Big shoes to fill

Editorial Comment from Lorianna Dovali, The Discerning Man's Sasquatch

Big shoes to fill

 Do we as humans have a need to believe in Bigfoot, a creature... that is like us in many ways, but chooses to keep its distance from those things we don't even like about ourselves? In a lot of ways that is exactly what Bigfoot is. He is us in antithesis. We attribute to him features that are very human like. He walks upright, he is intelligent, he is a survivor. Unlike us, he is peaceful, does not fight wars, he does not destroy his environment and he does not have habits that have made us humans weak. He has not been affected by changes in technology and in fact may be exactly as he has always been despite a world that has transformed itself countless times at our hands over the millennia. A creature true to itself and the planet which it and we all call home. There is much to be valued in a creature like this. It can show us what we have lost in ourselves that we once held very dear. He can give us hope of an unspoiled existence that can still be had. He can teach us to get along with each other for the benefit of everyone, and he can impart to us what it really is to be human and to not take our planet and resources for granted. I think those who believe and those who want to, look up to Bigfoot as a role model of something we wish we had never lost… but despite our own urging continue to let slip away. We are no longer always a good Sheppard of all that we survey and we have forgotten our own connection to nature in a world that we are as much a part of as our own children are to us. Bigfoot is a beacon of understanding and hope. He is why we still yearn and believe in something better than what we have settled into. He fights the good fight in his steadfastness and is undiscouraged by the changing world despite its seeming descent into something that we no longer recognize or appreciate in the way we once did. He is deeply and forever embedded into our psyche and is part and parcel of what it really is to be human. Could be that what we miss the most in ourselves, is what we love the most in Sasquatch, and what we ascribe to his character, is what we feel is missing in our own. Bigfoot most definitely DOES exist. I have no doubt of this. If he is not out there roaming our forests, hills and valleys, at the very least we know for absolute certainty… he is roaming our hearts, our souls and our minds. For that very reason, we need not always go to the ends of the world to discover this animal, for he has always lived in our own backyard deeply snuggled within our synapses and ganglions, somewhere within our cortexes. He is a part of us, and we will never lose that completely as long as we remember one thing. That is, we too are a part of this world and just another animal amongst the many that call earth home. In our hurry towards progress we may have detached ourselves a bit from our humbler beginnings, but as long as we still have Bigfoot in our thoughts and dreams, there will always be a tether to lead us back home. Ready, set…Bigfoot!

Scientists Sign Declaration That Animals Have Conscious Awareness; Just Like Humans

Scientists Sign Declaration That Animals Have Conscious Awareness; Just Like Humans

Animals have conscious awareness!

 

An international group of prominent scientists has signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in which they are proclaiming their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are — a list of animals that includes all mammals, birds, and even the octopus. But will this make us stop treating these animals in totally inhumane ways?
 

While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it’s the open acknowledgement that’s the big news here. The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way that we are, and it’s no longer something we can ignore.

What’s also very interesting about the declaration is the group’s acknowledgement that consciousness can emerge in those animals that are very much unlike humans, including those that evolved along different evolutionary tracks, namely birds and some cephalopods.

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states,” they write, “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.”

Consequently, say the signatories, the scientific evidence is increasingly indicating that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.

 

The group consists of cognitive scientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists — all of whom were attending the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals. The declaration was signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking, and included such signatories as Christof Koch, David Edelman, Edward Boyden, Philip Low, Irene Pepperberg, and many more.

The declaration made the following observations:

• The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic reevaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field. Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.
• The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain regions generates corresponding behavior and feeling states in both humans and non-human animals. Wherever in the brain one evokes instinctual emotional behaviors in non-human animals, many of the ensuing behaviors are consistent with experienced feeling states, including those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these systems in humans can also generate similar affective states. Systems associated with affect are concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and nonhuman animals without neocortices retain these brain-mind functions. Furthermore, neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).
• Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in articular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.
• In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing. Pharmacological interventions in non-human animals with compounds known to affect conscious behavior in humans can lead to similar perturbations in behavior in non-human animals. In humans, there is evidence to suggest that awareness is correlated with cortical activity, which does not exclude possible contributions by subcortical or early cortical processing, as in visual awareness. Evidence that human and nonhuman animal emotional feelings arise from homologous subcortical brain networks provide compelling evidence for evolutionarily shared primal affective qualia.

Read more about this here and here.

H/t to Katherine Harmon of SciAM. Image via Vittorio Bruno/Shutterstock.com Inset image of elephant passing the mirror test via. Inset image of Irene Pepperberg and Alex via.

Originally posted on: io9