Self-Awareness Is a Uniquely Human Problem
Abstract
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness suggests the evidence for nonhuman animal awareness is overwhelming, but it fails to support how any necessarily weighs on the topic of consciousness. I suggest here that the Declaration is ill-considered from the outset. Observations of others’ behavior cannot be satisfactory evidence of the kind of consciousness we seek. We should instead consider the conditions under which an organism may come to observe itself. Such self-observation is dependent on discriminative contingencies maintained by a verbal community. As such, only verbal organisms (e.g., most human beings) should be called “conscious.”
Keywords: verbal behavior, consciousness, self-awareness