Episode 52 - Animal Consciousness

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,,

Ellie: 0:08

And I'm I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Oh, my God, David, today is such a special day. This is the week that your book comes out and today is the day when we talk about it.

David: 0:43

All the anxiety.

Ellie: 0:44

I think I've ever heard that noise.

David: 0:46

Yes. It's anxiety oozing out of every pore of my body.

Ellie: 0:50

I've heard a lot of David's responses, but that's like a new react.

David: 0:55

No, I'm telling you, Ellie, you do not know how anxious and self-conscious I am about this book. I mean, I stand by what I wrote and I will defend it maybe to the death, but writing a book really was a very humbling experience for me.

Ellie: 1:12

Well, I can tell you it's great. You don't need to be anxious about it. I mean, I don't know what Twitter is going to think. But don't! In terms of the contents, I am loving it. Listeners, I'm not just saying this because David is my friend and co-host and so I have a vested interest in the success of this book and both from a professional and a personal perspective. No, truly. I am loving reading it. The graphics, there are the all these cute little illustrations

David: 1:39

Oh my God!

Ellie: 1:40

that are so sweet!

David: 1:41

I'm so happy that you liked the illustrations because I had to fight for them. Initially, they were meant to be in a different style that was a little bit more antiquated and almost like natural science from the 19th century. And I requested that they make the illustrations a little bit more fun. A little bit more caricaturesque even, a little bit. And I have to say my hat goes off to Princeton University Press because they worked really well with me and basically gave me everything that I asked for when it came to the illustrations. I love them. I think they just add so much value to the book.

Ellie: 2:17

Yeah. It's like little finches sitting on a branch twittering or an octopus with its colors changing. And it's like, yeah, they're black and white, but they're still- they still convey a lot.

David: 2:28

Yeah, it turns out adding high-quality colored photographs would have made the book jump in price by a hundred percent.

Ellie: 2:37

Oh, my God. Well, lucky for our listeners, it is not terribly expensive, so you can pre-order it now. I would highly recommend it. And if you don't, pre-order it now, you might want to after the end of this episode. This is not a promotional episode about David's book, so don't worry. This is very much in the spirit of our usual Overthink episodes. It's not just like, "Oh, hey, we're going to use our platform in order to promote the book." But we are taking advantage of the fact that David's amazing book is coming out to do a three-part series on animals. And because this is the topic, we haven't even talked about the topic of David's book, it's called When Animals Dream and it is about animal consciousness. So, if animals are your thing, amazing. You're probably excited already that we're doing a three-part series on animals. But if not, let me just say I'm with you. Animals are not my thing either. I actually have the reputation among my friends of being the one person who doesn't like animals. So, you know, my friends, like think I'm a monster because I- it's like, "Oh yeah, Ellie hates animals." This is not true for the record. I do not hate animals. I don't even dislike them. I feel indifferent towards them. But some people think that makes me a monster.

David: 3:48

Mean, I think that makes you a monster philosophically, but I know you personally, so I can't really stand by that claim.

Ellie: 3:54

Well, that's better than my grandpa who thought that there was something deeply wrong with anybody who did not love animals.

David: 4:00

Well, I have to say, I was really surprised when you agreed to do an episode on animals, just because I know how deeply humanist you are in your belief that really anything of philosophical and psychological and existential value comes only from human beings. And so I commend you, Ellie. No, this is, this is a comp- this is a backhanded compliment, maybe. I really meant it as a compliment.

Ellie: 4:23

I don't agree with your assessment of my views. I don't think everything valuable comes from humans, David.

David: 4:28

But you just said that you were completely indifferent to them.

Ellie: 4:31

I feel indifferent to animals. That doesn't mean that I don't think that they bring immense value to the world. And, you know, I, it's not like this is a very principled position. It's mostly just personal for me. So when I was a kid, I was very gently, but still kind of traumatizingly, attacked by a dog who was hurting me, like who was chasing me and hurting me. I was okay. It wasn't like super serious, but it just like made me afraid of dogs. And then my parents' response a few years later was to say, "Okay, it's becoming a problem. Ellie, can't go over to friends' houses because anytime somebody has a dog, she stands like in freeze response in the corner of the doorway.

David: 5:10

Oh my god.

Ellie: 5:11

Yes. I enter homes with dogs because I was like, so, you know, traumatized after this experience of being attacked by a dog, even though, like I said, it was very minor. And so my parents decided to get a dog so that I would overcome my fear of dogs. I did overcome my fear of dogs, but let's just say I kind of went from being terrified of dogs to then being like, "Oh, okay, cool." Not like now I love dogs.

David: 5:32

So many people have trauma associated with animals and I was attacked by chickens when I was a teenager. Um, my parents had

Ellie: 5:42

Whoa.

David: 5:42

this chicken coop in the back. And one time they went on vacation and they asked me to take care of the chickens. And so I went in to feed them and give them water and they all attacked me. And it was just like a whirlwind of legs and beaks and feathers and claws and me in the eye of the storm. And even though I care a lot about animals, of course, I have to say that I also fear birds. I don't like them and I don't want to be around them.

Ellie: 6:13

Hitchcock's Birds, not your favorite movie.

David: 6:15

Oh my God. It's so good though.

