Who Is An Animal? Looking for animal subjectivities

Roberto Marchesini WHO IS AN ANIMAL? Looking for animal subjectivities Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Chicago 6 June 2018 The reflection about animal subjectivity – namely the difference between an object or a machine, on the one hand, and nonhuman animal, on the other hand– demands an ontological inquiry in its boarder philosophical sense not confined to a descriptive analysis as in the 20th century tradition. Classical ethology and behaviorism – as the different versions and trajectories from Loeb’s tropisms theory up to the 20th century – have limited themselves to describing the animal machine. To put it in another way, ethology and behaviorism have singled out the mechanisms which regulate that machine, without problematizing the basic paradigm of the animal as automata suggested by Descartes in the 17th century. The theories on animal cognition, coalescing from the 1970s, have attempted to express a pale subjectivity through the function of awareness – sensation, consciousness, the theory of mind – inevitably tied to the litmus test that each species had to pass, to possess a suggestion of consciousness. However, these theories have not criticised the basic model, namely that of animal expression as the result of automatism, originated by the environment or by internal impulses, and encoded by experiential associations or by natural selection, learned or innate. Therefore, these theories have supported a deterministic attitude in the analysis of behavior. Behaviour is, thus, directly determined by the single automatism – be it an instinct or a conditioning - and so complex behavior is explained by a dominoes model, that is to say, through a chain of impulses. It is obvious that subjectivity is merely an appearance, according to this model. Giving awareness to a machine does not mean bestowing subjectivity upon it, if we consider, following Brentano, awareness as nothing more than assuming responsibility. Subjectivity precedes consciousness and is the foundation from which consciousness can emerge, not vice versa. I am aware of my subjectivity and, contrariwise, I cannot become subjective by becoming aware of being a machine. This thought becomes more pressing by directly concerning us if we consider Cartesian res cogitans as an artefact to guarantee subjectivity to an inert material, which can be mathematized and, like a clock, follows a path completely determined by its mechanisms. When we renounce to the soul’s deus-ex-machina or transcendental principle, we immediately realize that the res-extensa model is unable to explain, or even puts us off from explaining subjectivity’s nature. We can either accept to be nothing else than machines, already determined by their mechanisms, or inevitably review the res-extensa model, namely the animal as a machine. First, I believe that the term “subjective” should be explained and that has been one of my goals starting from the essay “Intelligenze Plurime e Modelli cognitivi” (Multiple Intelligences and Cognitive Models). That is even clearer in the forthcoming “Etologia filosofica. Alla ricerca della soggettività animale” (Philosophical Ethology. Searching for animal subjectivity). I think that this is a complex problem because it closely concerns us. It should not be addressed, though, in an anthropocentric way or by means of convenient shortcuts such as transcendental soul or tautological consciousness. Subjective is what is not objective, that is to say, predetermined, deterministic, passive, neutral, algorithmic. Subjectivity always comprises partiality, freedom, uncertainty, arbitrariness, infidelity, and characterization in the here-and-now. The subject is the one who chooses his conduct, not necessarily in an unconscious way, who invents a conduct by transcending learned skills. DESIRE An animal is a subject as owing desires that make her protagonist of her own life. She is not a passive entity, but rather keeps constantly proposing herself, like a being to look for in an uncontrollable way. There is a close relationship between animality and research, subjectivity, and nonbalance. An animal is moved by yearning, libido, impulse. She creates situations, changes the world into a field of opportunities since she has desires and goes therefore in search of occasions. The animal condition can be interpreted as the being of a body-that-desires, not only in terms of openness to the world or conjugative openness but also of implicit intentionality. Body, grasped in its vital coordinates, is always connected to something. The bodythat-desires refers and returns to a content because it expects something from the world – as fish’s gills from oxygen dissolved in water – and in that sense what is alive is always intentional, never closed in on itself, as it produces meaning through its desire on each plane of its expressions. Leaves are moved by the wind; instead, an animal owns an inner force: she is subjective since protagonist. Her inner causes are verbal structures: gathering, chasing, taking care of, joining, having, protecting. The