PETER GODFREY-SMITH Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness. Reviewed by Venkat Ramanan
Do animals have consciousness? And if so, to what degree? Professor Peter Godfrey-Smith investigates in Metzoa.
A scene in André Brink’s anti-apartheid novel An Act of Terror begins with a team of labourers processing recently caught crayfish. They take hold of each animal expertly and quickly twist off its tail and thrust it into a container of ice. After this, the still living torso of the crustacean wriggles desperately across the bloodied ground in a futile bid to escape extinction. ‘My God … how can you do this to them? They’re still alive!’ protests a girl watching. The foreman responds with laughter: ‘No, nothing to worry about, we been doing this job for years. The crayfish get used to it.’
How do we know that animals ‘get used to it’? Can we look into their minds? Or are they only what Descartes called ‘beast machines’, mindless unfeeling biological automatons? Do only humans and a few other animals – not crustaceans – have experiences like pain and joy and the attendant emotions? And is there a line in evolution that separates organisms with consciousness from those without?
These are the issues that Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, examines in Metazoa. He does not come up with all the answers, but encourages readers to ponder the questions from a more all-embracing perspective.
In this endeavour, his ‘guiding idea’ is that:
Animal evolution produced a new kind of being, one with new kinds of engagement with the world through the senses and action. It … produced animals who handle their dealings with the world in a way that includes a tacit sense of self.
He wishes to examine ‘why it feels like something to be a material being of the kind that we are.’ (If this enquiry sounds familiar, that is because it is an extension of a famous one by philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wondered ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ And Nagel’s thoughts are evaluated a fair bit in Metazoa.) Godfrey-Smith’s primary objective is explaining not just ‘human consciousness, but experience in general’, encompassing many other animals. It is also apparent that he believes the evolution of multicellularity conferred on animals much more besides physiological advantages. It gave rise to the evolution of subjectivity, the boundaries between the self and the other, and even between consciousness and the mind. Hence, while the book covers various epochs in biological development, it is still ‘weighted to the earlier evolutionary stages’ such as the Precambrian, where all animal life may have started.
While Godfrey-Smith is essentially a philosopher by vocation, he supports his standpoints with practical personal observation and by using the findings of biologists, neuroscientists and other thinkers. The inclusion of several pages of photos taken by the author – and drawings by two illustrators – adds valuable visual context to the text. Moreover, though the book deals with several complex ideas from cognitive science and philosophy, it avoids technical jargon, making it very readable.
Around 900 million years ago animals arose as one of several different multicellular organisms. As groups of cells took on different tasks, over time this led to:
… the invention of new kinds of action, the coordinated motion of millions of cells, made possible by muscle and nervous systems. New kinds of sensing arose to guide these actions.
This made possible the rise of creatures that viewed the external environment as a ‘realm beyond’ and had ‘a tacit sense of self’. For Godfrey-Smith, such self-awareness – and the recognition of ‘the other’ – is exemplified in the shrimp with a missing claw that he encountered in one of his numerous dives off the Australian coast. This animal perceives others as objects ‘rather than responding to washes of light and looming masses’. It also appeared to be conscious of its bodily boundaries when it stopped its big claw from grabbing one of its own legs. Godfrey-Smith surmises that such ‘sensing’ is a general characteristic of ‘a great many’ animals, ‘including some with simpler nervous systems than arthropods’. (The arthropod family contains crabs, lobsters and spiders besides the shrimp.)
The eminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes that a fundamental requirement for understanding living organisms is defining how they perceive their boundaries, ‘the separation between what is in and what is out’. Godfrey-Smith echoes this significance of the segregation between the organism and the external milieu when he refers to the need for a balance ‘between a feeling of my own presence and a taking in of what is going on around me’. But this ‘state of mind’ is ‘not self-absorbed, inward-looking, or introspective. Neither is it one where you might seem to disappear into transparency, left with just the scene itself.’ The individuality of an organism continues to be upheld while the awareness of being part of a wider scene is maintained.
These ideas are portrayed vividly in this book. As Godfrey-Smith pictures it, in the marine milieu:
You are swimming through something like a forest, surrounded by life … In the sponge garden, most of what you see are animals. Most of those animals (all except the sponges themselves) have nervous systems, electrified threads that stretch through the body. These bodies shift and sneeze, reach and hesitate. Some react abruptly as you arrive. Serpulid worms look like tufts of orange feather fixed to the reef, but the feathers are lined with eyes, and they vanish if you come too close. [It is as if they are] glimpsing you with invisible eyes.
