious” than other plants, depending on how they evolved and how much decision-making (if we were to assume plants were actively making decisions) they might have had to make.

Looking at life in this frame, one could also assume that some unicellular, less complex organisms may be more conscious than some multicellular organisms. Single-celled protists that require movement, knowledge, learning, and decision-making could be conscious. Think about it; if an organism had to navigate a tough environment, evolution would favor those that could make better decisions and avoid certain obstacles or predators. Therefore, organisms in these environments may evolve to be conscious.

Of course, one must also take into account how complex these organism’s consciousness could physically get. Taking this point of view, it’s hard to determine anything for sure, especially with organisms like plants and fungi. Assuming that living things need brains to be conscious is closed-minded thinking and only serves to “disprove” experiments before they happen.

Human bias like this has discouraged people to think of animals other than us as conscious or intelligent. The mirror mark test has been used to “prove consciousness” in nonhuman animals for years, but was questioned with the discovery that cleaner wrasse (a type of fish) passed the mirror test, but only with red-marked dots on their throats (as these were the colors of cleaner wrasse-infecting parasites). Before this experiment, many, many animals had been “proved” to be “not intelligent” and “not conscious” without the thought that perhaps the marks used in the mirror test were of no significance to the tested animals.

Putting that aside, consciousness varies from simple to complex, with simple consciousness showing up in things like awareness, and complex consciousness being things like learning, decision-making, and problem solving that isn’t purely due to reflexes and genetics.

We humans are both intelligent and conscious, as physically, we are quite weak compared to other species. Our ancestors endured this by inventing farming, society, and civilization itself. As Blaise Pascal said, “Man is a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.”

So if an organism somehow reaps a significant amount of benefit from being smart or conscious, it will most likely evolve consciousness.

Note that I am not a professional with degrees in this subject. This article is just a random few paragraphs thought up on a random Sunday. Perhaps this thinking is common, but from the debates I’ve seen, most reports ignore the why and think more about the how. Both are equally important (well, what, why, how, where, when, and who are all equals).