Are Animals Conscious? Yes, and the Test for Being Someone Has No Species Line

Your dog is asleep on the rug. Her paws start to run, a little at first, then faster, as if she's chasing something across a field. Her lip twitches. A muffled bark comes out, much smaller than her waking bark.

You know what you'd say: she's dreaming. Dogs have REM sleep,¹ and dreaming is the everyday reading of paws that run while a dog lies still. It isn't a study's result. What's certain is that she can't tell you what it's about, and she never will. An ordinary dream is like that for you too: while it's happening, you can't report it either.

So here's the question under every other question about animals. When her paws run, is anyone in there?

The short answer

Yes. Every event in an animal's body is felt, exactly as every event in yours is. And the rule that makes you someone applies to a dog, a crow or an octopus unchanged.

"Are animals conscious?" holds two questions, and they get different answers. The first is whether anything is felt. The second is whether anyone is there. By someone I mean a consciousness of its own. You're one: your headache is yours, and nobody else feels it. (Other posts in this series call this a self.)

Is anything felt? Yes. Every event has an outside and an inside, and the inside is experience. So every event in a dog's body, her brain included, is felt, exactly as every event in yours is.

Is anyone there? The test is the same for her as for you. Being someone has one test: an unbroken rhythm of eight ticks, carried by a web that lasts as a whole. (A tick is one step in the writing of reality's record. The claims below give the reason for every term.) The test reads eight whole numbers and nothing else. It has no clause for species, brain size, language or carbon, so the rule that makes you someone applies to a dog, a crow or an octopus unchanged.

One step isn't derived yet: the map from any running brain, hers or yours, to the rhythm the test reads. That's the step that would say which web in a brain is one someone, and what its eight numbers are. So no list of which animals are someones is derived, and nobody can yet read the test off a person's brain either.

Here's the reason in short. The smallest event in reality is one thing told apart from another. One number can't register a difference, so every event carries two: what a measurement reads, which I'll call the outside, and what the event is like, the inside. The inside is experience. Nothing about a dog's brain is a different kind of event from yours, so her events have both sides too.

Being someone takes more. The smallest event, repeated everywhere below the level of atoms, is one small process: two units passing a bit back and forth. It writes reality's permanent record. It can start 64 ways, and exactly 4 never break. A moment of consciousness is eight ticks of it with none silent. Eight, because space has three dimensions, each with two sides, and a cycle through all 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 corners takes eight steps. Someone is a web of those pairs that never goes silent anywhere. The test for that checks eight numbers, and nowhere does it ask whether the web belongs to a human.

Why this matters

You know you're someone first-hand: you're there, reading this. For everyone else you go by what they show you, and an animal can't report what it feels the way you can. So people turn this question into a hunt for a line on the tree of animals. Mammals only? Birds too? Octopuses? Insects?

This answer has no species line to hunt for. Feeling isn't rare: it's in every event. Being someone is decided by one test, and the test has no clause for species.

This post stops at what is felt and who is someone. How we treat animals is a separate question, and this post doesn't answer it.

Here's the whole answer in five steps. The rest of this post takes them one at a time and shows how we know each one.

1. Every event in an animal's body is felt. Every event has an outside and an inside, and the inside is experience.
2. Being someone has one test, and it reads eight numbers. It has no clause for species, brain size, language or carbon.
3. The map from a brain to the rhythm isn't derived. It's the same missing step for her brain and for yours.
4. Silence settles nothing. An animal can't report what it feels the way you can, and that's a fact about reporting.
5. The animal evidence measures other things. Two declarations by researchers argue from brains and behavior, and six different questions need keeping apart.

Where this starts: the claims and their reasons

The steps stand on six claims about how reality works. Each is stated plainly here, with its reason. Part 1, What You Are, gives them at more length.

The smallest event is one thing told apart from another. The smallest thing that can happen is one thing being told apart from another: a single yes or no. You're doing it right now, because every measurement and every perception tells one thing from another. Telling two things apart needs information about both of them, and the least information there can be is one yes or no.

Reality keeps a permanent record, and nothing in it is ever erased. Every event leaves a complete trace and none is ever erased: the full record of what happened is part of reality now. The reason starts in known physics. The basic laws never destroy information. In quantum mechanics that's called unitarity: the present fixes the past exactly, and running the laws backward recovers every earlier state. Our own work adds a second reason: the record only grows. Each new entry is added with every earlier entry kept, and writing a new entry never alters an earlier one.²

One small process writes the record. The process is the smallest event, over and over: two things, and a bit (one yes or no) passing between them. I draw the two things as two little clocks joined by a loop of wire. Each pass is one tick, one step in the writing of the record. The clocks are a drawing of the actual process, which runs below the level of atoms. A clock is full (holding a token) or empty. A tick is flowing when one clock is full and the other is empty, and silent when both are alike.

