In this video I describe a spectrum of consciousness, ranging from minimal consciousness up to full human consciousness. Along the way, recognition of the self may be an important marker for differentiating some animals. The ability to be self-conscious and view oneself as an object rather than just being the subject experiencing consciousness seems to be limited to a small number of animals. The mark test devised by Gordon Gallup has identified some level of self-awareness in chimps and has been demonstrated in other animals as well, including orangutans, elephants, dolphins, and magpies. It’s important to remember that this recognition test doesn’t tell us how often animals view themselves as objects when mirrors aren’t around or about the richness of their self-awareness.
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Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we looked at a number of problems associated with trying to understand consciousness but when we talked about consciousness we referred to it in general. We didn’t specify different possible types of consciousness so that’s what I’d like to do in this video.
One way of doing this is to think of consciousness as a spectrum. We have sort of the low end of the sort of lowest level of what we might consider to be consciousness all the way up to the rich full experience of consciousness that we might think of as human consciousness, as sort of being the highest level of consciousness that we’re really able to think about. So what’s at this lower end? Well this is what we call minimal consciousness.
Minimal consciousness just refers to the ability to react to stimuli. So if an organism is able to show some response to its environment this indicates that it has some awareness, some level of awareness of its environment. The sort of lowest level of this would be what we call minimal consciousness. Now this does not imply that there’s some experience of being this organism, right? It just shows that they can respond to the environment; they have an awareness of the environment in some way but it doesn’t mean that it feels like something to be that organism.
So plants, for instance, have minimal consciousness. They can respond to the environment. They can move in response to things like light but we don’t necessarily think that it feels like something to be a tree. We don’t think there’s an experience of being a plant. Ok, as we move up our spectrum of consciousness we reach a point that distinguishes some organisms from others and this is the ability not just to have awareness of the environment but to have awareness of the self; to be able to reflect on yourself as being an object in the world not just being the subject that experiences the world. This is the point which we refer to as self-consciousness.
Of course, humans have this ability. We can view ourselves as objects in the world. We can imagine how other people view us and we might wonder about other animals. So how would we go about testing this? How can we test whether an animal can view itself as an object? Well one test that’s used is called the mark test and this was developed by Gordon Gallup in 1970. Gallup worked with chimps to see if they had some level of self-consciousness.
What the mark test refers to is you give the animal some experience with mirrors right, so in Gallup’s case he gave chimps access to mirrors. Of course, the first time an animal sees the mirror it might think that that’s another chimp but he hoped that over time the chimps would learn to recognize themselves in mirrors. They would sort of understand how mirrors work and know that, you know, that’s not another chimp that’s me. Then what Gallup did is after he gave the chimps experience with mirrors he discreetly placed a spot of dye on a chimp’s face and then he gave the chimp the opportunity to interact with a mirror again. What he wanted to know is will the chimp realize that that spot of dye is on his own face. That would indicate that he knows that it’s him in the mirror not another chimp.
Rather than looking at the mirror and saying you know “that chimp has something weird on his face” he looks in the mirror says “I have something weird on my face” and then the idea is the chimp would try to remove it by touching his own face. So if he looks in the mirror, sees this orange spot, and then rubs his own face that would tell us that the chimp is able to view himself as an object. He is able to recognize himself in the mirror.
We can do this test with other animals and other animals have passed this test. So of course humans passed this test and we pass it starting around age 18 months. That’s when we’re able to start recognizing ourselves in mirrors but other animals who have passed this test are chimps and orangutans, elephants, dolphins, and possibly some bird species including magpies. So it’s important to remember that this mirror test shows us that an animal can recognize itself in a mirror but we don’t really know what that means in terms of their level of self-awareness.
So we might wonder if chips think about themselves as objects when mirrors aren’t around and how often do they do this and how rich is their perception of themselves? How detailed is it compared to a human’s? We don’t really have good answers to these questions. Now as we move up from self-consciousness, up to this sort of full level of rich human experience we can start thinking about different types of consciousness within that; different levels of consciousness that humans have and so that’s what we’ll look at in the next video.
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