object is just an excuse. Desires are verbs, potential acts, “structures-being-to connect” the individual to the world. An animal wants through her motivations that show up in playing, exploring, and interacting with the rest of the world. While expressing, body shows these verbal predicates, which, in order to declinate into actions, will apply to external reality in terms, for example, of targets. The desiring entrenching the subject in the natural world from where h/she arises. Desire is a mental yearning, a hunger of world that makes her restless, ready for action, imaginative, engaged. Desire has always constituted the basis of ethological research: every species has different desires, and every animal does desire. An animal is a subject since oriented to search some space for maneuvering: desire gives her few problems, let her evaluate the different situations, pushes for finding solutions, can inspire decisions. More than the achieved result, exercising the desire gives pleasure: an animal is subject since involved in the principle of expressive pleasure. EMOTIONS An animal is a subject as owing emotions, that is to say, inner states able to lead her to confer certain values to the different situations. She is subjective since not receiving the world passively but interpreting the external reality depending on her state. Through her emotional state, an animal converts a lived situation into a condition per se worthy. In this way, being moved determines the condition of a particular here-and-now: being subjective is building a peculiar being, peculiar both to the individual and time experienced at a given instant. The emotions are the outcome of body state and what reality can offer at a given instant. The body is a systemic reality in the making: transforming this world-talking physiological process into a mental state means being as becoming. By emotions, an animal embellishes her world with colors: depending on how she feels, the world acquires different tones. When an animal is tired and feeling negative emotions, her perception of the world changes if compared when she feels well. Emotions like sadness or fear can turn the world into something dark. Therefore, being a subject means being capable to read reality just partially. Whenever reading her surroundings, an animal is never objective, and her approach is subjective just because partial and attributed to her own inner state. Subjectivity is a world interpretation, which anticipates the representation; it is a preexisting value-giving, which changes the individuals into a pre-conceptual entity: the subject moves in the world, and, above all, moves inside her/his values, which paint the world accordingly. An animal is partial and does express bias under all circumstances. Emotions underlie feeling, as they turn world’s occurrences and phenomenological plurality into different body’s status. In other words, a sensorial repertoire is returned in physiological terms, for example, heart rate, vasoconstriction, epidermal conductance, emission of certain cocktail of pheromones, that is it gets somatized. Emotions give to the animal the condition of sentience. Being sentient mean having a past that makes every interface a shared somatization. At the same time, emotions that answer, like desire, to the pleasure principle, put the animal in constant relationship with the world, never closed on herself, never in a condition of balance, never in a condition of ontological self-sufficiency. The animal cannot be understood in her status just thorough an internal search, because her status is always being in a relationship. In its somatizing the external world, sentiency makes subjectivity a fluid condition, never crystallized in any shape. OWNERSHIP The animal is subjective because is the owner of her equipment. The principle of ownership shows that animal is not reducible to a set of automatisms, presiding, autonomously or due to single primers or to functional mechanisms, over animal’s behavior. The animal is not a combination of devices, just like the Cartesian clock, but is the owner of her own equipment: the animal is like an artisan using her/his own tools to manage her/his job. Any kind of information and knowledge we have related to our inner sphere and learned dimension are tools and not automatisms. It is a very important slipping of an explanatory model. According to the model automatism, the link between structure (what exists) and function (what it does) is representable like 1:1, that is to say, “what exists = what it does”. Therefore, the structure is given, the function can be deducted, in other words, structure compels function. According to the model tool, the link between structure and function is 1: infinity, that is to say, the equipment-tool a) gets ready, b) provide skills, c) is available to perform the function but does not implicate it. Whereas automatism moves the individual, the tool gets used by the individual. Let us think of any capability, innate or learned, like of any other tool, i.e. a hammer: it is me to use it, it cannot make me move. The difference