Ellie: 6:17

It's so good. It's so good. Maybe that movie also made me like more indifferent towards animals than passionate about them, but I'm sorry you were attacked by chickens. Honestly, that sounds hilarious. Um, but I'm sorry.

David: 6:28

It's just, it was like, I was at the bottom of the pecking order. We're talking about animal consciousness.

Ellie: 6:39

What does it mean to be conscious, and which animals are conscious?

David: 6:44

Is dreaming consciousness and do other animals dream?

Ellie: 6:48

We talk especially about David's new book, When Animals Dream. We have our very own in-house expert on to tell us all about this fascinating topic. David, your book opens with this scene of an octopus. You say that contrary to Aristotle's claim that octopuses are quote, stupid creatures, octopuses are intelligent and naturally curious beings who might actually dream. And the scene you opened with stars Heidi, who is the subject of one of the episodes of the PBS series, Nature, where they show her sleeping. And in the midst of her sleep, Heidi changes from being a pretty smooth white color to flashing yellow with blotches of Mandarin orange. And then from there, she changes to what you call a dark and piercing purple, a purple so deep that for a fraction of a second, we cannot tell where her body ends and the dark blue background begins. Then she changes into a series of light grays and yellows. So, what's going on here is that while Heidi is sleeping, she's changing colors radically over time. And so the biologist observing Heidi says that these changes in colors reveal the fact that Heidi is dreaming. She's going through all of these changes in color because she is having a dream about hunting and eating a crab. And in real life, she would have all of these different displays of color that are also echoed in her dream. So it seems really obvious that Heidi is dreaming. Why would anybody deny this?

David: 8:23

Well, the biologist that you mentioned, David Scheel, he makes the claim as a conditional. He says, if she is dreaming, you see the dream right here in all these changes in her mantle, the fact that there are these dramatic color displays. But there are people who disagree with him. And right after the video of Heidi was released, there was a story in the New York Times where a couple of experts on animal behavior were quoted actually disagreeing with Scheel's interpretation and their argument was, "Well, we really cannot tell whether or not this animal is really having a dream sequence because we don't have access to the content of her reality."

Ellie: 9:09

Okay. So you're clearly on the side of thinking that Heidi is in fact dreaming.

David: 9:15

And in holding this view, I'm saying something that is somewhat counter-cultural relative to our present scientific moment, but that is in line with the worldview of a number of 19th century naturalists, who were totally open to the idea that humans are not the only dreamers on this planet. So, I talk about people like Charles Darwin, for example, who openly talked about the dream experiences of other species, and in the 19th century, in the Victorian era, there was already an anti-vivisection movement gaining steam, you know, people's feelings about what we're entitled to do to animals were shifting. People were realizing, Oh, maybe the animals really are suffering when we subject them to vivisection, when we carry out invasive procedures on them. And so there was a growing interest in the inner lives of animals, especially their emotions, their feelings, their thoughts. And at the time it seems self-evident to many that not only are animals conscious in a general sense, but that they also dream when they go to sleep, which is a much more narrow form of consciousness.

Ellie: 10:23

Oh, yes. Like the story of the dog dreaming. It was so cute.

David: 10:27

Oh, I do really like that story.

Ellie: 10:29

Yeah. So, for our listeners that this is just like that totally tickled me. There was this guy. Oh God. What, oh, physician, he was a physician named William Lauder Lindsay who wrote this 1879 book that David talks about called Mind in the Lower Animals in Health and Disease. Sounds kind of boring, but he has this whole passage where he talks about what happens in the minds of dogs when they fall asleep. And here's just a quote from this book that David, in turn, quotes in his book. He says, "As regards the dog, and especially sporting dogs, it appears to hunt in its dreams as was long ago, remarked by Seneca and Lucretius. During sleep movements of the tail and paws, sniffing, growling, barking occur. There's every reason to believe that there is frequently during sleep in the sporting dog, an imaginary pursuit of an imaginary game." So, the dog in its sleep is on a little hunt and its little legs are going back and forth as it's chasing something.

David: 11:29

Well, and you know, yes, this is maybe boring 19th century naturalist writing, but for people who don't want to go there, you can go to YouTube and find a ton of videos of dogs dreaming. And in that quote, Lindsay goes on to talk about how sometimes this imaginary mental reality that the dog is creating in its sleep can be so vivid that the animals wake up from their sleep. Like they just like wake up in a panic and you can also see that in a ton of YouTube videos that I sometimes quote in the book. But, I mean, for our listeners, this is not a book whose primary source is YouTube. I just need, I need to clarify that.

Ellie: 12:08

Well, it's funny you say that though, David. Cause when I told my mom that we were recording this episode, she was like, "Of course dog's dream. Sugar wakes up from her dreams disoriented all the time." And I guess she does like the arms moving back and forth in her sleep too. So my mom is on the side of the 19th century folks, but you said that this is not the main view today. So tell us what happens after the 19th century that makes people question whether this type of evidence would count as an animal dreaming.

David: 12:33

Yeah. So before I answered that question, let me say that your mom is on the side of the majority of people who, I think, believe that animal dream who are not scientists.

Ellie: 12:45

Laypeople.

