Animal consciousness and thinking
Given how difficult it is to study consciousness in people, it is not surprising that the nature of animal consciousness is even less well understood. The debate about the use of animals in research makes this an even more difficult area.
In 1974, Thomas Nagel published an influential article 'What is it like to be a bat?' He was arguing that it was essentially impossible to put oneself into someone else's head and share their subjective experiences. We certainly couldn't possibly imagine what was going on inside a bat's brain.
But how about other aspects of consciousness, such as awareness? Do animals have anything approaching theory of mind? The obvious problem with animal studies in this area is that they cannot tell us what they are thinking. So the causes of any action have to be deduced and their implications inferred.
A classic problem is to distinguish between an association and a thought-through action. So a simple creature like a slug will soon learn to avoid an unpleasant stimulus, by conditioned learning or association (like Pavlov's dogs) but that does not mean it has thought about the consequences of the stimulus. But what about a rat? Or a dog? Might they be able to think things through?
These issues are beginning to be tackled experimentally. For example, rats have been shown to be able to learn from observing and then apply knowledge in a different situation – which would not be possible by learning by association. Birds such as crows seem to have similar abilities. Some go as far as to suggest that crows and parrots, the smartest avians, may have the same brainpower as apes.
And there is at least some evidence that macaque monkeys can imagine what others are perceiving (it could tell whether a human handler could see a grape or not, stealing it when the handler could not see it). They may thus possess some level of theory of mind.