Hard Problem also applies to Animal Consciousness

One of the nastiest traditions within Western philosophy concerns the Cartesian viewpoint on animals. According to René Descartes animals were nothing more than mindless and soulless automata. To an extent, his extreme view and its inhumane consequences root in the almost universal, traditional contempt of the conservative brands of Christendom for non-human animals.

These unfortunate mainstream Western standpoints on the animal soul concur in the message that animals are radically different from humans, in that they do not possess an immortal soul.

This conviction sometimes affects otherwise rational essays that defend mind-body dualism in the case of human individuals. Even if some (lower) types of consciousness are acknowledged for animals, only the human mind would be the expression of an immortal soul.

The inconsistent part about this is, as was implicitly recognised by Descartes, one cannot rationally conceive of a non-physical consciousness that would be wholely dependent on the brain in most species (including the great apes, cetaceans, or elephants) and ultimately independent only in members of homo sapiens sapiens. This can be demonstrated very easily.

One of the main reasons for believing in dualism in humans is what David Chalmers has called the Hard Problem. Consciousness has certain irreducible qualities that can never be defined in physical terms. It is hard (or impossible) to explain the existence of these qualities (as such) on the basis of brain properties. Now, either a being has conscious - in the sense of subjective, phenomenal and qualitative - experiences or it has not.

In the second case it should be considered some kind of zombie or indeed an automaton as Descartes would say. In the first case, the hard problem as defined by Chalmers certainly applies to the being in question, regardless of whether it is human or not. In other words, either dualism is true for any conscious experient or it holds for none whatever. Starting from the hard problem it is simply baseless to believe it could only apply to human consciousness.

For some this may seem disturbing as they have become accostumed to 2000 years of anthropocentric religious and mainstream 'scientific' thinking. However, we should realise there is much more to the philosophy of the animal mind than misguided conservative-Christian and Cartesian doctrines. For instance, in most of Indian philosophy it has always been quite normal to regard all animals including humans as beings with an immortal soul (in the individual sense as in Dvaita Vedanta or jainism, or in the noetic monistic sense as in Advaita).

Titus Rivas