David: 12:46

Yes, laypeople. So, part of the story that I tell in the book is that there is actually a split between the kind of knowledge that we accept in scientific settings that tends to be much more conservative, much more rigid, and much more limiting because it has to abide by all these norms of scientific methodology. Anyways, the point being that I point out in the introduction that a lot of people would look at this book and be like "Duh, obviously animals dream, but you know, making the case on scientific and philosophical grounds is a little bit more complicated than just saying, "I, you know, I saw my dog or I saw my cat and I believe this," but concerning the, the evolution of this debate, I talk about the fact that after the turn of the 20th century, there is a shift in the discipline of psychology where psychologists become suddenly very interested in emulating the methods of the natural sciences, right? They, they want psychology to be a real science. And that means doing experiments that look like the experiments that we might find in physics, right? Where you control all the variables and, uh, produce highly reliable knowledge and find patterns that are easily replicable. The problem is that if you're a psychologist, by definition, you are studying the psyche, whether that is this IQ of human beings or this IQ of non-human animals. And the thing about the psyche, the mind, is that it's not really like a physical object. It's much more volatile. It may not lend itself to quantification and measurement in the same way that like tables and chairs and planets and molecules do. And so there was this eclipse, I argue of the animal psyche in the early 20th century, because of the rise of this more quantitative approach to psychology that culminated in behaviorist psychology, which says "We're not going to talk at all about what happens inside the minds of other animals. We're just going to limit ourselves to talking about their behavior." Literally, what they do. And, you know, I mentioned that a couple of scientists were quoted in the New York Times talking about Heidi and saying that, "Oh, maybe we cannot say that she's dreaming." And this was precisely the position that they defended. They said, "Look, you cannot look at the behavior of Heidi and conclude that she's dreaming. The only thing that you can say is that the muscles in her mantel are twitching. And producing different colors. So you just very literally describe what you're seeing without really adding any kind of interpretation on top of that.

Ellie: 15:35

This strikes me as ridiculous. Why would we limit our claims about Heidi to saying that her muscles are twitching? Whereas, if I saw another person, even if I didn't ask them after they woke up if they had been dreaming, moving around in their sleep, I would assume that they were dreaming.

David: 15:49

Obviously, there's a worry here about the possibility of anthropomorphizing animals of projecting too much of the human onto the non-human, which I think is a well-taken concern. But the question is, how far are you going to take that worry or let that limit you? And the weird thing here is, if Heidi were a human, as you point out, we would not hesitate to say, based on the evidence, that she is dreaming.

Ellie: 16:15

Yeah. And it would be the same evidence, right?

David: 16:17

Yeah. The same evidence. Just,

Ellie: 16:19

Obviously our colors can't change,

David: 16:22

I mean, sometimes they turn a little red.

Ellie: 16:25

but like the same evidence being third person observation, not actual first person reports.

David: 16:31

Yeah. And in the background here, is the idea that because animals can't tell us that they dream, that we should not speculate, but if you look at most research on human dreaming in the last, like 30 years, sometimes they talk about linguistic reports, but by and large, they focus on other things like brain scans and observations of sleep behaviors. And those we also have in relation to animals. So in, in the book, I do talk about this double standard that we have in psychology, where we're behaviorists about animals, but we are not behaviorists about humans, even when we have the same evidence on both sides of the equation.

Ellie: 17:12

Yeah. And you make a strong case following those things like the behavioral markers and brain scans that, at this point, we really can't deny strong evidence for animals dreaming. And I particularly loved, in addition to the Heidi and the dog example, I'm just focusing on all the, all the examples with the cute graphics here.

David: 17:29

Who is not an animal lover now, Ellie?

Ellie: 17:32

I know, also, I say like, oh, cute dog with the friends that I mentioned think I'm like an animal hater. They're always like "What? You think that dog is cute?" I'm like, I never said that I hated animals. I just don't, they don't move me in the way that humans move me, but I still think they're cute sometimes. So, yes. Very cute example of these finches that you give in the book. Tell our listeners about this. Why do we have strong reason to believe that finches, in addition to octopuses, dream?

David: 17:58

So, there's been a ton of research on birdsong, right? How do different birds memorize the songs that they use to like court one another and . Sometimes even to communicate with one another. And for some time, people believe that the songs that birds sing are completely innate and genetic, you know, if you're a bird you're just born with your song already preloaded into your brain, it's a matter of enacting it.

Ellie: 18:25

Preloaded, a little download before the fact, before your birth.

David: 18:30

Well, and there's a lot of metaphors of computers and software in, in a lot of this research. Uh, so yes, some people would say preloaded in a computationalist sense.

Ellie: 18:40

It's like the new version of thinking that an animal works the way a clock works that we had in say the 17th century.

David: 18:46

Yeah. It's like the, not the animal as clockwork, but the animal as a Mac Air in this case, because it's a bird.

Ellie: 18:53

At least it's a Mac, instead of a PC. Anyway, I digress.

David: 18:57

But the birds, many birds actually learn their song horizontally. They, they actually pick it up through experience and that means that they have to practice their song. And so a bunch of ornithologists have been working on this question of how do birds memorize their song? And some have proposed that they, they memorize it when they go to sleep because one of the things that we know about human sleep is that it plays a key role in memory consolidation. One of the research protocols that I look at in the book, concerns whether or not when zebra finches, in particular, are practicing their song in their sleep, this is a completely unconscious experience -- or whether maybe they're actually having a phenomenal experience, which is a dream. You know, are they dreaming about it? Or, are they simply undergoing some kind of unconscious mental process associated with memory consolidation? Does that make sense?

