Did you know? **Turtles, water snakes, crocodiles, alligators, dolphins, whales, and other water going creatures will drown if kept underwater too long.**
As you can already notice, this question has always been tricky and worried many philosophers, scientists, researches, and ordinary people. This relates not only to creatures, but also to human beings. What does science say about this? What evidence we’ve got?
The investigation of this subject had led to various findings that greatly contribute to our understanding of animal cognition and communication.
One of the investigations involves neuroscience studies. In general, scientists emphasize 5 elements which define animals’ consciousness (acc. to faunalytics):
- Emotions: defined as a factor influencing our cognitive capacities related to judgment, learning, or memory, is not exclusive to humans. Many animals, including fish, exhibit indications of emotional changes that mirror our own experiences.
- Metacognition: a concept encapsulating "thinking about thinking," is a subject of scientific inquiry concerning animals. Researchers investigate two facets of metacognition in animals: the capacity to assess one's own state of knowledge and the ability to recognize one's lack of knowledge, prompting the pursuit of additional information.
- Processing of past and future: The ability to remember the past and plan for the future.Specific experiments have demonstrated these capabilities in primates, weasels, and corvids (crows and ravens).
- Social behavior: refers to how animals engage with one another in groups, involves social cognition. This includes the ability to infer the knowledge, emotions, and intentions of other group members, crucial for building and sustaining relationships. These capacities rely on intricate cognitive processes that are likely interconnected with consciousness.
- Human-animal relationships: Encompasses the ability of some animals to adjust their behavior when interacting with humans. For example, dogs will act differently towards humans than they do towards other dogs and are capable of recognizing distinct human individuals.
On top of that, the scientists have examined particular neurobiological structures that refer to counsciousness, such as the forebrain found in numerous mammals. Although this structure has not been identified in birds and fish, equivalent structures seem to be present in these species. Hence, neurobiology can help us in serving as a valuable indicator suggesting the potential for consciousness in non-human species.
What about memory? Behavioral studies have provided valuable insights into animal communication and expression. It has been discovered that dolphins, for example, are able to keep lifelong social memories ever recorded for a non-human species.news.uchicago. It is a critical indication showing that dolphins have a level of cognitive sophistication comparable to only a few other species, including humans, chimpanzees and elephants. Dolphins’ talent for social recognition may be even more long-lasting than facial recognition among humans, since human faces change over time, but the signature whistle that identifies a dolphin remains stable over many decades.
Birds have an incredible form of bird communication. Bird communication using sound includes singing, calls, squeaks, squawks, gurgles, warbles, trills, rattles, gulps, pops, whines, clicks, croaks, drums, whistles, howls, tremolos, thumps, honks and many other sorts of sounds.
Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.
Advancements in the field of machine learning have also played a role in investigating the ability to understand animals' thoughts. It led to improved speech recognition technology, and taking on animal speech represents an entirely new horizon for AI translation technology. A great contribute of recognising animals thoughts was made by Dr Constantine Slobodchikoff, who is an expert in animal referential communication. He studies using prairie dogs as a model species. Dr Slobodchikoff has been able to index the sounds made by prairie dogs to synthesise their language into English using electronics with AI to maintain and develop the catalogue and to further allow the computer to learn on its own to translate the animal talking to a great extent.
Further, a company is developing a program using AI analysis software along with CHAT to decipher what dolphins speak.The software for decoding human language is currently used to collect information about the type of emotion a speaker is exuding, and the program has already mastered 40 human languages. Companies interested in this utility believe that decoding dolphins will further this capability.
The same technology is also being used to translate the sounds of other animals. Sounds made by animals have different patterns and intonations tied to different concepts and words. Scientists feed these to a computer that maps out their meaning and context. So far, the program has recorded with refinement, distinguishing hundreds of different gibbon calls.
For sure, there are a lot of serious chalenges in interpreting animal behavior and the limitations of our current scientific methodologies. The research will be continued for a long time, and we will learn more and more exciting cognitive facts of the creatures we share our planet with. The sky is the limit.