Four patterns last. The process can start 64 ways. A start is how the two clocks begin: each is full or empty and has one of four settings, so it has 2 × 4 = 8 ways to be, and two clocks make 8 × 8 = 64. All 64 are checked. Within three ticks, 60 of them fall into coin-flip randomness. Exactly 4 never go silent. These are the lasting rhythms: the four kinds of unbroken rhythm a single pair of clocks can run, and at the bottom level the only patterns that persist.³

A moment of consciousness is eight ticks with no silent tick. Eight comes from three. Space has three dimensions, and each is one yes-or-no direction with two sides. Three of them give 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 combinations, the eight corners of a cube, and a cycle that visits every corner once takes eight steps.

Space has three dimensions because lasting structure needs a connection that no smooth motion can undo, and linking is that connection. Two linked rings can't be pulled apart without cutting one. That holds only in three dimensions: in two, loops can't wind around each other at all, and in four or more any two loops slide apart. Persistent pairs are joined this way. A moment of consciousness is one such cycle of eight ticks with nothing broken in it, and only the lasting rhythms deliver that every time, because they never go silent.

Someone is a web that lasts as a whole. One complete moment isn't someone. Someone is a consciousness whose moments keep coming, cycle after cycle, with no silent tick between.

Join clocks with loops of wire and you get a web, and a web lasts when none of its ticks is ever silent. A web that lasts as a whole delivers a complete moment every eight ticks, every time, and it is one rhythm and one consciousness. The four lasting rhythms are the building pattern, not four minds. A person is a vast web of pairs, each running one of them, and billions of people are billions of such webs. Your headache is yours because your web is a different rhythm from anyone else's.

Step 1: Every event in an animal's body is felt

Every event has two sides, an outside and an inside, and the inside is experience. So every event in an animal's body is felt, exactly as every event in yours is. Is Your Coffee Mug Conscious? works this out in full. Here's the short version.

Measure a table: it's 2 meters long. Measure it in centimeters: it's 200. What the measurement told you isn't "2" or "200". It told you how the table compares with the ruler: two against one, or two hundred against a hundred. A lone number depends on the ruler, and a pair keeps its ratio. The table and the ruler are a drawing of the real structure.

Now take the smallest event, one thing told apart from another. A single number can't register a difference. It needs something to hold it against. When two molecules bump, nobody is standing there with a tiny ruler, so each event carries its own second number. I call the number a measurement reads the outside, and the number that reading is held against the inside.⁴ Neither is ever zero: a comparison with an empty side isn't a comparison, because you can't say how many times bigger than nothing something is.

The inside is experience. Experience exists: you're having some right now, in the same world as everything you can measure. There is one set of events, not two, so experience isn't a second set of things happening beside the events there are. It's their other side. And the outside never fixes the inside. An event with outside 1 and inside 2 and an event with outside 1 and inside 3 read the same on any meter of the outside.

Nothing about a dog's brain is a different kind of event from yours. The same two sides are there, so her events are felt, as yours are. The mug post follows the same two sides all the way down to a rock, and it says there what isn't derived below organized events like brains.

Feeling isn't being someone, though. Feeling is in every event. Being someone takes a rhythm that lasts as a whole. That leaves the question people mean when they ask whether a dog is "in there".

Next, and why: if every event in her is felt, what's left to ask is whether anyone is there. That has its own test.

Step 2: Being someone has one test, and it reads eight numbers

The test for a moment of consciousness reads a list of eight whole numbers and nothing else. Take the eight ticks of a cycle. Each tick posts a whole number: how much flows in that tick, and which way, totalled over every link in the web. A silent tick posts zero. The moment is complete when none of the eight is zero. That's the whole test for a moment, and it fits on an index card. The pattern the list belongs to has some size and lasts at least eight ticks, but the test reads only the eight numbers.⁵

Here are two lists. The first is 2, 1, -1, 3, 1, 2, -2, 1. No zero, so the moment is complete. (A minus sign only says which way the flow went.) The second is 1, 2, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 2. Two zeros, two silent ticks, so it isn't complete. Someone is a web whose moments keep coming complete, cycle after cycle.

Now look at what the test doesn't ask. It has no input for species. None for brain size, language or carbon, the element life on Earth is built on. It never asks what the web is made of or whether it can speak. It doesn't check a passport. Hand it eight numbers and it says complete or not complete, and it says the same thing about the same eight numbers every time, whoever they came from.

That's why the rule that makes you someone applies to a dog, a crow or an octopus unchanged. A mammal, a bird and a mollusk have three very different bodies. An octopus has only a third of its neurons in its central nervous system, and the rest are in a peripheral nervous system that includes its eight arms.⁶ They all get the same test, because the test has no box to put the difference in.

A full eight isn't a measure of how much anything feels. The count of how many of the eight ticks post runs from 0 to 8, and it says how complete a moment is. It isn't how strongly anything is felt, and nothing in the test makes an animal feel less than you. Eight isn't the minimum for experience either. Step 1 puts experience in every event.

Next, and why: the test is built, and it has no species clause. What feeds it?

Step 3: The map from a brain to the rhythm isn't derived

The step that feeds the test isn't derived yet: the map from a running brain, a dog's or yours, to the boundary and the eight ticks the test reads.

The test needs eight numbers for one web. An enormous number of events run in a brain at once. Which web among them is one someone, where that web's edge is, and which eight ticks of it to read are what the map would say. Nobody has derived it. Not for a dog's brain, a crow's or an octopus's, and not for a human one. Is Your Mind Just Your Brain? states the same step for yours. This post applies it across species.

