Macquarie Minds and Intelligences Initiative public lecture by Prof. Peter Godfrey-Smith, University of Sydney
Animal Consciousness: Evidence, Models, and Clues
The talk will look at evidence for felt experience (consciousness in a minimal sense) in a number of invertebrate animals. I’ll do this by going through a sequence of experiments (some well-known, some newer) on hermit crabs, octopuses, cuttlefish, bees, and fruit flies. I will emphasize interactions between different kinds of evidence, and the role of some fortuitous observations. A preprint by Hakwan Lau criticizing the whole enterprise will be discussed at the end.
