Mental States and Animals
In the last post, we discussed whether computers could have mental states. This is a highly controversial issue, especially among philosophers. What’s relatively not controversial, even among philosophers, is whether animals have mental states. By “animals” I mean non-human animals. Anyone who has had a cat or a dog as a pet takes it for granted that animals have mental states. Many pet owners describe their pets as being highly intelligent. [Watch this video and you will see some amazing intelligent crow behavior.] Besides intelligence, many pet owners say that their animals have the following mental states: sensations (e.g. they are in pain), perceptions (e.g. they can see and smell and hear and taste), emotions (e.g. they are scared or excited or happy), desires (e.g. they are hungry or tired) and memories (e.g. they remember where who you are or where a bone is buried – check out this video). Some pet owners even insist that their dogs dream. If these pet owners are correct, then animals, at least some of them, such as dogs, maybe even cats, have many of the types of mental states that humans have.
But how similar are the mental states of non-human animals to the mental states of humans? Humans have thoughts about things. But can dogs or cats have thoughts about things? When you have a thought about something you think about it in a certain way, from a certain ‘conceptual point of view’. For instance, I think that there are electric cars in the United States, my thought is directed at something (cars) under a certain description (as being electric and existing in the United States). If we say that an animal has a thought, do we know what the thought is about. For instance, if you tell a dog to jump in the car, and the dog does it, do we know what the dog is thinking about? Is it thinking anything about the car? Does it think of it as something that has wheels or an engine? Probably not. If it is thinking of it as a car, how does it conceive of a car? If we cannot answer this, can we say that it has an thought about the car, or more generally, any thoughts at all?
Even if we can know that animals have thoughts and what their thoughts are about, there isn’t much evidence that most animals have higher-order thoughts. A higher-order thought is a thought that is directed at another mental state, such as being in pain. We have thoughts about things in the world, e.g. cars and trees. But we also can think about our thoughts about these things. We can also think about the thoughts of others. Thus, we have higher-order thoughts.
According to some philosophers, the fact that we have higher-order thoughts explains why our actions can be morally evaluated. When we do something for a reason, we can think think about the reason and evaluate whether it’s a moral reason. Did she kill her husband because she thought she was threatened? If her reason for acting was that she felt threatened, then we may decide that her act of killing is not wrong. Animals seem to act for reasons. The cat bit my foot because he was hungry. But is there any evidence that an animal can think about its reasons for acting. Can the cat think about its hunger. There is little to no evidence that a dog or a cat can think about its own thoughts or the thoughts of others. Furthermore, if an animal cannot think about its own thoughts, then, according to some philosophers, this means that the animal cannot have conscious mental states.
Before we discuss these challenges to animal mental states, I want to explain why most philosophers agree with pet owners that animals have at least some mental states, even though we cannot experience or directly observe them.