Trends Cogn Sci
August 20, 2020
Jonathan Birch, Alexandra K. Schnell, Nicola S. Clayton
394 citations
A multidimensional framework is proposed for understanding how consciousness varies across animal species. Rather than ranking species on a single scale of consciousness, the framework identifies five key dimensions: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments are reviewed and future experiments suggested. By assessing a species against each dimension, a distinctive consciousness profile can be constructed, indicating that no species is simply more or less conscious than another.
Nous
March 1, 2022
Jonathan Birch
227 citations
The debate over whether invertebrates are conscious lacks both agreement and a clear methodology. Three approaches exist: theory-heavy, theory-neutral, and theory-light. Theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches have serious problems, so the author advocates a middle path: the theory-light approach. This approach relies on a minimal hypothesis: that conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities related to that stimulus. This 'facilitation hypothesis' can guide research into invertebrate consciousness. The author argues that what is needed now is not more theory or undirected data gathering, but a systematic search for consciousness-linked cognitive abilities, their relationships, and their sensitivity to masking.
Science (New York, N.Y.)
February 21, 2025
Kristin Andrews, Jonathan Birch, Jeff Sebo
29 citations
A growing scientific field demonstrates that animal feelings can be investigated using rigorous methods, challenging the long-held view that subjective experiences in non-human animals are beyond scientific reach.
History and philosophy of the life sciences
November 22, 2021
Jonathan Birch
24 citations
An essay review contrasts two major theories of animal consciousness: Peter Godfrey-Smith's view that subjective experience is widespread across many animal lineages and Joseph LeDoux's claim that consciousness depends on higher-order brain circuits found only in mammals and birds. The author discusses the motivations behind each picture and attempts to find a middle path between them, weighing evidence from evolution, emotion, and the nature of phenomenal experience.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2026
Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Tim Bayne et al.
A method for assessing whether AI systems might be conscious is presented, drawing on existing neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The approach involves deriving indicators from such theories to inform beliefs about AI consciousness. This method can make progress because computational functionalist theories, which are influential, have empirically testable implications for AI. The work does not claim that any current AI is conscious but outlines a rigorous framework for future assessment.
arXiv Preprint Archive
August 17, 2023
Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Eric Elmoznino et al.
No current AI systems are conscious, but there are no obvious technical barriers to building ones that might be, according to an analysis grounded in neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The report surveys prominent theories—recurrent processing, global workspace, higher-order, predictive processing, and attention schema—and derives computational indicator properties from them. Applying these indicators to recent AI systems yields no evidence of consciousness, but the authors argue that future systems could potentially implement the necessary properties.
Current Biology
August 1, 2023
J. LeDoux, Jonathan Birch, Kristin Andrews et al.
Leading experts in consciousness research address big questions about the relationship between AI and consciousness. The piece presents a multi-perspective discussion, with contributors including philosophers, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists responding to challenges posed by Joseph LeDoux and Jonathan Birch. The experts explore whether AI systems could ever be conscious, what criteria might be used to assess machine consciousness, and how insights from animal and human consciousness research might inform these debates. No single conclusion is reached; instead the work maps the current landscape of scientific and philosophical positions on AI consciousness.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
Jonathan Birch, D. Broom, Heather Browning et al.
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and its own body, a concept easiest to grasp with vision, as Ernst Mach illustrated by drawing his own visual perspective. However, subjective experience encompasses far more than vision, including sounds, odors, tastes, and tactile sensations—a complete sensory world. The text argues that these sensory experiences constitute a full subjective point of view, extending beyond any single sense to shape a person's entire conscious experience of reality.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
A. Crump, Jonathan Birch
The relationship between neural and behavioral evidence for animal consciousness is examined by critically reviewing two recent studies. One study on crows found different neural activity depending on whether a stimulus was reported as seen or unseen, but this implicates neural activity in consciousness only if a specific conditioned behavior is assumed to be a report of conscious experience. Another study on macaques recorded behaviors strikingly similar to patterns of conscious and unconscious perception in humans, yet confounds were only ruled out in human subjects, presupposing substantial neural similarity between humans and macaques.
Philosophical Topics
January 1, 2020
Jonathan Birch
Peter Carruthers argued that if a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is correct and fully reductive, then there are no substantive facts to discover about phenomenal consciousness in nonhuman animals. This paper presents two problems for that conditional. First, it applies a double-standard: the ordinary concept's intuitive non-gradability is treated as unchallengeable by future science, while its intuitive determinacy is predicted to be abandoned. Second, it prematurely dismisses the live possibility that phenomenal consciousness may be linked to a core global broadcast mechanism determinately shared by many animals. Future science may challenge the non-gradability of phenomenal consciousness but is unlikely to eliminate facts about it outside healthy adult humans.