Animals are different

 

 SYNOPSIS

Animals differ from humans in one crucial respect: they live entirely in the present moment.  This means they cannot be aware of the passage of time, which in turn means they cannot communicate through language, nor plan a course of action. This seems to contradict our experience of animal life.  But at one time the notion of the sun as the centre of the solar system contradicted our experience.  However, observation and measurement demonstrated that in reality the Earth moves through space in an ellipse around the sun.

 By applying the methodology of science, it may likewise be possible to show that all non-human animals live entirely in the present moment, and therefore lack free will or the ability to use language.  The proof of such a hypothesis would require that the sensorium of each species be analysed in detail in order to determine exactly how their nervous systems work and evoke the behaviour patterns of each member. To perform such a study of every species on the planet would be an incredibly large task.  However from the start the trend would be found to point consistently in one direction.

 Animals are in effect bundles of permanently open and activated nerve-endings – whiskers, nostrils, skin, retinae, ears – through which sensory input passes via afferent nerves to a central nervous system, from which immediate responses pass directly to the efferent nerves that activate the appropriate muscles. This is one continuous, and continual process. There is no evidence that animals have the capacity to interrupt or modify that neural flow. Should an exception come to light, it would need to take the form of a species that displayed volition and the capacity for abstract thought.

  

ON the first page of his new book Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett describes watching an ant climb to the tip of a blade of grass.  It falls off, then climbs up again, and again. This particular ant happens to be host to a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum), a tiny worm that needs to get into the stomach of a grazing animal in order to reproduce itself.  It is making the nervous system of the ant get it to where both of them will be eaten.

 This parasitic relationship between fluke and ant is just one of the myriad ways in which organisms interact in order to stay alive.

 All organisms survive by responding instantly to the stimuli arriving at their sense receptors.  This is the survival imperative, the essential process of evolution by natural selection that governs all life on Earth: quick, or dead.

 Darwin set out the process in The Origin of Species, and the idea of survival of the fittest was rightly seen as central to it.  However in The Descent of Man he adopted the view that homo sapiens differs from other animals in degree, rather than in kind – that other animals are like us, just less highly developed.

 It is the contention of this paper that Darwin was mistaken about this.  In fact, a fundamental difference exists between homo sapiens and all other species, viz. that HS is the only animal aware of duration, of time. All non-human animals must respond instantly, in the present moment, to sense stimuli in order to survive.

 Clearly all the creatures on this planet share the three spatial dimensions – length, breadth, and depth – but HS seems to be the only species aware of time.

 Since animals survive by living entirely in the present, they cannot, by definition, be aware of the past or the future.  They have no means of envisaging what lies ahead; and their apparent memory of past events is probably no more than an accumulation of conditioned responses.

 Such an assertion might seem counterintuitive.  After all, there are times when animals appear to hesitate, or ‘freeze’, or in the case of some kinds of bird, perform a diversionary manoeuvre.  One action seems to follow from a previous one.

 It is only the human observer that links such behaviours together into a narrative framework.  For animals there is no script: they are programmed by their genes.

 The animal itself is continually receiving sensory stimuli, to which it responds instantly. The response is movement of its muscles towards fight, or flight, or perhaps something more complicated from which an observer might infer ‘deception’, or the exercise of choice.

 In every case the organism exists in the present, in each moment of survival-oriented behaviour.  

 It must also follow logically from the living-in-the-present condition that animals lack the capacity to communicate through language, because language is predicated on succession: meaning derives from the order in time in which sounds or symbols occur. This is a uniquely human attribute.

 Humans can choose to do x rather than y, having given consideration (using thought and language) to different possible outcomes.  But animals, since they respond instantly to signals received by their central nervous systems, have no capacity to make choices.  In effect, they do not possess agency.

 The fundamental distinction between homo sapiens and all other creatures can be stated in three axioms:

·      no species other than HS is conscious of the dimension of  time

·      no species other than HS can communicate through language

·      no species other then HS can choose between options, i.e. display agency.

 The three axioms are interdependent, rather like a tripod – if evidence is found which falsifies one leg, the other two will collapse with it.  

 

The objection will doubtless be raised that there is already plenty of published evidence that appears to falsify all three.  However, closer scrutiny reveals that most of it is actually inferential and anecdotal, rather than empirical and replicable.  In other words it is not, strictly speaking, scientific.

 The above axioms could only be confirmed beyond doubt if all the sensory pathways in every organism on the planet were examined for evidence of awareness of time, communication by language, or agency (free will).  If a single species was found that incontrovertibly and consistently displayed any of the three, then the hypothesis would be falsified.

 Potential examples may spring to mind, but it will be found that, in every case, the animal has been bred, fed and trained by humans to do whatever it is humans want it to do.  For animals are always the subordinates in this power relationship with HS.  Only creatures living in the wild are outside the human sphere of influence, and therefore not often available for scientific investigation.

 By way of clearing the ground still further, terms like ‘animal cognition’, ‘animal minds’, ‘animal consciousness’ should be ignored as being disjunctive; as stated earlier, all non-human animals exist in the present, and their survival depends on responding directly to sensory stimuli.  Therefore to bracket the word ‘animal’ with any of these time-related concepts is to tend towards a category error.

 The only word that can usefully be coupled with the word ‘animal’ is sense, as in ‘animal senses’.  Sensorium might be a useful umbrella term for the sensory equipment of each species (as in the sensorium of a bat, which would be largely biosonar, or of a hawk (strongly visual)).

 With regard to animals then, most researchers are looking in the wrong place, seeking in animals those characteristics which mirror the human model of narrativity and self-conscious agency.  From the earliest times this perspective has been dominant:

‘Aristotle considered that the essential quality of living creatures was that they possessed their own internal will and this allowed creatures to initiate independent movement.’(McFadden).

Apart from Descartes (who thought that animals were automata), this came to be the consensus view.  Later, thinkers such as David Hume added their weight to it: “No truth appears to be more evident, than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.’  It came to full flower with Darwin:

‘We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals’ (Chap IV The Descent of Man).

The idea that humans and animals are at different points on the same continuum has thus achieved general acceptance.  All the science points the other way, however.  The sensorium of each creature interacts instantly with the biosphere to ensure survival. Organisms respond to the continuous flux of electromagnetic pulses on different wavelengths, and to windborn scents, pheromones etc, in movements modified by internal drives (visceral, metabolic, and reproductive).

Every human attempt to describe or account for animal behaviour makes the animal the active subject, whereas it is actually a passive object.

Not only is it an object, it is essentially a vehicle for its genes.  What Aristotle calls the internal will is the activity of the organism’s genetic material, which lives simply and solely to get itself replicated.

Instead of ‘the bird flies to the berries’, the behaviour should be described in such terms as  ‘the signals given off by the berries together with the bird’s need for sustenance causes it to be moved towards them through the air by its wing muscles’.  Clumsy and tortuous though it may be, the passive rather than the active voice is appropriate for describing objectively the non-human, agent-less animal world.

 

To summarise, it seems to be self-evident that animals:

(a) exist entirely in the present (governed by the survival imperative: ‘quick – or dead’);

(b) that they therefore lack access to language (which is predicated on succession in time); and

(c) they do not possess agency (they cannot direct their gaze, for example, and cannot do anything on purpose).