As Godfrey-Smith noted in a 2014 paper, such activities make these creatures ‘who have a point of view in a richer sense than, say, a digital camera’.
Godfrey-Smith subscribes to the idea that evolutionary changes occur gradually over time and there is ‘no sudden switching-on of the lights’. It is increasingly evident that we share a similarity in brain physiology with a number of other animals. Take for instance the human hippocampus. Rats have a comparable organ which has been well studied. It is therefore possible, the Dutch primatologist Frans da Waal opines, that ‘rats and humans relate to the past, present, and future in homologous ways’. This aligns with Godfrey-Smith’s stance that subjectivity is not something that appears at a particular point in evolutionary history but was always there and its presence is only a ‘matter of degree’.
Charles Darwin also appears to have taken this possibility into account when he posited that the science of mind would in future be based on the understanding of ‘each mental power and capacity’ over the course of evolution. Pamela Lyon, a researcher at Flinders University, asserts that this was Darwin’s ‘most radical idea’ and it could ‘transform the way we see the world and our place in it’.
The likelihood that living organisms may have experiences ranging from ‘affective’ ones to something at a more fundamental level has, Godfrey-Smith argues, ‘practical and ethical consequences’. He points out how some have dismissed the thought of crabs (and crayfish!) feeling pain. But his encounters with these animals have shown that this is incorrect; it is instead worth looking upon many other beings as ‘potential subjects of experience’.
Nevertheless Godfrey-Smith is aware of the risk of conflating sentience at a basal level with other phenomena like qualia and consciousness. He is also wary of some recent thinking that qualia and consciousness denote the same thing, and prefers to think of them as distinct from one another. This also enables more organisms to be brought into an investigation of subjective experience. As he has put it in his 2014 paper, it allows us to ‘wonder whether squid feel pain, whether damage feels like something to them’, without equating this with ‘whether squid are conscious’.
Likewise, instead of asking if insects are ‘conscious’, it would be more fruitful to start by asking if they have any felt experience, even if minimal.
Parts of this book – such as those concerning subjectivity and animal consciousness – verge on the speculative. Peter Godfrey-Smith acknowledges that ‘Questions remain about how [his interpretations and assumptions] fit together.’ However, he believes that each of these ideas performs a ‘partial bridging of the gap between mind and matter, between experience and biology’.
He is not alone in this: no one else has appropriately addressed the explanatory gap in accounting for such mental phenomena. Even so, our knowledge of the world has expanded a lot since the days when anyone different – let alone other animals – could be easily dismissed as of no consequence or greatly misunderstood.
There is a poem by an unidentified cohort from the second century BCE who believed (as translated by the essayist Eliot Weinberger) that ‘To the north are the People Without Anuses … To the south are the Winged People … the Cross-Legged People … the People Who Never Die …’ If you think those kinds of ideas were ages ago, consider this: until recently there was scepticism in some quarters as to whether infants could feel pain, and even until the 1980s paediatric surgery was conducted with no or very little anaesthesia. Today no doubt there is a lot more interaction with the ‘other’ and most of us seem to go about this task with less trepidation and fewer preconceptions than in earlier times. But how much are we willing to extend this empathy and understanding to animals? Not just cats and dogs, but much more?
The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was convinced that ‘the self is only possible through the recognition of the Other’ and comprehending how that recognition feeds into our moral and ethical frameworks. This requires a move away from a human-centric approach to nature. As Godfrey-Smith argues, it is a mistake to claim that only what is perceived in humans:
… is what experience is, and if you don’t have this going on, you can’t have experience. The alternative is that if your brain is different from ours, your experience is different, but not absent.
Darwin asserted that ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.’ Metazoa reiterates the need to realise that everything is interconnected. It also gives us a better appreciation of how bound we humans are to our biology and the evolutionary process that continues to shape us.
Peter Godfrey-Smith Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness HarperCollins 2021 PB 288pp $24.99
Venkat Ramanan is a freelance writer and independent scholar from Brisbane whose interests include literature, art, philosophy and science. His work has appeared in both online magazines of general interest and academic journals. (Full details at venkr6b.blogspot.com). He also tweets as @venkr6.
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