Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author's Conclusion

• Bringing these ideas into the field of animal behaviour, I’ve looked at a range of diagnostic criteria that might apply. Does the animal:
  1. Have a robust sense of self, centred on sensations?
  2. Engage in self-pleasuring activities – be it listening to music or masturbation?
  3. Have notions of ‘I’ and ‘you’?
  4. Carry their sense of their own identity forward?
  5. Attribute selfhood to others?
  6. Lend out their minds so as to understand others’ feelings?
• Broadly, these tests confirm my hunch that it’s only mammals and birds who make the cut. Chimpanzees, dogs, parrots we can be sure of. Lobsters, lizards, frogs we can rule out.
• Octopuses? They are everybody’s favourite candidate for an outlying species that is sentient. But the behavioural evidence belies this. On the face of it, octopuses don’t find pleasure in sensation-seeking for sensation’s sake; they don’t have a strong sense of themselves as individuals; they don’t attribute selfhood to others; nor do they care.
• What about man-made machines? There are, of course, already machines in existence that see and hear and smell at their own level. But, as with lobsters and frogs, it’s presumably blind-seeing, blind-hearing, blind-smelling. Given the life-tasks that nonsentient animals and machines have been designed to accomplish, we can assume that phenomenal blindness leaves them none the worse off.
• Nevertheless, let’s suppose that, not so far in the future, human engineers were to want to build robots to undertake a task where sentience and selfhood really might play a role: namely, to survive as significant individuals in a world of other phenomenal selves. Then I can imagine that one day the engineers could in fact take a leaf from Nature’s book and, by duplicating the specialised brain circuits responsible for phenomenal consciousness in humans, build sentience into a machine.