here is fundamental since an automatism would turn any animal into a marionette moved by wires, whereas a tool is grabbed by an animal that can use it with a certain mental flexibility. A tool can be compared to a city map: it provides me with the requested indications but it cannot decide any itinerary. The functional exhaustivity of automatism would transform any individual just into the summation of her/his automatisms. Subjectivity denies any functional exhaustivity, which would transform an animal in a set of mechanisms triggered by external and internal stimuli. Considering any piece of information as a tool instead of an automatism means providing the animal with a kind of autonomy about her own resources: it is she to move and use them, not the opposite. A tool can be used in a thousand different ways, and creatively. Being a subject is being autonomous about own tools, able to test them in new situations, to modify them and to create some new ones. Why would a model based on tool be more adequate than a model base on automatism? The answer is “the principle of the singularity of the real”: the world appears in shapes similar to each other but never identical, and for this reason, the individual has to manage some margins of novelty all the time. If their capabilities were just automatism, she/he could not manage any change, as automatism produces only one defined function. This is why it is impossible to project any software playing chess through an algorithm. In order to manage singularity, an animal must use her own abilities in a free, flexible way, by exaptation, using creativity. SELF-OWNERSHIP The two conditions that we have defined as “being desiring” and “being sentient” make us understand that, differently than any machine, animals are subjects since carriers of inherent interests. A machine can express potentially very complex performances but it is not interested in produce them: it is up to us to set up the work. Any animal able to desire or feel has some interest because she gets engaged in her here and now. Whenever talking about animal rights or considering animals as moral patients, we will refer to this very capacity of carrying interests. If using an analytical approach, the equipment ownership makes us understand that it is impossible to consider subjectivity as a quality ascribable to a specific outfit, because subjectivity is a systemic outcome. We could say that subjectivity is an emerging quality, not identifiable among single parts but through interactions among the single parts. A fundamental perspective infers from that: animal, as the owner of her own equipment and not the slave of it, is an entity emerging from the functional processes. Emerging means being able to perform some reflexive aspects, such as evaluating, judging, deciding, simulating. In this sense, the difference compared to a machine is not given by the performance per se, but by the capacity of presiding over the development of the various functions through being present. The animal is subjective as a present, able to attend her operational here and now. Having inherent interests and equipment ownership inevitably produces a selfownership, what is absent in machine. Animal creates her present time, a here and now in which she builds her own Dasein (Being). Present time does not exist per se, it is an invention of being animals via the connection of past and future: the past time gets resonated and a chrono space of action-presence is created. The animal is subject since existing: she is not confined to simply show up on the world’s stage, but she is present to the world. Owning a present means having sovereignty over here and now and being plunged into it. Being animal expresses by the resonance codes of here and now, these two parameters changing according to species: it exists as many different presents as the animal species are. Every species puts in relation different times because is different from the phylogenetic history preceding any individual emergency about species-specific subjectivity. Subjectivity is such an emerging from the flowing of time. MIND Subjectivity is having an inner world continuously changing. Being animal means dreaming, making projects, setting up strategies, thinking about possibilities, evaluating a situation and its inner contents, realizing mental simulations about different tactics. Subjectivity is the outcome of animal mental life, the result of an inner stage where all orientations are compared to each other, and that Lorenz used to call it the parliament of instincts. Hence, the result is always systemic, reflective, interactive among the parts involved, and never mechanical, analytical, domino effect alike. Mind as a system gives life to thinking, a kind of inward-looking leading to global decisions more or less aware. The mind is not conscience: conscience is just one function of mind. The subjectivity of mind mostly unfolds inside the unconscious. Nothing is more subjective than unconscious, which reveals itself in the flow of desires, in the dream and in altered states, in emotional images, in disentangled