When we ask if other creatures are “conscious” what I think we really want to know is this impossible question of what it would feel like to be a cat or a barnacle (or an eagle wheeling on a warm swell of air above our cities.) We can, to some degree, imagine what it might be like to inhabit the bodies of other living things, but to experience their minds? That is another matter.
With close cousins we could imagine some process to match neuron to neuron and project some of the patterns of electrical activity from one mind to another. (Although the variation in function of just human minds makes this idea limited.) Perhaps, rather than trying to find analogous structures, we should just expand our minds. Continue to think with our own bodies but then expand our awareness to include the other. (and do we notice that in doing this, their minds incorporate ours?)
This has been my issue with comparative psychology for a while. It makes limited practical sense to try & measure intelligence through the adaptations of our senses & organs. We don't have wings, whiskers or gills. Conversely, saying that an owl is unintelligent because it wouldn't crack a nut or that "a dog has the IQ of a 5-year old human" shows the immaturity of our scientific thought. If a human was to be magically turned into, say, a bee, they'd likely perish quite quickly.
@illumniscate “immaturity of our scientific thought” is an excellent way to describe it.
@illumniscate @futurebird 
"Humans Fail at Basic Communicative Dance Tasks, are 'Unintelligent', Bee Scientists Find"
“She tried to give me directions to the flower.. but then just made noises & didn’t say anything! And she didn’t even bother to barf a little taste of the nectar for me so I have no idea if she was even talking about real flowers.” (bees assume everyone who is “doing things” is female, this was in response to a male scientist who was trying to get the bee to go to the blue dot for his bee IQ test.)
“she is so huge, she must think very slowly.”
@futurebird @bujold @illumniscate perhaos ABI will help us
@bujold @illumniscate @futurebird This is a wonderful analogy!
OTOH, when I wonder whether a creature is "conscious", I wonder if it sees itself separate from the rest of the universe, at the center of their own universe, as humans start doing in their 3rd year. I don't care if they communicate that by smell, sound, dance, or by scratching their wings ear-splittingly. I wonder if they have a, any, concept of "me".
To the best of our knowledge only very few species produce such creatures.
Frans de Waal, dutch primatologist, and animal cognition expert, wrote a great book on this, _Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?_, in which he details the many difficulties in studying animal cognition, and how badly people have mis-estimated the cognitive abilities of many animals. Unfortunately, most of his examples are necessarily about primates, but he's very clear the same problems are more severe for less charismatic animals.
Thanks, I'll give it a read!
@llewelly @illumniscate @futurebird Came here to say this, found you'd said it already. It's a very good book! (Also, his thing on what apes can teach us about gender is interesting without being transphobic.)
@illumniscate Agreed!
It wasn't even a comment on intelligence, yet I'm also reminded of Wittgenstein here: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." @futurebird
@futurebird There are so many cans of worms, so to speak, around the notion of putting oneself in another creature's shoes. We suck massively at it even with other humans. I suspect we vary a lot in our ability to conceive of minds different from our own, and that this compounds the problem. How can you have a discussion with me about our cognitive differences if the very notion of cognitive differences doesn't compute for me, because that's one of the differences we have in the first place?