Humans, Animals, and the Nature of Consciousness

And how it relates to discussions of environmental preservation.

In discussions of humanity’s impact on the environment, the environment is often treated as an other. Us, as in humans, and Them, as in the environment. Thinking of the environment as a separate entity enables us to ignore the damage that we have done, but we are animals as much as an octopus is, and coastal cities are being destroyed just as reef ecosystems are.

This “othering” of the environment likely stems from humankind’s idea that humans are too smart to be an animal. Humans cook their food and do arithmetic and build cities. Every species has unique characteristics, though. Being unique doesn’t remove humans from the animal kingdom. When it comes to intelligence, though, we tend to neglect the intelligence of other animals.

A 2019 study by Howard et al. demonstrated that honeybees were taught and understood basic arithmetic. Bees are tiny, and their brains are tinier. But they can add. This example is notable to me because when I try to think of nonhuman animals that are “intelligent,” my brain jumps to apes or dolphins or crows. Animals that are not that far from us, evolutionarily speaking. But bees? Bees are invertebrates, so their lineage diverged from ours hundreds of millions of years ago. Despite so many millions of years separating our species, similarities in our cognition persist. Another example of an invertebrate similar to humans is the octopus.

The nervous system of an octopus is extremely decentralized. While they do have a brain in their head, each of their arms can act like an individual unit, making an octopus seem like nine connected creatures. That being said, octopuses do exhibit similar behaviors to humans. The body transfer illusion is an experiment in which a person’s hand is hidden, and a rubber hand is placed in front of them. Then, both their hand and the rubber hand are prodded in the same way. Then, the rubber hand was struck with a hammer. The experiment showed that people would react as if their own hand was struck. Recently, in a study by Sumire Kawashima and Yuzuru Ikeda, this same phenomenon was demonstrated in octopuses. Despite our differences in physical structure, our minds still function in similar ways.

Humans aren’t the exact same as every other animal, but we aren’t completely different either. That’s what it means to be a species. Earth is home to us all and internalizing that fact can help remind us that hurting the environment hurts us too.