memories, in chaotic projects. We would rather say that conscience is often a censor to subjectivity The mind is an internal ecosystem, a microcosmos not overlapping with the macrocosmos world, where the processes of reality take place. Mind locates me inside the world, and, at the same time, allows me to step back, to reflect about occurrences through a complex elaboration of every available piece of information. Mind permits to turn any world occurrence into a meaning, into pro and cons category; mind permits an immediate decoding in order to make decisions. The mind is not only a set of elements, as far as capable to produce systemic effects – such as arising qualities, synergic effects or the availability to introject organizational information – the mind is above all a process, a set of events producing some outcomes that do not precede the mental action itself. The mind is a factory of cognitive activities. Just like any other organ, the mind acts to metabolize the rough matter provided by the world. Considering animality, together with considering myself being in the world, as a trigger of automatism seems a non-reply to me, aimed to avoid the issue. Indeed, I put also the appeal to conscience and the various levels of awareness among the non-replies. I wish to underline that I do not deny this status of subjectivity in the other animals. But, recalling Brentano, I would say that those are “plans of intentionality”, the condition of “being aware of” and to “shed a light on something which is taking place”. The flashlight can light a room up but cannot create the furniture present inside! Therefore, the conscience (the flashlight) cannot create subjectivity (the furniture); the conscience simply illuminates its characteristics. Therefore, it is due that subjectivity precedes conscience. Any possible awareness in the machine can only enlighten machine’s mechanisms, and will not be able to originate any free will or creativity that found subjectivity, and neither can give any ownership to the machine over its automatisms. Animal’s emotional and motivational statuses define a feeling, an involvement more similar to my falling in love than to a ticking of a watch. This is a distinction we should discuss. A character exists as result of a phylogenesis, because it has passed the fitness’s examination and because it has got the green light from some remote causes that have established its compatibility. That is for sure. A character assumes a specific conformation during the development and got affected by some physiological and environmental activations. That is for sure as well. But it also produces a feeling that should be explained by a different plan of explanation, anyway keeping in mind the previous ones: this should be the fifth principle. As Lorenz used to say: “life is made up of physical and chemical laws, but it is not only physics and chemics”. Me too, I do not want to introduce any other element. By complex systems analysis, we know they exist different predicative plans emerging inside the process. Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen, but shows some predicates that differ from its ingredients; this is why laws governing oceans cannot be explained just on the basis of water’s qualities. This is true also about involvement! The variables act on pre-existent predicates and create a “systemic involvement plan” emerging from the single ingredients. In her predatory dimension, a cat expresses her subjectivity, her being desiring. This condition leads the cat into a dialectic of languor-orientation and expressionsatisfaction related to pleasure and self-ownership. Cat does not hunt to eat: in hunting, she expresses her being-into-the-world, the pleasure coming from being. Eating is just a consequence, something retroacting on fitness in the long term. If we made love to reproduce, contraceptives would not exist. THE CONCEPT OF INTELLIGENCE When speaking of intelligence, the issue is given by the idea that we have this capability. What is intelligence? For example, it is considered that an intellectual act means primarily solving problems through the capacity of getting out from the checkerboard condition. The more elegant the solution is, the higher the intellectual gradients are. The word “elegance” should sound a wake-up call to us. Generally, this term gets any kind of connotations but objective: novelty, essentiality, velocity, articulation, beauty. Maybe, we still are too attached to the anthropocentric concept of the machine to understand AI? Let us try to understand which options are available to the animal to solve a problem. Usually, she could act through: i) an algorithmic key of an inner flux diagram scheme, such as a spider’s net; ii) the repetition of some previous expertise by adaptation, such as predatory behaviour in a cat; iii) the use of some probably effective solutions (heuristics) to be applied under the form of attempts and route adjustments; iv) mental simulation of the problem’s structural relationships inherent in the productive thinking (insight); v) creativity, freely assembling objects and