Ellie: 19:54

I guess so. Although, I was a little bit tripped up by the language of unconscious versus phenomenal because as you and I have discussed in our recent episode on the unconscious, to say that something's unconscious doesn't mean that it's not psychic. Does it have to do with being reflective? Like whether you're reflectively aware? I guess we're not really reflectively aware in dreams unless we're lucid dreaming, right?

David: 20:15

So, yes, I think here, the distinction is between they're both mental processes because they have to do with cognitive operations, like memory and recall. So we are talking about something psychic or mental.

Ellie: 20:26

We're not just Macbook Airs, folks. And the zebra finches aren't either.

David: 20:32

And so the question is whether the animals experienced something while this process is going on. So is there a lived experience? That's why I said phenomenal. Is there a phenomenological component to this psychic process or is it one of those examples of unconscious mental processing that we did talk about in our episode on the unconscious.

Ellie: 20:55

Yeah. And you say that the answer is that it is a phenomenal experience, right?

David: 21:00

Yeah, that's right. And so, this is one of those cases where I actually find myself disagreeing with the scientists who conducted the experiments about the meaning of their own findings, which is a weird position to occupy, but that is the position that I end up occupying here.

Ellie: 21:17

I mean, like a lot of folks on Twitter post about stuff like that all the time. It's like somebody posts a new article. It's like, well, actually I can disagree with your findings. So, you just be like one of those guys, David, except a lot more legit cause you're writing your own book about it.

David: 21:29

Yeah, hopefully without that nasal voice either. But, and so there are two things for me that really make a difference when we try to figure out if it's unconscious or whether there is a lived experience where these animals. The first one is that when the animals are rehearsing their song in their sleep, it's not just a brain operation where it's not just like random neural activity happening. The whole body is involved in the replay. So, I point out, for example, that the scientists found that the zebra finches, as they are rehearsing their song, actually go through the physical embodied movements that they would need to perform when they are awake in order to produce a song. So, they literally like move their throat in the right way. And so when you're talking about embodiment, often there is this phenomenological component, arguably. And the second piece of evidence that I point to is the temporality of free play. So we know that a lot of memory consolidation can happen unconsciously, but often that happens on a different timescale. So, when your brain tries to go through and experience unconsciously, it does it very fast, right? It's not on the same timescale as waking experience, but what researchers found in connection to the birds is that the mental replay that happens when they're asleep takes exactly the same amount of objective time as the act of singing while they're awake. And so that suggests that there is this lived component to replay that you wouldn't have if it was just an unconscious mental operation. So, the embodiment and the temporality for me are pretty significant on top of the fact that when the animals are going through this replay, it's really fascinating that the hearing portion of the brain also starts sliding up. So, it seems like they're hearing something. They are experiencing sound, even though they are not actually producing any sound wave.

Ellie: 23:41

They're going through what you call a reality simulation. Let's take a quick listen before the break.

David: 24:05

Anybody that I've shown the video of zebra finches singing. They always say that's actually less beautiful than I expected. They expected this like melodic performance.

Ellie: 24:14

I wouldn't barely go so far as to call that a song. Sorry, zebra finches. You are not the next American idol.

David: 24:19

Oh, no.

Ellie: 24:41

David, I was struck by the claim you make that dreaming is a sufficient, but not necessary condition for consciousness. So, basically this means that you can have consciousness, even if you don't have dreams, right? Dreaming is not a necessary condition for consciousness. But if you do dream, that automatically means that you do have consciousness. Dreaming is a sufficient condition saying that an organism clears the bar for being conscious. What does this mean? It means that any animal that dreams is conscious.

David: 25:13

And for me, this is just a logical point, really, because I take dreaming to be a form of consciousness, and in the field known as consciousness studies, which is interdisciplinary with science and philosophy, everybody and their grandmother has their own taxonomy of, you know, consciousness and how many parts it has. But one that I find really helpful is the one that Evan Thompson provides in his book, Waking, Dreaming, Being, which I've taught in my courses a couple of times. And my students have loved it so much that I recommend it to anybody interested in the science of consciousness.

Ellie: 25:51

Okay. We'll recommend it to our listeners now by teasing it a little bit. Tell us what's going on with Evan Thompson's theory of consciousness.

David: 25:56

So, in this book, Thompson says that there are four modalities of consciousness and they are waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and then what he calls pure awareness. Essentially, waking is of course, when you're awake, alert, you know, going through the world, dreaming, self- evident also, it's when you have phenomenal experiences, thoughts and other mental states, when you are in a particular phase of the sleep cycle. Dreamless sleep is the kind of consciousness that you have during what we call deep sleep. And finally, there is pure awareness, which is a somewhat controversial state that is associated with heightened insight that you attained, for example, in cases of, of meditation and, according to some people, at the moment of death. So, when people talk about like their life flashing before their eyes, people call that a pure awareness.

