Think like a crow, choose like a crab: The animals inside our minds
A conversation about intelligence and consciousness with philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith.
One of the first things you learn as a young philosopher is to clarify your terms. If you don’t define, early on, what you mean by things like “God,” “truth,” or “free will,” then you’ll spend hours shuffling around in circles and probably get a failing grade.
A lot of what you read about “consciousness” is at risk of getting a failing grade because the concept is so complex that we cannot assume we all mean the same thing when we use it. Someone might start an article on whether AI can be conscious by talking about one cognitive ability but then end up talking about something completely different before you can say “non sequitur.”
For many scientists, consciousness is not a single entity but a complex cluster of cognitive abilities, any one of which could merit its own special issue. But for the author and philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith, the term is a broad, inclusive category most people often use to refer to someone’s lived experience — the “what it feels like” to be you.
In our interview, Godfrey-Smith explained what the natural world teaches us about the core components of the mind and how the animal kingdom might help us come to a working definition of consciousness. We focused on three key parts of what most people mean by consciousness: creativity, subjective experience, and what he calls “weighing up.”
How much pain can you take?
In a lot of our deliberations, we “weigh up” what gives us the most pleasure and what brings the most pain. This calculation is a key component of consciousness, and it’s something we often assume is an advanced faculty. After all, it takes rationality and intelligence to sit down and fill in the details on a pros vs. cons grid.
Godfrey-Smith mentioned a wonderful experiment from 2016 by a team from Queen’s University Belfast that might dent our notions of human exceptionalism. “One of the main experimental procedures with hermit crabs is to give the crab inside its shell a very small electric shock,” he said. “Suddenly, it gets a shock, and they leave the shell. Except, if it’s a good shell, as opposed to a low-quality shell, they’re less inclined to leave. They’ll also put up with more shock if there’s the odor of a possible predator around. Because, then again, the shell is more valuable and they’re less inclined to leave. So, there’s a trade-off happening or a weighing up of the intensity of the experience and other positive and negative factors that are present in the situation.”
What’s striking about this experiment is not just the behavioral sophistication but what it implies: Even hermit crabs calculate costs (pain, vulnerability) against benefits (safety, comfort) in a manner that resembles rudimentary decision-making.
If crabs can do it, what’s going on with human beings? In 2022, a team from McGill University released a paper that revealed how the process works in humans. The researchers asked participants to choose how much pain they would take for a certain amount of money. The team identified specific, distributed neural patterns in brain areas associated with reward valuation, emotion, executive control, and goal-directed action. Negative weights came from reward-related regions, positive weights from affective and control-related regions. So just like hermit crabs weighing shell safety against shock, humans are constantly running a cost–benefit analysis, judging whether the potential reward is worth the risk of pain.
What this tells us is that “weighing up” is not just some rationalistic gift of the gods. It’s basic neurobiology. Many of your moment-to-moment decisions — Do I go to the gym? Do I reply to that email? Do I buy that chocolate bar? — are underpinned by a constant, silent arithmetic in your prefrontal cortex. In both hermit crabs and humans, deliberation is not about detachment from feeling. It’s integrated into “conscious” feeling.
The many uses of a ping-pong ball
In 1967, the American psychologist J.P. Guilford invented the Alternate Uses Test to measure how creative or imaginative a person can be. The test involves having someone list as many uses as they can think of for a common, everyday item — a shoe, a paperclip, a stick. Give it a go. Try to list all the things you could use a pen for. If you can think of more than nine, you’re doing well. If you can think of more than twenty, you should start writing a novel.
Creativity and imagination — “out of the box thinking” — are the essential ingredients of the human mind. So, do they appear elsewhere in the animal kingdom? Possibly.
“Imagination, I agree, does have an apparent connection with experience,” Godfrey-Smith says. “But it’s going to be hard to find in lots of cases. I think that a good place to look would be certain kinds of bird behaviours, especially behaviours in crows and their relatives.”
