Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do some species of nonhuman animals (hereafter “animals”) enjoy consciousness and to which degree? This is a notoriously difficult question for at least two reasons, namely first we need a sufficiently clear concept of consciousness and second it remains difficult to characterize convincing strategies of access to conscious experiences in other species since we then have to rely on third-person access and mostly on behavioral data. Lacking a communicative access to animal minds, it is difficult to justify an analogy argument. Let us characterize central open question guiding the symposium: (1) Concerning the scientific access: How can we develop a nonverbal access to conscious experiences in animals? (2) Are there behavioral markers of consciousness in animals? (3) What is the main functional role of consciousness from an evolutionary perspective? (4) Can we offer a conceptual framework which allows us to adequately characterize evolutionary old basic forms of consciousness and its relation to standard consciousness experiences in humans? The symposium is arranged with four talks which together aim at outlining answers to these questions.