Ellie: 26:54

Yes. And you mentioned that Thompson takes this model from the Upanishads. So, it's pretty different from the way that we tend to think of consciousness today as either on or off, right. Either we're conscious or we're unconscious, almost like a light switch. And that would be an approach closer to enlightenment European philosophy. I think it's interesting that it's not a single concept of consciousness by which consciousness is like, opposed to the unconscious. But that it's actually, this quadripartite view. If we can say that of waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and pure consciousness.

David: 27:26

Yeah. So, it's a multimodal model of consciousness. And in this model, by definition, to dream is to be a conscious agent because when you dream, you are immersed in a phenomenal field that you experience as reality itself. So, it's impossible to dream and to not have consciousness. It just follows.

Ellie: 27:51

Yeah. And in the book, of course, you just mentioned dreaming. That's the category of consciousness that you're most interested in, right. And you then introduce what you call the Sam, or is it S.A.M. Model of consciousness?

David: 28:04

I've never had to pronounce it. So I don't know. I think let's go with Sam.

Ellie: 28:08

You better get used to it, David, you're gonna get a lot of interviews about this book. Okay. We are good. We're going on the record here, David Peña-Guzmán himself says that it's pronounced the Sam model of consciousness. And I'll be honest, the book hasn't even come out yet. And I got an advanced copy, but I just got it last week, so I haven't even made it to this part of the book yet. So, now, I'm on the same page as our listeners. I'm not going to have any fun facts about finches for you all. I'm going to need you, David, to just treat me as a listener because I haven't read this part of the book yet. Tell us what the Sam model of consciousness is. What is Sam? Actually, let's start there.

David: 28:42

Yeah. So, Sam is just an acronym, S.A.M. And it stands for Subjectivity, Affect, and Metacognition. So, it's really a kind of a mouthful for a relatively simple idea. And the idea is that when we dream the very fact that we dream already functions as a window onto these three concepts, onto subjectivity, affect, and what we mean by metacognition. So let me talk about these three terms, uh, somewhat quickly, hopefully, beginning with subjectivity, with the S. Obviously, consciousness involves at the most bare minimum, having a perspective on the world, even if you're not reflectively aware, even if you don't have a complicated sense of self. Consciousness is both egocentric, in the sense that it revolves around an ego, and embodied, you know, you cannot have consciousness just floating in the air without a body. And in the book, I argue that this is also true of dreams. When you are in a dream, you are always present in a phenomenological field. You have an ego and you have a body. There is what some experts call a "dream I" or a "dream self." So, this means that animals who dream have this kind of subjectivity that is egocentric and embodied.

Ellie: 30:04

Okay. What do you mean by saying that dreams are egocentric here. I'm a little stuck on that because aren't there some dreams from nowhere, right? Like I'm not sure that I agree that all dreams have an ego in that aren't there ones that depict a scene and we don't necessarily feel like we're present in them?

David: 30:26

So, this is a raging debate in the field of dream science, because some people would say, "Yes, Ellie is correct. There are some dream experiences where there is no ego." And that usually happens when you're first falling asleep, transitioning from waking into sleeping. And when you're transitioning out of sleep.

Ellie: 30:47

Mm.

David: 30:47

But even those liminal cases, I think, are egocentric because even when you perceive a field, you're not seeing it from all points simultaneously which is what would be required for a view from nowhere. And so I take the side of people who argue that even those dream experiences that seem to be ego-less are in fact minimally egocentric, but still egocentric. I just don't think "I have a view from nowhere" makes any sense in any context.

Ellie: 31:20

Well, and I tend to agree with that too, just generally. Yeah. Is that we can't have a view from nowhere, so I guess it makes sense that we would also have to include dreams there. So, we've got the first one, subjectivity. Tell us about the, a in S.A.M.

David: 31:34

So, A is for affect. I feel like we're doing an Abecedarian here. Like, "Hey S is for Subjectivity, A is for Affect." Um, so my view is that all conscious awareness involves some kind of affect, some qualitative feeling of intensity that usually involves something like pleasure versus pain or better or worse, some evaluative dimension. So, as soon as you have sentience, I think there is an affect. Although I have to flag that, not everybody agrees with me on this point. And in the book, I lean, in particular, on Sigmund Freud to present an image of dreams as truly rooted in an affect in feeling in emotion because dreams reveal our emotional lives and the same can be said of the dreams of animals. I think they are portals into the emotions that animals experience. For example, I talk about research showing that rats.

Ellie: 32:33

Everybody's favorite animal.

David: 32:36

I think rats gets such a bad reputation. It's horrible. I think they're adorable.

Ellie: 32:41

You're like there are portals into the emotional lives of animals. And I'm with you. And then like, for example, rats, sorry, go ahead. Tell us about rats.

David: 32:48

And then you can't handle No, but I- so, rats dream and they not only dream about things that they have experienced in the past, but they also dream about things that they want to experience about things that they desire. So there's a kind of projection happening here. So like, I don't know, they might dream of getting their hands on like a piece of cheese that they've seen, but that they haven't been able to get.

Ellie: 33:14

Or opening a fine dining restaurant in Paris.

David: 33:17

Oh, are you talking about a Ratatouille? Um, yeah, so I think Ratatouille probably had a ton of dreams before succeeding in his culinary venture. Um, but this research on rat desire really brings to the fore, the emotional dimension of thinking of dreams as conscious experience, as you cannot think about dreams without thinking about emotions. I think that's incoherent.

