The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
We have decided to publish, in it’s entirety, The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (“CDC'“). What is this declaration and what does it mean?
Photo credit: We Animals
We have decided to publish, in it’s entirety, The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (“CDC'“).
What is this declaration and what does it mean? This was a document signed in 2012 by “an international group of prominent scientists, led by computational neuroscientist and neurophysiologist Dr. Philip Low, . . . . . in which they are outlining convergent evidence indicating that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors, and consequently discarding the notion that humans are unique in possessing the neurological substrates of consciousness. Stephen Hawking was the guest of honor at the signing ceremony”.1
The CDC, in essence, rejects the view of French philosopher René Descartes (1596 - 1650) in which he, “maintained that animals cannot reason and do not feel pain; animals are living organic creatures, but they are automata, like mechanical robots. Descartes held that only humans are conscious, have minds and souls, can learn and have language and therefore only humans are deserving of compassion.”2
Reading Descarte’s views on animals may come as a surprise to many. Anyone who has ever interacted with nonhuman animals knows they are conscious, they do feel pain and have emotions - this observational evidence is easily and quickly discernible. Nonetheless, Descartes’ views heavily influenced humanities perspective of non-human animals including within the scientific and legal communities for centuries. It is fair to say that this view of non-human animals pre-existed Descartes, it was those ancient philosophers who provided Descartes with the foundation he needed.
As such, Steven Wise, an Amercian legal scholar and head of the NonHuman Rights Project, once said, “For four thousand years, a thick and impenetrable legal wall has separated all human from all nonhuman animals. On one side, even the most trivial interests of a single species — ours — are jealously guarded. We have assigned ourselves, alone among the million animal species, the status of "legal persons." On the other side of that wall lies the legal refuse of an entire kingdom, not just chimpanzees and bonobos but also gorillas, orangutans, and monkeys, dogs, elephants, and dolphins. They are "legal things." Their most basic and fundamental interests — their pains, their lives, their freedoms — are intentionally ignored, often maliciously trampled, and routinely abused.”
This is why the CDC is such an important moment in science and for nonhuman animals. It is a formal rebuke of centuries of collective cognitive dissonance among the sciences and moral philosophy. Disciplines, ironically, in which one might consider cognitive dissonance antithetical to the intellectual rigours and disciplines of reason and logic required by these otherwise noble human pursuits.
But what also caught our eye upon reading the CDC, is the following sentence: “Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness.”
Please read the declaration. We also provide a link to download the declaration as a PDF.
The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness
On this day of July 7, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals. While comparative research on this topic is naturally hampered by the inability of non-human animals, and often humans, to clearly and readily communicate about their internal states, the following observations can be stated unequivocally:
The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic reevaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field. Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.
The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain regions generates corresponding behavior and feeling states in both humans and non-human animals. Wherever in the brain one evokes instinctual emotional behaviors in non-human animals, many of the ensuing behaviors are consistent with experienced feeling states, including those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these system in humans can also generate similar affective states. Systems associated with affect are concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and nonhuman animals without neocortices retain these brain-mind functions. Furthermore, neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).
Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.
In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing. Pharmacological interventions in nonhuman animals with compounds known to affect conscious behavior in humans can lead to similar perturbations in behavior in non-human animals. In humans, there is evidence to suggest that awareness is correlated with cortical activity, which does not exclude possible contributions by subcortical or early cortical processing, as in visual awareness. Evidence that human and nonhuman animal emotional feelings arise from homologous subcortical brain networks provide compelling evidence for evolutionarily shared primal affective qualia.
We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
* The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was written by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch. The Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 7, 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, by Low, Edelman and Koch. The Declaration was signed by the conference participants that very evening, in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfour Room at the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, UK. The signing ceremony was memorialized by CBS 60 Minutes.
Download: The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.pdf
Footnotes:
Nigel Osborne is the Executive Dir. of Egg-Truth. Nigel has years of experience related to animal rights and on-line advocacy. Nigel's extensive background in the publishing, outdoor advertising, printing and web design industries over the last 25 years provides him with a strong, creative acumen and business management experience. Through Egg-Truth.com and it's social media channels, Nigel seeks to increase awareness among the public about global egg production and expose the conditions for the billions of hens condemned to laying every year.
Eggs Over (dis-)Easy?
(The USDA has been) warning egg producers against the illegal use of false or misleading advertising . . .
In this eight-minute video from Nutrition Facts, consumerist collusion between the USDA and the egg industry are revealed via documents sourced through the Freedom of Information Act. Warning egg producers against the illegal use of false or misleading advertising, the USDA repeatedly advises substitution for the words "safe", "healthy", and "nutritious":
It is no surprise that egg yolks are high in cholesterol, and that eggs are calorie bombs given that their evolutionary purpose is to feed a growing embryo. It is also no surprise that those with a vested financial interest in the production of eggs would seek to ameliorate any negative connotation with their brand or product. What is surprising is the level of self-awareness these companies seem to have about the atrocities they're committing, not only with regard to the health of the humans consuming eggs but also the treatment of the hens to whom they owe their livelihood. What's also surprising is that taxpayers are helping foot the bill for their own manipulation.
A review by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission deems advertising by the egg industy is “false, misleading or deceptive”.
These documents between the USDA and egg companies demonstrate that the federal government has a hand in shaping public perception, re-framing words ("healthy" is now "nutritionally-dense"; "safe" is now "fresh") in what I can only describe as a blatant attempt to pull the wool over our eyes. What's in it for them? What is the financial or moral hook on which the USDA is hanging its cap? Surely fielding such questions and offering alternative verbiage carries a cost to the USDA, an organization so woefully understaffed that poultry farm inspections were given over to farm employees in 2014 due to nationwide USDA inspector shortages.