There is a famous video from Alex Taylor on YouTube featuring a crow named Sheryl Crow. Sheryl has to acquire one tool to get a second tool, which allows her to get some food at the end. After a few times, the crow is disturbingly proficient at the task. Trial, error, trial, error, success, competence. Sheryl Crow just looks at the task and hops into action.
“Now, in that situation,” Godfrey-Smith says, “it is certainly tempting to say that there’s the imagining of a path to the solution going on. The bird looks at the setup, imagines doing this, imagines doing that.”
Throughout our interview, Godfrey-Smith often used the phrases “it’s tempting to think” or “we might infer” rather than saying we know absolutely either way. And that’s because, when it comes to the “science of consciousness,” we will always run up against one very hard problem: What’s actually going on inside something’s head?
Inference, guesswork, and faith
The classic definition of consciousness almost always centers around subjective experience. It’s “the mind’s eye” — like the image you see when you close your eyes and imagine a dragon. But consciousness is also a private sensation or feeling — what philosophers call qualia. It’s the tickly shiver you get when you stroke the back of your hand. It’s the love you have for parents, children, and partners. The most intuitive and haunting feature of consciousness is the fact that there is a “you” it feels like to be.
And here, we have to step beyond evolution and zoology and resort to inference, guesswork, and faith. Science works on observable data. We can only measure and record an animal’s behaviors and not what’s going on inside.
Godfrey-Smith agrees with this notion, but he also cites certain studies that might offer a different angle and a more convincing argument for animal consciousness. We have not only behavioural evidence but also studies into “internal processing.” For example, there is evidence from a 2015 study from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that rats use “cognitive maps” to navigate problems and their environment. They can replay and remember actual paths they’ve taken. “Now that’s not behavioural evidence,” Godfrey-Smith says, “that’s evidence that involves the relationship between internal processing and what the animals are doing behaviourally.”
A mansion with many rooms
Weighing up, creativity, and subjective experience — when you pause to look at these three aspects of our human consciousness, you can appreciate how difficult the wider issue becomes. Because, to ask “What is consciousness?” is a bit like asking “What is an ecosystem?” It is the interconnected relationship between lots of different aspects, a confederation of cognitive abilities that’s bigger than just the sum of the parts.
Seeing consciousness in this way makes it easier to trace over evolutionary time. Rather than asking when consciousness arrived, it’s better to ask what elements of it appeared and in what order. To that end, Godfrey-Smith argues that we should think of consciousness as a gradually constructed, multiroom mansion, with different wings added in different evolutionary lineages.
He pointed out that there are three groups of animals who, as separate evolutionary events, seemed to have evolved complex nervous systems and behavior. First, there were vertebrates like us, but also birds and other mammals. Second, there were cephalopods, which include the octopus and cuttlefish. And finally, there were arthropods, insects, and crustaceans, and so on. Consciousness — or at least its prerequisites — may have evolved three separate times in radically different nervous systems, Godfrey-Smith said. And yet, remarkably, he thinks we shouldn’t rule out a common thread running through them. “I’m coming around to thinking that there’s a lot of unity there,” he said. “That it really is the evolution of three somewhat different versions of the same basic trait.”
This idea makes consciousness both more difficult to define and more interesting to explore. If it is a “bundle” or “package deal,” as Godfrey-Smith calls it, then we shouldn’t expect a single scientific breakthrough to solve it. Instead, we’ll need to explore each of its components — the rooms of the house — one by one. Weighing up. Internal simulation. Feeling. Creativity. Attention. Self-awareness. All of them stitched together, but each deserving its own inquiry and scientific funding.
It might be that we never land on a final, unified definition of consciousness. It might be that the more honest — and more scientific — approach is to look inside the bundle and ask what each strand of it tells us about the rest. Because consciousness, as Godfrey-Smith says, might not be one thing. But that doesn’t mean it’s nothing.
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Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He's known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.
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Great read, thank you so much for this insightful and thought-provoking article. I look forward to reading more!