Ellie: 33:45

Well, yeah. And it's interesting cause you're talking about desire, in particular, right. And desire as being at the root of the animal dreams. And that sounds a lot like Freud's theory of dreams because Freud says that wish fulfillment characterizes dreams for humans. And now I'm wondering whether we should be sending animals into psychoanalysis for dream interpretation.

David: 34:08

Yeah, so we need a fainting couch for Ratatouille now at the psychoanalyst office.

Ellie: 34:13

I think the talking cure might be a little tough for them.

David: 34:17

Yeah, with rats because, you know, they laugh. So it's the laughing cure. You just, catharsis through laughter for rats, not through talking. But you're right, I mean, I do talk about rat wish fulfillment

Ellie: 34:29

Oh my gosh, can't wait to get to this part.

David: 34:31

It's in chapter two, Ellie. Yes. I know you didn't make it very far.

Ellie: 34:40

I told you, I just got it last week. I just, I got to the part right before the Sam model of consciousness.

David: 34:46

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Point well taken.

Ellie: 34:48

By the time listeners hear this, I will have read all of it.

David: 34:51

I'll definitely hold you to that, um, with a questionnaire in the future, but for now let's transition from the S and the A to the third letter in the acronym.

Ellie: 35:01

To the M.

David: 35:03

To the M.

Ellie: 35:04

To the S to the A the

David: 35:07

M M M M M. This is our rapping career beginning and ending in one moment. Um,

Ellie: 35:13

Please take over and tell us about metacognition.

David: 35:16

So metacognition. Let's begin by defining what metacognition is. Metacognition is when you are reflectively aware of what you're doing or what you're thinking.

Ellie: 35:27

Okay. I think I know where this is going. Are we talking lucid dreams?

David: 35:31

You got it. I talk about lucid dreams in the book. And I speculate, I want to emphasize that term speculation cause this is the more speculative part of the book. I speculate that some animals could have lucid dreams, which is what happens when you're aware of being in a dream. And listen, I recognize that when you start talking about the lucid dreams of animals, it honestly sounds like I've gone off the deep end. Like I'm just really projecting a ton onto animals here. But what's really interesting is that there is a bunch of new research showing that some animals truly are metacognitive agents. There is research on birds, on cetaceans. There is a ton of research on primates and other mammals, more importantly, in connection to dreaming. I stumbled upon a couple of theories of lucid dreaming while doing research for this book where the authors lay out their theory of how lucid dreaming is generated by the brain, how it works, how we experience it. And then, they say that they are open to the possibility that animals might be included in their theory, which is extremely radical. So there are dream experts out there who specialize on lucid dreaming who say that some animals might be capable of this really high end metacognitive feat. And so it would mean that animals can on some level tell the difference between what is real and what is a dream. But I do want to emphasize again here that this is something that I think could be true, but we don't really have a lot of evidence to support that it's something that really happens. That's a very tricky question. So I want to measure my claims because I know that I am walking on shaky ground here.

Ellie: 37:26

Well, you can say that because, you know, you have to answer to readers of this book, but what I'm taking from this is that rats are having lucid dreams of Ratatouille.

David: 37:35

Yeah. Yeah. This is where Ratatouille meets Inception. Definitely.

Ellie: 37:54

Enjoying this episode? Please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You can also connect with us and other listeners on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. One of the central claims in your research on animal consciousness, David, is that we can't focus on a strictly behavioristic approach to animals. Instead, we need to think about the phenomenology of animal consciousness. What is it like to be a non-human animal? But this takes us back to a worry that we raised a while ago, which is the worry of anthropomorphizing animals. So, I think, someone, maybe me, who knows.

David: 38:38

You. Just say it.

Ellie: 38:42

No, I, like I said, I think that, I think that Heidi is, is dreaming. But, someone might say that any speculation about what it is like to be an animal is anthropomorphic in nature, because we only know what it's like to be human. And so we have to bracket any interpretation of animal phenomenology. What do you say to such a person? Say, the authors of that New York Times rebuttal of Heidi's supposed dreaming?

David: 39:07

So, I recognize that there are limits to what we can know about other animals. I would never deny that. And I think it's something that we need to accept and in fact, cherish. The problem here is that often people assume that attributing certain capacities to other animals is dangerous because you can be wrong. But the inverse is also true, right? One can be wrong by refusing to attribute capacities when there is evidence in favor of it. And I think that's actually a greater danger in fact, and I really liked the concept of anthropodenial, which was coined by Frans de Waal, a very well-known primatologist.

Ellie: 39:49

We love a good term.

David: 39:51

Yeah, anthropodenial. And it's, it's the inverse of anthropomorphism. So, it's when you deny attributes to animals based on a starting point of assuming human uniqueness and superiority. And in general, I think the scientific community is excessively worried about anthropomorphism and not worried enough about anthropodenial.

Ellie: 40:15

Interesting. I'm like, yes, that makes sense to me. Because I totally hear what you're saying in the sense that mentioned these examples where it just seems ridiculous that scientists would deny something like Heidi dreaming, right. Or, the dog kicking its legs in its sleep being a dream of a hunt. But I also do have some worries about what you call a phenomenology of animal consciousness, because strictly speaking, phenomenology is a school of philosophy that depends on the first person experience of individuals. And in conveying that first person experience through language to others, such that we can come up with a sense of what structures of consciousness look like that transcend the individual, right? So, it starts from a first person perspective. But it ends up really in an intersubjective space and it doesn't strike me that we can get that with animals. Right. Some phenomenologists talk about what's called a second person phenomenology. So, doing phenomenology of the you, rather than of the "I," but historically speaking, phenomenology is almost all about the experience of the "I" and connecting that to broader structures of consciousness.