Denial is a powerful thing, and cognitive dissonance can only be stomached for so long. With these ideas in mind, I had wrongfully assumed that industrial agriculturalists as a whole had all but gone numb to the idea of psychological nuance, patting themselves on the back for a bottom line honestly achieved through good ol' fashioned farm work. Sure you gotta make the cartoon chicken look happy and the farm in the background blood-free. Consumerists can get "overwhelmed" otherwise... but to have the blatant suggestion that advertising should not depict scenes that are "too industrial"--battery cages, large warehouses filled with eggs, machinery, etc.--demonstrates that their willingness to manipulate the psyche of the consumer precedes their concern with demonstrating sterility and mechanized efficiency, reducing hens to units on a Henry Ford production line.
Wow. The fact that these companies are still having to mitigate consumer feelings for the hen after all that commodification and utilitarian production speaks volumes to the innate strength of empathy in avian-human connection. I guess that's the silver lining here. Bottom line, egg consumption can lead to heart disease, and perhaps even worse, heart dis-ease: that achy feeling that creeps in when empathy is swallowed by dissociation.
This blog post is re-published with the permission of Elizbeth M. Burton-Crow, Ph.D.
Egg-Blog contributor: Elizabeth M. Burton-Crow, Ph.D. currently works at the Depth Psychology Program, Pacifica Graduate Institute. Elizabeth does research in Philosophy of Science, Ecopsychology, and Trans-species Ethics. Her current project is 'Poultry, Parrots, and People: Exploring Psyche Through the Lens of Avian Captivity'. Dr. Crow is also a facuity member of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence
Learning How to Speak Bird
Did you know that in this very moment, there are tens of billions of birds held in captivity?
Photo credit: We Animals Media
Did you know that in this very moment, there are tens of billions of birds held in captivity? Worldwide, “commercialized” chickens alone outnumber us by a ratio of nearly seven to one. That’s seven chickens for every human on the planet, more if you consider apartment hens and backyard flocks, a growing trend in many cities and suburban areas.
Despite its astounding prevalence, avian captivity as a phenomenon remains all but invisible, something most people hardly even think about, let alone talk about. (And frankly, those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo would prefer to keep it that way.)
The deafening silence surrounding bird captivity is what inspired me to find my voice and more recently, to undertake a five-year study on “Poultry, Parrots, and People” in order to delve into the psychological aspects of bird confinement. What I discovered is that while the motivations underlying avian captivity are as varied as the species we keep, most share one theme in common: commodification at the expense of the birds.
Parrots, for example, are often sought for their beauty and companionship—aesthetic friendship for purchase at a pretty price. Yet beauty fades and relationships are complicated, leaving many parrots left to languish alone—or worse. By contrast, the chickens, ducks, geese, and other species we refer to collectively as “poultry” are not considered in post-industrialist society as individuals at all so much as means to an end: feathers, eggs, and flesh measured most efficiently in dollars per pound. The end result is the same for poultry as it is for parrots—or worse.
Psychology informs us that commodification is, in essence, a form of objectification, a psychological projection that inflicts harm on an unfathomable scale, both to birds and to us as their captors. Peeling back this Cartesian projection reveals its irrational nature, for humanity’s collective lack of consideration for living, breathing birds is a strange paradox given that our affinity for avian beings is an ancient one, steeped in rich symbolic potency informed by the experiences of countless generations. So why is there currently such a wide schism between our perception (and treatment) of the birds we encounter in day-to-day life and those of our imagination, the sacred metaphorical images that speak in the universal language of the archetypes?
Perhaps in holding the tension of these opposing forces, we have forgotten a third thing, the one at the heart of the matter: The birds themselves.
In my experience, if you spend enough time with a bird, you will begin to see the true colors of their character. They are nothing short of magnificent, far brighter than any feather. The birds i’ve known are sparkling and imaginative and playful, sometimes generous, always curious, and oftentimes rude. They are individuals with their own personalities, just like you and me. (I guess it turns out the species divide might just be another one of those pesky psychological projections.)
With these newly-honed avian eyes I can see it is no longer enough to speak about birds; we need to learn to speak with them, to include their voices in the conversation. This realization inspired me to create the short film “A Bird Tail”, narrated from the perspective of a backyard Ameraucana hen named Pimento, one of the many avian loves of my life. I invite you to watch the film, to get to know Pimento and to fall in love with her, too.
Because isn’t Love the most motivating force of all, stronger than psychological projections like objectification and speciesism? Surely our love for all living things compels us to take flight in the face of immeasurable odds, to get our hands dirty, to learn how to speak for (and to!) Birds and other animals—beginning with telling the Egg-Truth about eggs, for instance.
So I implore you, dear reader, to seek your catalyst. Find not only your voice but the courage to wield it, to crow until you’re blue in the face, until you’re absolutely certain you’ve woken every
Sleeping
Neighbor.
Billions of silenced birds depend upon it.
Egg-Blog contributor: Elizabeth M. Burton-Crow, Ph.D. currently works at the Depth Psychology Program, Pacifica Graduate Institute. Elizabeth does research in Philosophy of Science, Ecopsychology, and Trans-species Ethics. Her current project is 'Poultry, Parrots, and People: Exploring Psyche Through the Lens of Avian Captivity'. Dr. Crow is also a facuity member of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence