Spider Research—Are We the Killjoys at the Animal-Consciousness Party?
Abstract
A recent declaration that consciousness is widespread throughout the animal kingdom might suggest that finding evidence of consciousness is the proper basis on which to decide an animal’s welfare matters. The welfare of spiders, the animals we use for our research on cognition, matters to us but we have no evidence of spider consciousness or see how there ever could be. Asking for evidence of consciousness is asking for a subjective, first-person understanding of what a spider experiences. To us, reference to consciousness is an unappealingly people-centered perspective from which to appreciate spiders.
Keywords: cognition, spiders, objective vs. subjective