David: 41:25

So, I actually disagree with you on this point. Um, and it, maybe it is a self-serving disagreement because I need phenomenology to be broader in order for me to carry out a project of animal phenomenology. So, if you look at somebody like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he writes extensively about the experience of what he calls pathological cases, people whose experience of the world has been shifted in many cases by brain trauma. And he is working off of the medical files and that's second order phenomenology, right? Like he himself did not have those experiences, but yet he, he does the phenomenology of those subjective standpoints. And I also don't think that all phenomenology necessarily needs to end in a communal space through language, in particular, because there are plenty of experiences that cannot easily be translated into language, may never be translated into language. And many of those are precisely the ones that phenomenologists are interested in, right. Because a lot of phenomenologists are critical of the notion that everything can be captured by linguistic categories.

Ellie: 42:34

Okay. I see your point about phenomenology not necessarily involving first person experience. Although, I mean, it really does in a lot of traditional descriptions of phenomenology, but for instance, Merleau-Ponty describes phenomenology as a direct description of our experience as it is. And so a question might be who is "our" there, right? Who is "our experience"? I read that passage as being a direct description of my experience, but perhaps it could be broadened out to other humans, or even in your case, to non humans. I don't think it's true though, that there's not a move to the communal in phenomenology though, because Merleau-Ponty also thinks that phenomenology has to be what he calls eidetic and transcendental. It has to get us to an understanding of essences is what I was calling the structures of consciousness. Maybe essences is better. And so, phenomenology in being a direct description of our experience as it is, doesn't remain at the level of a sort of specific experience, but ends up making general claims.

David: 43:41

Yes. And so, I mean, two points here, the first one is that I don't deny there has to be a transition into the communal. I just don't think it needs to happen necessarily through language. And so it's not as if only linguistic subjects can be objects of phenomenological investigation. That's my point. And the second thing is that I think you can have that movement into the communal across species lines because our interactions with other animals, that interaction is itself communal and shared, even if it's not linguistically mediated. So the question here is how do we, as humans talk about the possible experience of other animals, without those animals being the source of the linguistic categories that we use to interpret their experience with.

Ellie: 44:29

Well, yeah, because if we're following Merleau-Ponty's definition of phenomenology as a direct description of our experience, I worry that we get into a little bit of a problem, which is how do we describe something, not in language. And even if we're using language to describe something, in the case that you just mentioned, David, we humans are using language to describe the experiences of animals, which they have not described in their own words. And so that seems to me to not necessarily line up with Merleau-Ponty's definition of phenomenology as a direct description of our experience, right. He seems to imply that it's the person who's experiencing who also needs to be the one describing.

David: 45:14

Yeah, And I think here there's a difference between what Merleau-Ponty says and what he actually does because, for example, there are entire sections of the phenomenology of perception that are rooted in his description of a very famous patient, which was Schneider. A very famous case study in the early 20th century that was, you know, his case was described by a number of philosophers. And Merleau-Ponty draws a number of conclusions about the eidetic structures of subjective experience. Again, not based on his own experience of the world, but based on the experience of this patient who had a very particular relationship to language, to imagination.

Ellie: 45:58

Yeah, because he'd had an injury, but Schneider was describing his experiences and Merleau-Ponty is using Schneider's self-reports.

David: 46:07

But it's not only self-reports. A lot of it is Schneider performed in this way, on the following test. So we ask him to draw a clock and he couldn't do it in a rational way. So, in his behavior, we see something about the way in which his experienced is constituted. So again, the point here, being that I agree with you, I don't want to deny that historically, phenomenology has been rooted in the study of the self through self-description. I think that's true. My claim simply is that we can broaden phenomenology beyond that direct description of experience as it unfolds to the eye. So I just want to open it up to that kind of second person phenomenology and broaden it even more beyond the human so that we can get to the point of talking about the experience of non-human animals.

Ellie: 47:01

Hmm. I'll have to think about the language point more. I do think you're right to point out that phenomenologists historically have involved in their descriptions the experiences of others. But I do want to bring in here, the work of another philosopher whose claims about animals' subjective experience have been really popular in recent years. And that's Peter Godfrey-Smith. So Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote this book a few years ago called Other Minds that everybody was like obsessed with not just philosophers. A lot of people, you know, who just like to read, a lot of readers. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher who has done a lot of research on octopuses and all of these amazing dives. I ended up wanting to scuba dive after reading this book. Have not done that yet, but also, I mean, we had COVID and scuba diving is expensive and whatever.

David: 47:50

And you, and you can't go until you finish my book cause you're still in chapter one.

