Animal Minds

Extending the biocognitive model

Jul 08, 2025

These posts examine modern psychiatry from a critical point of view. Unfortunately, mainstream psychiatrists usually react badly to any sort of critical analysis of their activities, labelling critics as “anti-psychiatry,” whatever that is. Regardless, criticism is an integral part of any scientific field and psychiatry is no different. As it emerges, there is a lot to be critical about.
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You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete (Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1895-1983).

We live in a semi-rural area in the foothills on the outskirts of Brisbane. This time of year, the mornings are sometimes frosty but it’s the best time of year for my morning ride through the hills. Sunrise is about 6.45am; I leave at 6.00 when it’s still quite dark so I can see the sun rise on the way back. The birds are busy and it’s common to see wallabies grazing on grass on the side of the road. This morning, there were two young ones not far from home, who got a bit panicky as I approached and ran straight at the barbed wire fence beside the road. At the last moment, they ducked their heads and zipped under the wire into the grass and scrub. If they hadn’t judged it perfectly, they would have scalped themselves. Last week, one of them wasn’t so lucky. It had been hit by a car so I took it to the vet about 5km away. Its leg was shattered and there was nothing they could do so they had to put it down.

That was not a good day but there don’t seem to be any good days lately. Everywhere we look, the news is grim and getting worse by the hour. Humans are treating each other atrociously and nobody in authority seems to be taking things such as climate change, nuclear war or future pandemics seriously. In the uproar, one subject that unfortunately gets too little attention is how we treat animals. Granted, practically all animal species will be at far greater risk of climate change than humans but it’s our casual, daily treatment of them that says most about us. Currently, humans kill over 80 billion (with a B) land animals each year, plus countless fish and marine animals. That includes about 27billion a year in the US although I can’t find figures for Australia, which is a big meat exporter. In the main, those animals will have been raised in poor to dreadful conditions, the entire goal being to squeeze from them as much profit as possible for the humans. All of this depends on our attitude to animals. We have strong rules about hurting or killing other humans, including eating them, but we treat animals differently, based on either of two views:

1. Dominionism, the belief that, for whatever reason (mostly religious but all selfish), humans have the right to use the world and its contents to satisfy their own wishes or needs regardless of the effect on other species. In the West, this comes from the Old Testament, which says at Genesis 1.28: And God blessed (Adam and Eve), and God said unto them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” This schema, also known as speciesism, sets humans on a pedestal where humans are the only creatures with minds and free will. The rest are simply perambulated cabbages waiting to be eaten.
2. Determinism, which says that all events in the universe can only unfold in one way. The present and future course of the universe was fixed by the distribution of matter and energy at the instant of creation (the Big Bang) and is determined by the laws of physics. In this schema, free will does not exist, even though all human law as we understand it is entirely based on the notion that humans have free will, i.e. “Regardless of how I acted a minute ago, I could have acted differently” (I regard the doctrine of “compatibilism” as incoherent).

These two views have been around for ever, twisting and turning through history, feeding on each other and generally making life difficult for people who try to sort out complex questions. In my view, we can dispense with religion as a justification of Dominionism. If people who say they believe it followed all the other laws and injunctions of their religion, it may be possible to take them sufficiently seriously to debate it with them, but they don’t. There are 613 laws in the Old Testament, including seven before the Ten Commandments, but nobody takes the slightest notice of them, especially the bit that says “Thou shalt not kill.” So-called Dominionism becomes just another example of people doing what they like and cherry-picking their private religious texts to justify it.

However, it has led to the idea that only humans have minds, and this is where it gets murky. In an influential paper published in 1989, British philosopher Peter Carruthers argued that animals (he called them ‘brutes’) don’t have minds in any sense that we need to take seriously. As a result, he concluded that all efforts to treat animals humanely are misplaced and we should redirect our concern to all the people in the world who are treated badly:

Much time and money is presently spent on alleviating the pains of brutes which ought properly to be directed toward human beings, and many are now campaigning to reduce the efficiency of modern farming methods because of the pain caused to the animals involved. If the arguments presented here have been sound, such activities are not only morally unsupportable but morally objectionable [1].

According to Carruthers, it is morally objectionable for me to hurry home, get my car, retrieve what was patently a frightened little animal in great pain, warm it, soothe it, and take it to the vet to be put to sleep humanely rather than leave it to die slowly of thirst and infection, or eaten alive by ants and crows. He has a case: while a certain nuclear-armed air force in the world sends supersonic bombers to drop 2000lb bombs on terrified refugee children huddled in tents, worrying about one of Australia’s thousands of road kills on one day seems a bit trivial. However, I think we have to do what we can, but this raises an important question: is it proper to talk of animals as “frightened and in pain”? Various strains of determinism say it isn’t, that it’s ridiculous and mystical and goes nowhere.