concepts. At that point, the solution to the problem becomes the focus of our attention, the famous exclamation “Eureka!”, that should testify an intellectual acting. Indeed, we have the tendency to evaluate the solving perspicacity of an animal on the basis of her performance: the elegance and complexity related to the performed work, the effectiveness and correlation to a specific challenge, the correspondence to the requisites of the issue. Nevertheless, this could mislead us, since the best performances do not depend on the capacity of pondering the occurrence and conceive a strategy. The solving speed consists in just repeating any consolidate – innate or learned – competence, with few or no room for thoughtfulness and creativity. Clearly more than just the act/performance to solve problems, intelligence is the capability of perceiving problems, detecting an issue beyond the appearance; it is, therefore, the capability of plugging in a condition of a not evident problematic nature and suspending the tendency to repeat the prior expertise. Intelligence is the potential of getting a problem emerged from the quiet sea of reiteration, distinguishing a ripple in the bottom-building of things related to how things show up. Intelligence is having a problem as able to focus the singularity of real, to mention Prigogine Animal intelligence reveals itself through hesitation and mistake, through expressive ambivalence more than coherence and linearity - our definition of elegance. Often, intelligence goes with some behaviors which just apparently are inconsistent, selfreferred or exhibited as the emotional outburst. Also in a human being, thoughtfulness is not shown through an immediate action and performing expertise, rather through hesitation and production of outburst/ redirecting behaviors like head-scratching or nose touching. Coherently with the concept of intus-legere, thoughtfulness recalls the act of getting a possible configuration of real emerged thanks to a specific query. If we consider intelligence as the ability to problematize, we need to reaffirm that: 1) to have any problem, it is necessary first to look for opportunities, which allow going beyond what has already been given; 2) to get a query, intended as the capability to get the opportunity given by singularity, it is necessary having the power of feeling and desiring. Intelligence, as problem conceiving, is given only under the existence of emotional dispositions and motivations. Intelligence comes from the bottom of animality, where thinking is always servant of a condition which is much more lived than considered in an abstract way: what we usually call the voice of the heart, the sentient and desiring being. Having said that, we can argue that, in order to conceive any issue, it is necessary to be first of all involved in the occurrence; differently than any known machine, this involvement arise inside animals from the condition of owning some inherent interests related to animal as an entity able to somatise external reality, which, in its turn, carries these interests concerning that animal herself: 1) past, that is the assignment of emotional values to the different experiences: in its whole, the past implicates feeling what an animal is surrounded by; 2) desire, that is projecting beyond oneself to realize the expressive coordinates coupling with the external reality. In this sense, an animal shoes a self-ownership that push her to problematize. SIMILARITY/DIVERSITY If it is true that every species is the result of a story shared with few other species, in other words, if Darwin is right, then dealing with the characters in an essentialistic way is nonsense, as if they were borne with a specific species and belong to it in a cogent and exclusive way. The phylogenetical predicates of human being are mostly shared with some other species, they are not species-specific, therefore, for example, i) maternal love does not appertain to the being-human condition, but to the being-mammal condition; ii) feeling emotions, and not only the basic emotions, comes even before the mammal condition; iii) the tendency to gather and manipulate are typical of primates; iv) even our biped locomotion is based on the coordination of tetrapods. When we say that anthropomorphizing is wrong, we say correctly, but in no way, the above-mentioned attributions are any kind of anthropomorphization. A wolf is different than a bear, a dog from a cat, in other words, they have different predicates. Nevertheless, they exist some basic needs – reproduction, learning, finding food, avoid possible dangers, monitoring the environment – that does not concern just a particular species, but to the animal condition generally speaking. At this point, we can say that being a wolf is just a predicative declination – a specific trait – of the predictive condition of being-animal. Is this condition comparable to the mechanism of a clock? For example, when we fell in love, we feel a deterministic strength that takes our protagonism out or, on the contrary, a condition that increases our protagonism, making our presence