Ellie: 47:57

Okay, true. But yeah. So, Godfrey-Smith, whose book I have read in its entirety. I took it, I took it on a trip to the south of France and did a beach read of it a few years ago. He says, and I thought this was a really interesting part of that book, which I think on the whole, I liked a little bit less than other people, but I thought this part was great. And that's that we usually think about consciousness as having a single center and for humans, that's usually behind the eyes, right? We associate our consciousness very closely with vision and also with the brain. And this makes sense because our nervous system is highly centralized. The brain controls the action throughout our bodies. So, if I'm going to move my arm, this movement originates in the brain and is visually guided. But this is totally different from the way that octopuses experience the world. They have a de-centralized consciousness. And instead of having the brain at the center of their nervous system, their neurons are much more distributed throughout their body with most of them in their arms. So, when they move their arms, their arms have their own sensors and controllers such that the arms movements are guided by the arm's own senses basically. And so, one arm doesn't necessarily even feel like it's part of the same self as another arm. And this blew my mind.

David: 49:14

Oh, I know. I mean the whole issue about distributed nervous systems non-centralized modes of consciousness. It should blow your mind because it is entirely unlike our experience of the world. And some people have speculated that octopuses have a double consciousness where you have one locus of consciousness in the head and another locus in the tentacles. And so essentially you have two subjectivities arguably in the same body. What is also equally shocking is that octopuses shift between this dual consciousness. And then the more unified, conscious awareness that we have, which you described as visually guiding something from the head. We know that octopuses can also do that. So, the head can at some points be like, no, you guys, I'm really in charge right now. So I'm going to guide you in a very intentional controlled way. And then the tentacles follow, but at some point that tentacles are like, no, we're actually on our own now. And we don't have to listen to what you say.

Ellie: 50:22

Cool!

David: 50:23

So, it just moves between duality and unity.

Ellie: 50:27

Wow. And so do each of the tentacles have a different consciousness? You're seeing double consciousness, but they have how many tentacles they have? They have a bunch of tentacles.

David: 50:36

Yeah. So each tentacle would have basically its own locus of perception.

Ellie: 50:41

So, it's not a double consciousness. It's uh-

David: 50:44

Yes, it would be a multiple.

Ellie: 50:46

How many, wait, literally how many tentacles are- eight tentacles, right?

David: 50:49

Octo-pus.

Ellie: 50:53

Oh my God.

David: 50:54

Like technically six arms and two legs.

Ellie: 50:57

Wait, wait, wait, David, I'm sorry. My mind is blown at how I thought I was smart and I really must not be. I have PhD and I didn't put that together. Luckily, it's not in biology. Okay. Well, I'm going to go like hide in shame. So, um, yeah, I dunno if you have something you want to say next, but I, I am so embarrassed.

David: 51:20

No, I mean, don't be embarrassed because the octopuses are weird. We can agree on that. And so, um, from their body to their consciousness, they just raised a lot of questions and to bring all of this back to dreaming, a point that I make in the book is that we need to be highly attentive to the ways in which the dreams of animals are entirely unlike our dreams. So we should not assume that they dream like we dream and in the same way that we should not expect the unity of human consciousness to translate into the unity of octopus consciousness. So again, that difference point. And so let me give you one example here, and that is that human dreams tend to be highly visual. But the dreams of other animals maybe are not even visual at all. So for example, the Zebra Finches that we talked about earlier, they primarily activate the auditory parts of the brain. So, it could be that birds, because sound is such an important sensory modality for them, have primarily auditory dreams without a lot of visual content. Maybe dogs because of the importance of smell in their lives, they have olfactory dreams, you know, who knows maybe an electric eel has electric dreams. Um, we just, we just have to be really open to the possibility of radical difference. And one of the most controversial cases are cetaceans, whales and dolphins. And the reason is because, kind of like the octopus, their cognitive architecture is really different and a little bit bizarre because they have uni-hemispherical sleep.

Ellie: 53:01

Okay, which is?

David: 53:02

It means that when they go to sleep, they only turnoff one of their brain hemispheres at a time while the other is awake. So half of their brain is awake and half of their brain is asleep.

Ellie: 53:15

Oh, yeah. I think I remember learning about this ages ago, but it's so cool.

David: 53:19

Yeah. And so like, the question is could they have dreams when they are kind of half on and half off? And if so, what would their dreams even be like? What would their experience be a combination of the real world and the dream world super imposed on one another. Or would they just not dream at all in order for the waking half to be able to do its job. So again, completely different. I don't know what to say about that. It's a limit for me.

Ellie: 53:49

That is fascinating. I also just looked that up in your book because I was like, I do not remember that discussion, but you're talking about chapter one, which I did read. It's just in a footnote, so I don't have to feel crappy for forgetting that, but that is so cool. I wish I could dream that way. In the meantime, I'll just hope for some Ratatouille lucid dreams and maybe not the Zebra Finch song to, to haunt my dreams tonight.

David: 54:14

I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I nap that way. Like half awake, half asleep.

Ellie: 54:20

Well, David, thanks for talking to us about your book. We're going to have two more episodes in this animal series, which is very exciting. Listeners can pre-order your book, When Animals Dream from Princeton University Press. Highly recommend after reading the intro and chapter one. It's fantastic. Can't wait to read the rest.

David: 54:44

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 54:52

You can find us overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.

David: 54:59

Also, find us on Instagram and Twitter at overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our assistant, Sunny Jeong Eimer.

Ellie: 55:08

Samuel Smith, the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo. To our listeners, thanks so much for Overthinking with us.