Octopus, bee, crow: the consciousness debate moves beyond the human
The declaration signed in New York in 2024 held that consciousness in birds and mammals enjoys strong scientific support, and that in fishes, reptiles, cephalopods and insects it is 'a realistic possibility'. A conference at Duke in November asks the next question: what is welfare, and how is it measured?
On 19 April 2024, in New York, a text appeared over the signatures of forty scientists and philosophers: the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. The number of signatories later rose above eighty.
The text is short and carefully built. It says two things.
First: there is strong scientific support for attributing conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.
Second: the empirical evidence indicates that conscious experience is a realistic possibility in all vertebrates — reptiles, amphibians and fishes included — and in many invertebrates, at the least the cephalopod molluscs, the decapod crustaceans and insects.
The declaration's force lies less in what it claims than in what it declines to claim.
It does not say that insects are conscious. It says there is a realistic possibility that they are.
This is not merely scientific caution; it is an ethical move. Moral decision does not require certainty. If the chance that a creature can suffer is serious enough, leaving that chance out of the reckoning is not a defensible position.
It is the logic of reasonable doubt in criminal law turned round. There, one may not convict without certainty; here, one may not remain indifferent without it.
The German Society for Philosophy has launched a working group on philosophy and National Socialism, conceding that the subject has no settled place in research or teaching. In Beijing, sixty scholars debated how to build a 'Chinese autonomous philosophical knowledge system', a phrase that belongs to Xi Jinping. And a sociologist's book on reproduction in Palestine/Israel reaches a philosophy audience.
Among the first forty names are specialists in human consciousness — Christof Koch, Anil Seth, David Chalmers — specialists on birds — Nicola Clayton, Irene Pepperberg — on fish — Culum Brown, Becca Franks — on octopuses — Jennifer Mather, Robyn Crook, Peter Godfrey-Smith — and on insects — Lars Chittka, Andrew Barron, Martin Giurfa.
The list also tells you something about the shape of the argument.
Chalmers and Seth stand in opposing camps in the file on the hard problem we publish today: one holds that functional organisation is what settles the matter, the other that biology is indispensable.
But on animal consciousness they sign the same text.
That is no accident. What divides them over artificial intelligence is the question of whether silicon can stand in for carbon. With animals no such question arises: the octopus and we alike have carbon-based bodies, with a metabolism, interacting with an environment.
Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds is the book that makes this point best. The octopus evolved a complex nervous system independently of us. Our common ancestor lived half a billion years ago and had almost no nervous system at all. The octopus is intelligence invented a second time, by a separate route.
In Godfrey-Smith's formulation, meeting an octopus is the closest we come to meeting an alien intelligence.
What makes the declaration genuinely provocative is the insects.
A honeybee's brain holds about a million neurons. A human brain holds eighty-six billion. The ratio is beyond grasping.
Yet the work in Lars Chittka's laboratory shows that bees can learn to roll balls, that they learn from one another, that they display play-like behaviour and that they undergo states resembling negative ones.
The question that follows is plain and hard: how much brain does consciousness require?
If the answer is that a million neurons may be enough, then consciousness is far more widespread than we supposed. If the answer is that scale is what decides, then we owe an account of where that scale begins.
The declaration looked at the question of who might be conscious. The next question is harder.
On 20-21 November 2026 a conference under the title Philosophy of Animal Welfare convenes at Duke University. It is organised jointly by Duke's Center on Law, Economics and Public Policy (CLEPP) and NYU's Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy.
Its focus is the nature, the measurement and the moral significance of animal welfare.
The questions in the call for papers show how open the matter remains:
Which animals are subjects of welfare?
Which is the right theory of wellbeing for non-human animals?
Can one and the same theory apply to humans and to animals alike?
How should animal welfare be measured?
The third is particularly awkward. Theories of human wellbeing — hedonism, preference satisfaction, the objective list — presuppose a creature that can reflect on its own life. What could preference satisfaction mean for an octopus?
The link between this debate and the argument over artificial intelligence is not a coincidence. NYU's Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy, co-organiser of the Duke conference, is also one of the centres of work on the welfare of artificial systems.
The logic is the same: a creature need not reason in order to merit moral consideration; being able to suffer is enough.
The criterion goes back to Bentham, and it took its place at the centre of contemporary ethics through the work of Peter Singer, which we covered this week — and it is now being extended towards machines.
The argument about animal consciousness is the rehearsal for that extension. There, at least, we have an evolutionary kinship, a nervous system and an observable repertoire of behaviour.
In artificial systems we have none of these.
If we still cannot produce a criterion for animal consciousness, then everyone who speaks with confidence about machine consciousness owes an explanation.
In Turkey the argument about animal ethics runs mostly on legal ground: animal rights legislation, street animals, shelters.
The philosophical ground is largely empty. Yet the question of which beings belong to the moral community is one that ought to come before legal regulation.
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Will Kymlicka, Thomas Pogge, Philippe Van Parijs, Hannah Arendt
Dundee has suspended its single honours philosophy degree and approved a philosophy-and-AI programme instead; Hertfordshire has stopped recruiting; Kingston's research centre has left the university altogether. Meanwhile the labs hire, Floridi speaks of a 'haemorrhage' and the Fed's table is quoted as vindication. An audit of what the year has actually established.
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