What is exact, and what isn't derived:

• Exact: the test, as Step 2 states it, and the count: 4 of the 64 starts never go silent.
• Not derived: which pattern, over which eight ticks, a living brain carries.

Two things follow, and they point the same way. First, no list of which animals are someones is derived, because a list would need the map. Second, nothing in the rule favors you. The missing step is the same for her brain and for yours.

You don't need the map to know you're someone: you're there. The map is what you'd need to find out from the outside, by looking at a brain, and the outside is the only way anyone gets at a dog.

Next, and why: from the outside, the usual stand-in for a map is what an animal shows. What does her silence tell us?

Step 4: Silence settles nothing

An animal can't report what it feels the way you can, and that is a fact about reporting, not about experience. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which Step 5 comes to, names this problem in its opening paragraph. Comparative research on the topic, it says, is "naturally hampered by the inability of non-human animals, and often humans, to clearly and readily communicate about their internal states."⁷ Often humans, it says. A sleeper in an ordinary dream can't tell you either.

A missing report is a missing report. It never shows that nothing was felt. An unknown answer stays unknown, and it never counts as a no. Two experiments on exactly this are in Step 5 of Is Your Coffee Mug Conscious?, and Where Do You Go When You Sleep? covers dreamers who answer questions from inside a dream. This post doesn't re-run them.

So the dog on the rug is the ordinary case, not a puzzle. She's silent. Her silence doesn't show she isn't there, and it doesn't show she is. It shows that the report is missing, and neither question in this post asked for one. The first is about events. The second is about eight numbers.

Next, and why: if silence settles nothing, what do researchers who study animals have to go on? Brains and behavior. Step 5 says what that evidence measures.

Step 5: What the animal evidence measures

Researchers who study animal minds have put what they think the evidence shows into public statements. Here are two.

On 7 July 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals in Cambridge, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was proclaimed, and the conference participants signed it that evening in the presence of Stephen Hawking. Its last two sentences read: "Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates."⁷

On 19 April 2024, researchers announced the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness at New York University. It says: "While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged." The first is "strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds." The second is that "the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects)."⁸

Both are statements about what observation of animals' brains and behavior supports. On the first question they point the same way as this answer, toward yes. They weigh the evidence one group of animals at a time. This answer reaches yes from events, and it has no group to stop at.

Here's how that evidence relates to the rest of the answer.

It doesn't settle the first question, because the first question doesn't wait on it. The declarations rest on markers. A marker is something you can measure in an animal that goes with consciousness in people: a brain structure, a chemical, a pattern of activity, a way of behaving. Every event is felt, whatever a marker says.

It can't run the second test, because nobody can yet. The test reads a pattern, and the map from a brain to that pattern isn't derived (Step 3).

What markers do measure is what a brain can do. Six different questions are in play, and a marker speaks to some of them and not to others:

1. Is anything felt? Yes, in every event (Step 1).
2. Can the animal use what it feels, and report it? Behavior tests speak to this.
3. How awake is it? Sleep and anesthesia change the answer.
4. How rich is its brain's response when something knocks on it? The echo test in the mug post measures this.
5. How tightly do its parts act on each other as one system?
6. Which web is one someone? The test of Step 2, with the map of Step 3.

A finding on one of these doesn't answer another. An animal that is hard to read on questions 2 to 5 isn't shown to be empty on question 1, and a rich echo on question 4 isn't the test for question 6. The declarations list animals because the evidence they weigh is evidence about animals' brains and behavior. The rule for being someone lists no animals, and no list is derived.

The Cambridge text says the substrates "generate" consciousness. Here a brain is what a rhythm is tied to, and Is Your Mind Just Your Brain? gives the reasons.

What's still open

• The map from a running brain to the rhythm the test reads: which web in a brain is one someone, where its edge is, and which eight ticks to read. It is open for a dog's brain, a crow's, an octopus's and yours. Until it's derived, no list of which animals are someones is derived, and the test can't yet be read off a person's brain either.
• Below brains. Is Your Coffee Mug Conscious? follows the two sides down to a rock, and states there the one step not yet derived below organized events like brains.

The whole trip, in one breath

Every event has an outside, which a meter reads, and an inside, and the inside is experience. So every event in an animal's body is felt, exactly as every event in yours is. Being someone takes more: eight ticks of the smallest process with none silent, which only 4 of its 64 starts deliver every time, carried by a web that lasts as a whole. The test for that reads eight whole numbers and nothing else. It has no clause for species, brain size, language or carbon, so the rule that makes you someone applies to a dog, a crow or an octopus unchanged. What isn't derived is the map from a running brain, hers or yours, to the pattern the test reads. An animal's silence settles nothing, and the declarations of 2012 and 2024 rest on markers of brains and behavior, which speak to other questions than the test's.

That's how reality is built: events with two sides, and a test for a complete moment that fits on an index card. The map from a brain to that test is the part still to be found. Next time her paws run on the rug, every event in her is felt, and the rule that makes you someone has no line between her and you.