[steve19]

Do you believe mice ask themselves "why do I exist?" or whether it is better "to be, or not to be"?

I am genuinely interested in your perspective.

I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lack of my existence (despite feeling it when I am not around, so I am told).

[danschuller]

I think conscious isn't a binary yes/no kind of property. It's more a range, where you can put humans arbitrarily at 1.0 and then a mouse might be 0.05 or something like that. It certainly has self-awareness of somekind, even basic biological homeostasis requires self-awareness of a limited kind.

Other animals then present more consciousness, like chimps, dolphins, elephants etc and would place somewhere between the mouse and humans.

[taneq]

Thought experiment: Dogs tend to act guilty when they know they've done something wrong. If you get two dogs together, and one does something naughty, do both act guilty afterwards or only one? If only one, then is it not reasonable to assume that the guilty dog has internally models the situation as "I did bad thing, I am bad dog" but the other dog internally models the situation as "I didn't do bad thing, I am good dog"?

I'm not saying dogs sit around quoting Kant, but they're highly social animals and I find it hard to believe they don't have some internal representation of themselves.

[nerdo]

Dogs act guilty in response to being scolded, not because they know they've done something wrong.

[PhasmaFelis]

No, we could always tell when my dog had gotten into something even before we found the evidence, because she'd be slinking around embodying the word "hangdog" from the moment we walked in the door. There's debate over whether this is actually guilt or simply anticipation of punishment, but there's no question that dogs know when they've done something they weren't supposed to do.

[snowwrestler]

And how to do humans learn which things are wrong? Kids are scolded fairly frequently when they're young...

[davelope911]

Reminds me of the Vonnegut quote from Cat's Cradle:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”

[Rangi42]

What would observe differently about your dog if he were self-aware? Self-awareness wouldn't automatically let dogs speak their minds or write philosophical treatises on existence. When a dog is just sitting still, I have no idea if they're being self-reflective or not.

[steve19]

Good question.

I would expect him to exhibit less reliably to stimuli. His behaviour is closer to a large switch(stimulus){} statement than the emergent behavior of human reaction to situations and stimuli.

One example: he was stepped on when a small puppy by a very old man from that point on and to this day, many years later, he has a major dislike of old people that he does not know well.

If the same thing happened to a child, I would expect the child to slowly, over time, question why they disliked all other old people when the old people they do know are kind to them. This would result in a change of behavior without someone explicitly teaching them.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Human reactions are hardly freeform. Most human responses are either instinctive or socially scripted/learned - more often, some combination of the two.

The only thing that makes humans truly unique is the fact that we can store, retrieve, and process information outside our bodies. While we can question our responses, as in your example, we don't - unless we live in a social environment that suggests we should. (Not all environments do. Some actively discourage it.)

Everything else we do - solving puzzles, counting, acting socially, teaching in person, showing emotions - appears in simple forms in at least some other animals.

Going up a level, humans are actually an extremely large, planet-spanning colony organism with very limited collective consciousness. We act more like an aimless flock of birds or mound-building insects than a collective with awareness of its own planetary situation.

[marvy]

I think the case for a collective consciousness for humanity is much too weak. An insect colony does way better. At least most individual insects tend to act toward the common good, rather than waging war on other insects in the same colony.

[ethbro]

There are places to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

[marvy]

No way, I did not mean to imply I thought that mice do that. But I think that's setting the bar too high. How often does the average person ask themselves such questions after all? I think four year olds are conscious, and yet I doubt that they ask such questions either, and might even look at you funny if you asked them such a question.

[greatthanks]

some people (very young children or mentally handicapped humans) don't ask those questions either.

furthermore there is a reason why in Buddhism this intellectual thinking and questioning is considered unessential to being.