here-and-now stronger? An animal cannot choose to be a dog, a dolphin, a human or a hen, but every animal carries on shoulders a story telling some peculiar characteristics of a subjectivity. Each species has different talents, not only somatic but also of the psychic kind. Therefore, subjectivity is an expression of differences, and any try to look for a subjectivity through the comparison with humans is wrong. One thing is certain: the idea of the animal like a machine is in its twilight, and we will need to rebuild an animal ontology by going beyond the concept of res extensa. Just as there is a morphology, endocrinological, sensorial multiplicity, so too there is a cognitive multiplicity since the phylogenetic process does not improve, but just provides specialization. Therefore, the animal world is made of a plurality of intelligence, each specialized in doing some processing about a current piece of information. For this reason, it makes no sense wondering which is the most intelligent species, just as it makes no sense wondering which is the most sensorial or the most endocrinological species. For example, a dog has a strong social intelligence while a cat stands out for her resolutive intelligence: wondering which one is more intelligent is wrong and pointless. PHYLOGENESIS ONTOGENESIS Subjective means having an identity, a biography, which is the result of several moments –species history, gestation, evolutive age, adulthood – and several relations with the world. The coexistence of these stories, being each of them conveyor of specific causes, determines a causal plurality: the subject is always like a Harlequin servant of several masters. Those different stories get together in an individual whom they provide with singularity: this means being unique and unrepeatable, and, above all, this means that no animal behavior can be entirely predictable. We cannot attribute this unpredictability to the only fact that it is a complex system, but to the fact, it belongs to diverse causal temporalities. Along with their phylogenesis, individuals get affected by what their species have learned and introjected inside their genetic and epigenetic library rendering the phenotype, inside their parental and cultural structures rendering the ontogeny. Individuals get affected by the very first relationships with their parents, in the litter, with the group of peers during the evolutive age, which has built their basic personality type. Individuals get affected by the received amount of experiences and by the introjected proximal plan of experience. Individuals have elaborated an evolutive differential according to the received stimuli, have to build specific knowledge. They react to all this. A biographical identity is a work in progress because any animal keeps constantly learning and continuously modifying. Expressing a behavior is practicing some behavioral traits, in such a way that every time an animal chooses to act in a given way, she modifies her identity. Just like muscles, that get trained while working, and grow up, similarly identity is constantly evolving. Being a subject means changing, never staying the same, being unfaithful to the past. Besides, learning is not just a particular instant of subjectivity, but rather just the foundation of the subject. We must radically review animal ontology by reinterpreting not only subjective behavior but the whole course of life. Animals are not only protagonists in the definition of their biographical structure, but also in the determination of the phylogenetic development of the species. The animal who plays and invents/interprets her script is not just a “repository of genes”, as in a Neo-Darwinian approach. Nowadays, following the new theories of EVO-DEVO, we realize how subjective choices, although not in Lamark’s simplification, change the species’ phylogenetic trajectory. We have to find out much more in terms of epigenesis and the construction of niches. However, the problem is that the concept of adaptation itself seems outdated. Life is not just adapting to regimes imposed from the outside. Life works as an artist. It does not merely play, but rather it continuously creates. Life never remains within a boundary, but always exceeds, transcends, reinvents itself. That is why Descartes must be overcome and not postCartesian descriptions. That is also why we cannot just follow conscience in attributing agency to the animal condition. THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND ATTENTION! Roberto Marchesini Head of Centre Study of Post-human Philosophy, Bologna, Italy. Let’s stay in touch Find: Roberto Marchesini on Academia.edu Visit: www.fisolosofiapostumanista.it Mail at: estero@siua.it Do you want to delve into deep of Roberto Marchesini philosophy? • R. Marchesini, Over the human. Posthumanism and the concept of animal epiphany, Springer 2018. • Jeffrey Bussolini, Brett Buchanan & Matthew Chrulew (Eds.), The Philosophical Ethology Of Roberto Marchesini, Routledge, 2018. • R. Marchesini, Beyond Anthropocentrim: Thoughts for a Post-Human Philosophy, Mimesis International, 2018.