The Cat's Cry for Help Theory
Let's try and define consciousness
The Consciousness Conundrum: A Reductive View
YouTube's algorithm never ceases to amaze me, and today it did so by showing me a video where I encountered the term Reductive Consciousness. This posits that consciousness is not separate from the body or matter, as dualism postulates, nor that every material body inherently possesses consciousness, as panpsychism suggests. Let’s also rule out monism, which states that everything is part of one consciousness, as the comedian Bill Hicks eloquently put it with a beautiful example of what news could be like outside the current obscene mainstream:
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves...
Now here’s Tom with the weather”
There are many other theories, but my favorite is undoubtedly Reductionism. As a current Psychology student, behavior is no longer such an abstract concept, and Neuroscience has provided us with a series of insights in this regard. It's no wonder many neuroscientists fill bookshelves with books about Dopamine, Serotonin, or: “what science says about something.”
All very nice, but when it comes to the abstraction of consciousness, science faces certain handling difficulties, and philosophy proves to be a very good companion. There's a study that attempted to measure consciousness in a certain way: Benjamin Libet's experiment. They made several attempts to measure the temporal relationship between brain activity, the conscious intention, and the execution of a voluntary act.
His findings, in summary, were that there was a difference of approximately 550 milliseconds between brain activity and the conscious act, and 200 milliseconds between brain activity and the report of consciousness (the intention or desire to do something).
That is to say, before performing any action or even wanting to perform it, brain activity was already underway. This study, of course, has a series of criticisms, and the topic is not settled, but despite its questioning and the study's purpose (which was related to decision-making), somehow it became a subject of debate about free will. Libet defended free will by stating there was a 100 to 150-millisecond window in which the decision could be retracted, but without supporting evidence, it didn't contribute much and, due to lack of proof, turned it into a more philosophical matter.
And this is where I want to take the discussion: assuming that brain activity occurs prior to a conscious act, we could say that the brain determines consciousness. Unfortunately, while we can estimate which neurotransmitters are released after some experience or stimulus, like endorphins from eating a delicious chocolate, we cannot reverse engineer the process to know which stimulus triggered the released neurotransmitters.
Humans have an infinite source of stimuli that bring them happiness, or in the case of masochists, some can even derive pleasure from pain. Without losing focus, what I aim to establish is that there is a strict relationship between consciousness (let's call it mind) and the brain.
That said, consciousness needs to be defined. When you Google an answer, or ask an artificial intelligence, it's generally defined as:
"The capacity of a being to perceive, feel, know, and be aware of its own existence and its surroundings."
Now, anyone could argue that this applies to both humans and animals. When a prey animal hears a predator, it is aware that there is danger nearby. They perceive with their senses, they feel happiness, joy and other feelings, they know and learn things (monkeys using tools or elephants learning to drink water with their trunks by carrying it into their mouths, not with it, sorry) and being aware of one and others could be applied to both prays and predators during hunting.
So, with this example, and this simple way of explaining it, lead me to my conclusion. What is called consciousness, for me, would be something like:
"The overdeveloped instinct of attention, on our external and internal environment, individualized by the neuronal connectome, aided by the capacity for planning and memory, with the ability to think and communicate what it attends to."
*By "internal environment" I refer to both the psyche and bodily integrity and homeostasis.
**I will delve deeper into this definition in another post.
"The Cat's Cry for Help Theory"
When an animal is conscious of danger, it knows its own existence is threatened. This triggers the famous self-preservation sense of fight or flight, usually originated in the amygdala, which sends signals to the autonomic nervous system, creating a stress reaction that we could reduce to "I am in danger." There are too many examples in the animal world, and I’m no zoologist or biologist, so bear with me…
To me this is, in a primitive level, what we call Self-Awareness. When a cat gets stressed and crouches, it is, in a way, communicating that it is in a stressful situation, while instinctively responding to a threat by making itself look bigger.
Now, imagine if it had the ability to shout: "Help!" This single word would imply the following:
It recognizes that its integrity (its "self") is in danger.
That, in attempting to plan both escape or fight, it has determined it cannot free itself and needs another entity to rescue it with the ability to do so. So, recognition of self, other entities with rational distinctions: the danger and the other conscious being (let’s say a human who may help).
It has the ability to express itself to another through language. We could apply the same exercise with a cat using sign-language.
It can be recognized by another conscious being. In this case, a human.
*I will talk about Koko the gorilla who could do that later as well, and no, parrots and crows don’t count. For now, let’s stick to the cat.
**Also, I’m not talking about the interpretation of a message given by the conscious being, we tend to attribute anthropological meaning to non-conscious beings.
The ability to articulate a concept like "help" goes beyond a mere reflex or an instinctive vocalization. It implies an abstract understanding of its own situation, an evaluation of the threat, and the conceptualization of a solution that lies outside its immediate capabilities. Furthermore, it requires the capacity to attribute agency and the possibility of intervention to another being, and the ability to encode that need into a symbol (the word "help") that is comprehensible to that "other." This level of cognitive processing, which integrates self-awareness, situation assessment, planning for an external solution, and intentional symbolic communication, is what elevates the action of "asking for help" to a potential demonstration of consciousness in a more complex sense.
Of course, there's the evolutionary side, which might suggest that the cat adapted its meow to resemble human language upon noticing that with these phonemes, humans come to help others. But for the sake of the exercise, let's put this aside for a moment.
According to Sartre, existence is defined by our interaction with the world; therefore, the concept of self-awareness, by itself, is not enough to argue for the existence of consciousness by others who don't have it. Hence, it must be able to express itself. Animal language is full of codes, like the language of whales and the management of frequencies. Until we understand what they are saying with the intention they are saying it, we cannot recognize their consciousness. This is the key phrase: consciousness must be recognized by another conscious being. If the cat barked, and it was recognized by a dog, we conscious beings would not be able to understand what happened to the cat, except as an anecdotal anomaly.
This is merely the presentation of this theory. But we can play with it trying to figure out, what word would be enough to attribute consciousness, let’s say that the cat asks for food when it’s hungry or when it’s not hungry. Let’s say it shouts your name. Surely we can add more words to it, but since I’m a reductionist, a simple word should suffice for now.