Sir Roger Penrose: Are Animals Conscious Like We Are?

This is something that everyone contemplates, like what makes you conscious? What is the soul? Is it a real thing? What is your consciousness? Is it simply just your own biology trying to calculate your environment and looking out for its best interests and trying to procreate and move forward with the genes that it has? Or is it something almost mystical or far more complicated maybe even instead of the word mystical might be tainted? Maybe something far more complex than we're currently able to understand. I think to some extent I would agree it is because it's certainly different. To have some internal perception of the external world and being able to think abstractly and all these things, it's surely different from where baseball runs through the air and what makes it spin. And different than every other conscious animal. I'm not so sure about that. I think the difference isn't that big. I mean, okay, we use language to a degree. I mean, some animals use language to some kind of degree. There's a huge difference in degree. I agree with that. But whether it's a difference in kind, I'm not at all sure. You watch these nature movies and I remember seeing one about elephants. And this was about how the elephants were... They're always led by a female elephant and that's not relevant to the story. But they were trying to go from A to B. I don't know what it was. And there's a whole herd of them. They'd be doing that. But then at a certain point, they made a detour. And they went off to a place where the leader of the elephant herd, her sister, had died. And the bones, the tusks I suppose, were there. The bones anyway, were there. And the elephants picked them up, handed them around and seemed to caress them and move them around. And then they went back and joined to the route that they were at before. Now, what does that tell us? There's something going on, which is not just some machine behaving like a robot. There's some feelings there that we can appreciate. Another one I remember was one with these African hunting dogs. And the dogs... You see, there's a route where some antelopes would tend to go... They had to go across the river. And when they got to the point where they crossed the river, they'd slow down and make their way to get across. Now, these hunting dogs, you could see them. I think it was taken from the air. And they would go along towards this place where the river was. And then they would break into two. So half of them would go one way towards the... And they would hide just where the river starts. And the other half would go and chase the antelopes. They'd go and bark and make an awful noise, chase them right there. And then the other ones would pounce on them. I mean, there's something there which is... They've been working it out between themselves, how to do it. Communication of some kind. And I think there's what you call understanding, okay, at a more primitive level than human understanding. But nevertheless, there is something... There's no sort of clean dividing line, in my view. It's pretty continuous. Yeah. And this exists in wolves as well. And very, very similar behavior. And they do seem to have not just verbal, but nonverbal communication. They seem to have some understanding of what the task is and what their roles are in the task. And even though there's not as many variables, maybe as human life, there definitely seems to be a conscious awareness of, first of all, their position in the hierarchy of the tribe, of the pack-rabbits. Interesting. But also what their objective is. This is not a selfish objective, it's a group objective. And they operate as a group, and they do move like those African dogs that you were talking about. Yeah. No, it's fascinating all that, yeah. And there's a lot of indication that... Well, certainly chimps and elephants and things and dolphins, we know about them, but I imagine it goes quite far down, I should think. How much have you studied octopi? They're fascinating, aren't they? Yeah. Yes, no, I haven't. There's a new book about them, which I haven't gotten the chance to read yet. I want to read it. I think they're highly intelligent. Yes. Yeah, I've only been really paying attention to them for a few years. I have a good friend, my friend Remy Warren was doing a television show called Apex Predator, where he studied the way different animals hunted. And he started studying the way octopus and cuttlefish and all these different octopi and the way they could adapt to their environment by changing their actual... Not just the look, but the texture of their skin instantaneously. And how this is not really understood, not only how they do it, but how they know what's below them, what they're copying. That they somehow or another can figure out how to blend in almost perfectly with their environment. It's amazing, isn't it? They also can open jars and they can climb out of tanks. There was one guy had a... He had a camera on his tank because he had two tanks and one of them had very expensive tropical fish and the other one had his octopus. And he was trying to figure out what was happening to his expensive tropical fish, so he put a camera on it. And the octopus was climbing out of the tank, walking across the ground, climbing into the other tank, killing one of the fish, eating it, and then going back into his tank. Yes. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's heavy. Indeed. Well, there's one I saw about octopi. I think I heard the description or I read it. I think I read it about some experiments on testing the intelligence of octopuses. And they had a little thing. They had to pull a chain and then open a door and get food out. And this octopus was thinking, I'm getting fed up with this thing. And so he yanked the chain. It came right off. And then it rose to the top and started squirting all the people in their white coats. So I thought it was pretty good. There's something else going on than just... There is something going on. Absolutely.