Human and Animal Minds

The continuities between human and animal minds are increasingly well understood. This has led many people to make claims about consciousness in animals, which has often been taken to be crucial for their moral standing. Peter Carruthers argues compellingly that there is no fact of the matter to be discovered, and that the question of animal consciousness is of no scientific or ethical significance. Carruthers offers solutions to two related puzzles. The first is about the place of phenomenal¿or felt¿consciousness in the natural order. Consciousness is shown to comprise fine-grained nonconceptual contents that are "globally broadcast" to a wide range of cognitive systems for reasoning, decision-making, and verbal report. Moreover, the so-called "hard" problem of consciousness results merely from the distinctive first-person concepts we can use when thinking about such contents.No special non-physical properties¿no so-called "qualia"¿are involved. The second puzzle concerns the distribu