Animal conciousness?

Today's introduction to the theoretical foundation of the new media left me with many thoughts and mixed feelings. Mixed, in the sense that it became clear that I will have to venture deep into a obscure landscape that is unfamiliar and even intimidating. The grand theories of Semiotics, Structuralism, of Knowledge and Conciousness; of Ontology and cousin Epistomology and so forth, are certainly not the easiest of subjects. Ask a group of average academicians about these questions and you throw them into contemplative silence, or possibly a fistfight. So how can little I and I make sense of this Gordian knot of intertwined theoretical snakes? Maybe I'm too dense to understand all this? To create a coherent roadmap out of this maze seems like one big Mission Impossible.

Still, one thing springs to mind, a peg to hang something on: I feel familiar with the question of animal conciouness. Anyone who ever had close contact with an animal will readily testify that they certainly have feelings, memory, and that they can and do suffer. Only the most insensitive will deny animals a conciousness, a sense of self. Perhaps not in the way we think about ourselves, but surely more than many credit them. To deny animals conciousness or soul, and implicitly a moral standing, serves us well. After all, we have a long tradition of claiming a God-given right to use and exploit animals as we please, no question asked. Descartes, the french philosopher, is said to have viewed animals from a purely mechanical perspective; animals had no feelings, far less any observable conciousness: he spoke of birds as small "clockworks" and curiosly recorded their reactions as he pulled off a wing or a foot. When we know the meaningless and cruel experiments performed on animals by the cosmetics industry (to name but one), we can only regret that we have not developed far from Descartes mechanical empiricism in our inter-specious relationship. From that, animals suffer, and ethically, we suffer too.

Levi-Strauss, the french structuralist proposed an interesting observation in the way we think about animals, as a direct reflection of how we categorize social groups around us: we speak of friends, neighbours, strangers, criminals and so on; indeed exactly in the way we cat(!)egorize animals as pets, livestock, wild animals or vermins to name one group. In Norway, many speak of wolves as "criminal" when they wish to morally defend their extermination, for example by poisoning them. Levi-Strauss, to a large degree inspired by de Sausurre and even the linguist Whorf, concludes that we create meaning of our surroundings by organising phenomena as contrasts and differences in our mind, in dialectic oppositions, if you will. That's why we tend to order our experiences in oppositions, like black/white or day/night or hot/cold. Old Levi-strauss had a point. Makes a lot of sense, if you ask me.

And if you ask my dear old aunt Annie if her beloved (and weight-challenged) Dachs-hound Frederic has a conciousness, she will swear on the Bible that he is not only clearly aware of himself and his "umwelt", but indeed gifted with psychic powers: Frederic can - among a range of impressive feats - predict with great accuracy when she plans to make his dinner. "- Could have had his own TV-show, that dog..", she says. In my conciousness, my aunt Annie and Descartes are organised as dialectic opposites. But who to trust?

-- Posted from my iPhone