Western philosophy of mind takes its modern starting point with the work of the French polymath, René Descartes (1596-1650), who argued for a very clear distinction between humans and animals. It’s not easy to follow his case as he uses important terms, such as ‘passion,’ in ways that are totally different from modern usage, but at least he tried. He didn’t fall back on “Well, the Bible says…” Descartes was a devout Catholic but he also believed that you can’t take anything written down for granted. At about age 23, he decided that for every opinion expressed in one of the “great books” of antiquity (he read them in the original Greek or Latin), he could go to another and find exactly the opposite opinion. He therefore decided that he would only believe what he could prove himself, which was one of the most important starting points of modern science. He was an accomplished anatomist and at one stage said that anybody who wants to understand the brain should get the head of a large animal from the butcher and dissect it. That was revolutionary as most physicians studied what had been written by the Greek philosopher, Galen, nearly 1500 years before. Galen had never dissected a human, only monkeys.

Starting with his firm religious beliefs, Descartes gradually came to the conclusion that only humans have reasoning minds. He was fully aware of the very close similarities between the anatomy of the human body and of various animals, including the brains, but decided that the God-given soul endowed humans alone with the capacity to reason and to speak. Animals, and the human body, were machines in the ordinary sense of the word; the crucial question is where the line of division lies. I read him as saying “Animals experience the world exactly the same as humans because we have the same animal machinery. The only difference is our immortal soul.” Others, however, say he denied sensory experience to animals such that they are “dumb brutes” and can be treated as such.

This argument raged back and forth for hundreds of years. The skeptical Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711-1776) said: “… no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.” It all depends on the evidence but by the latter part of the 19^th Century, it was becoming clear that practical evidence couldn’t settle the matter. Gradually, more and more students of “mind” concluded that sitting in an armchair and trying to sort out what happened in our heads was going nowhere. In Germany, a new field of experimental psychology started and quickly spread around the world. The first psychological laboratory was opened in Leipzig in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), a physician and philosopher who had studied under the great physiologist, Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894). In his laboratory, Wundt applied Helmholtz’s investigative techniques to animal and human psychology, which opened the door to the behaviourist revolution.

In 1913, American psychologist John B Watson (1878-1958) declared that all attempts to study the mind were a waste of time [2, Chap. 4]. Instead, he intended to use the method developed by Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) to build an entire system of psychology for all living creatures on the basis of “conditioned reflexes.” He thought it would take only a few years. In 1929, this rapidly-growing hostility to “the mind” was cemented in place by a group in Vienna who declared that science can be based only on what we can observe [3]. Things like the mind, which is in principle unobservable, could not be studied by scientists. Very quickly, this became “The mind is irrelevant” which morphed to “does not exist.” Despite massive efforts over the next half century, that didn’t go very far so radical behaviourism was quietly discarded. These days, the great majority of researchers, such as psychologists, neuroscientists and psychiatrists, settle for: “The mind exists but it is physical in nature and we will sort it out in the laboratory. PS please send more money.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, philosophers haven’t yet made up their minds [2, Part II].

Despite enormous advances in molecular biology, especially genetic research, the drive to explain the human mind in physical terms hasn’t budged in the last fifty years. This isn’t for lack of trying or for lack of money, as the former director of the US NIMH, Thomas Insel, admitted:

I spent 13yrs at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that, I realise that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs - I think $20billion - I don't think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalisations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness. I hold myself accountable for that.

That was only a tiny proportion of the total. The reason is quite clear: as philosopher Daniel Stoljar showed some years ago, the mind cannot be understood in terms of the physical machinery that generates it [4]. Hence the biocognitive model [5], which says: The mind is a real, causally-effective thing but not in the sense that a brick is a real thing. The mind is totally dependent on the physical integrity of the brain, emerging as an informational space generated by the brain’s computational capacity. There is nothing magic about this process as we use it all the time in daily life (phones, computers etc). However, we will probably never be able to work out the exact codes by which the brain operates, so minds will always remain private. If that’s the case, how do I know you’ve got a mind? As Descartes knew very well, if I want an absolute proof, there is none. If I settle for “good enough proof,” then I can say “You do all the things that I do, and your physical body is the same, so if it works for me, it must work for you.”

However, and this is the point, the neural machinery that leads to the astounding three ring circus in our heads is very much the same as animals have. If, just on similar behaviour and physiology, I can assume that you have a mind, then I can do the same for animals, too, as there is no demarcation point between the behaviour and physiology of humans and animals. The biocognitive model specifically says that if and when a particular computational structure exists, then a mind of some sort will emerge. As far as we can tell, many animals have both the behaviour and the specific computational structure so they have to be given the benefit of the doubt, which is exactly the opposite of what Carruthers said about animals. American philosopher, John Searle, made this clear:

I do not infer that my dog is conscious, any more than, when I came into this room, I inferred that the people present are conscious. I simply respond to them as is appropriate to conscious beings. I just treat them as conscious beings and that is that.

