The Ravenous Brain: How The New Science Of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search For Meaning - Plot & Excerpts
Outward signs that they are in distress—squealing when they are in pain—might be a hint that they are aware. But a skeptic will claim that this could purely be a behavioral response, that the animal was programmed to make that noise when it had a certain pressure applied to its skin, but that there is not necessarily any conscious life in between the pressure and the squealing. The obvious yet important fact that animals can’t use language to tell us whether they are aware means that, technically, the skeptic’s position is an entirely valid one. A slightly more suggestive feature of animal behavior than suffering, often overlooked in discussions of the extent of their awareness, is that many animals appear to get bored. Humans may well be ravenous for information, but many other species, too, seem to have a hunger for knowledge that they critically need to meet. If you place animals in a drab lab cage, a dark, simple farm pen, or a zoo enclosure with no objects with which to interact, many of them will soon develop stress behaviors.
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