In other words, the more you know about animals, the more you have contact with and experience them, the more you are inclined to accept that they are conscious in the ordinary sense of the term. Remember that when dealing with animals, they have to learn our language, they have to read us as we never bother to learn theirs. Thus, given all the behavioural and neuroscience evidence, I think we can go a lot further than Searle’s pragmatic approach with a direct challenge: the burden of proving animals don’t have minds, that they don’t feel pain, don’t want to go outside or don’t know when to duck their heads when going under barbed wire, rests with the nay-sayers. However, the same people who are determined to deny free will in humans aren’t going to allow it in animals.

So what is it like to be an animal? Fifty years ago, the philosopher, Thomas Nagel (born 1937), wrote a most influential paper called “What is it like to be a bat?” [6]. He concluded we don’t know but it won’t be like a person pretending they’re a bat by hanging upside down and piddling down their front all day. I don’t think that paper was as helpful as people say so I’ll offer an improvement.

Q: What is it like to be an animal?
A: It is like being a top international tennis player, standing on the line, racket in hand, as the serving player flicks the ball aloft and swings her racket.

A tennis court is 27.7m long (78’) and the ball travels at up to 200km/hr, meaning it covers the distance in about half a second. In that time, the receiving player has to work out where it’s going and position herself in front of it, swinging her racket at exactly the right spot and speed to send it back. In the moments before the ball is served, the player is crouching, eyes fixed firmly on her opponent, and nothing else. She isn’t thinking about the crowd or the colour of the sky or of her opponent’s knickers when she swings; not about getting some bread on the way home or her errant boyfriend or anything. All of these things are there, she knows them all but they are dormant, unconscious knowledge, you could say, as she is not thinking in the usual sense of the word. She is totally fixed in the present, watching, hearing, sensing her legs and hands, but that’s it. That is her conscious state at the instant the ball is hit and throughout the match. There’s no thought, no planning, no “maybe or maybe not,” just totally focussed on watching and acting. In the biocognitive model, actions are computed silently, meaning in a mode we can’t access; all we know is the decision and we don’t think about it, we just do it. How do you lift your right arm? You don’t know, you just do it.

And that, I propose, is how animals sense the world: in vast and immediate detail, uncluttered by words or other nonsense. While stalking a young antelope, the leopard knows where her cubs are but she isn’t thinking of them. The bat knows where the insects are but, like the tennis player intercepting the ball, doesn’t use language to work out how to catch them, it just does it. The wallabies racing for the fence knew where the wire was and computed precisely when to duck their heads, all without language. They have the neural machinery to represent their worlds in the same or even greater detail than we do, so we have to presume that’s exactly what happens. The idea, put about by various philosophers who should know better, that entirely without precedent, conscious experience sprang into existence when the first little Homo sapiens was born is a perversion of the idea of evolution. Indeed, if you are totally committed to determinism, then there’s no such thing as evolution, only an “unfolding.”

Animal worlds are totally in the here-and-now, alert and fully aware of what is going on, and able to respond to it in the same way the tennis player responds to the ball. We haven’t lost that ability, we have just buried it under a deluge of language to the extent that we now (mistakenly, arrogantly) believe that nothing can possibly be real without language. Chomsky, indeed, made the absurd suggestion that language developed about 70,000 years ago, with no precedent, following a single minor genetic mutation in the brain. However, he avers it was not for communication with other humans but as an aid to thought, an internal process rather than external [see 2, Chap. 7, esp. S.7.2.3]. It is that attitude, that “nothing can possibly be real without language,” that is used to licence cruelty to animals (and to humans, by calling them “human animals”).

The mistake in Carruthers’ philosophy of mind lay in not understanding the role of attention and memory in our behaviour. His verbal contortions trying to prove his long-standing opinion led him to the wrong conclusions, which have been used by people to justify treating animals as, well, brutes. I believe it is morally wrong to treat animals in the way, for example, the psychologist Harry Harlow (1905-1981) treated baby rhesus monkeys in his now infamous experiments in the 1950s. This is not just a matter of being soppy or tender-hearted. The biocognitive model offers the scientific fact that animal brains are remarkably similar to ours, that animal brains compute according to the same principles as ours and, until proven otherwise, we must accept that they therefore have emergent minds operating on the same principles as ours. To my knowledge, the biocognitive model of mind is the first to argue that animal mental functions are so very similar to humans, and to provide a specific mechanism common to the different species by which mind emerges from brain. Pace Descartes, the human mind isn’t God-given, and nor do we have the right to act like gods.

Of course, we can’t “see” animal minds any more than we can see each other’s, and theirs aren’t the same as ours but that’s not the issue. What counts is that creatures with minds, human or otherwise, have to be treated in a certain way. We can no longer say they are profoundly different from us and can therefore be treated as insensate automata. Noblesse oblige: the strong must not use their strength to disadvantage the weak.

Niall McLaren on Critical Psychiatry

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