Jonah Branding

If an organism displays enough of the right neural, cognitive, or behavioral “markers,” researchers can generally assume it’s phenomenally conscious. But what if it doesn’t? Recently, there has been substantial disagreement on this “exclusion question.” According to one view (what I call the “symmetry” view), organisms lacking markers probably aren’t conscious (Dennett in Soc Res 62:691–710, 1995; Tye in Tense bees and shellshocked crabs: Are animals conscious?, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016; Birch in Noûs 56:133–153, 2022; Veidt in Biol Theory 17:292–303, 2022). However, according to another (the “asymmetry” view), we cannot conclude anything about the presence or absence of consciousness in organisms lacking markers (Prinz Conscious Cogn 9:243–259, 2005; Schwitzgebel in Philos Topics 48:39–64, 2020; Andrews in The animal mind: an introduction to the philosophy of animal cognition, Routledge, New York, 2020, Andrews in Anim Sent 10.51291/2377-7478.1737. 2022, Andrews in Mind Lang 39:415–433, 2024). Here I argue that this disagreement partially reflects a deeper disagreement about how markers are identified; to this end, I point to three “paths” from specific ideas about marker identification (namely, theory-based, analogy-based, and function-based approaches) to one or the other view on exclusion. Equipped with the right auxiliary assumptions, theory- and analogy-based approaches can motivate the asymmetry view, whereas function-based approaches can motivate the symmetry view. However, this relation is not deterministic, as different auxiliary assumptions will lead to different views about exclusion. My distilled product is therefore a decision tree, which links views about marker identification to one or the other view on exclusion. I hope that this tree will serve as a means of identifying “fronts” where future debate on this question can be productively focused.

There’s something strange about Freud’s _Civilization and its Discontents_ (1930). Biologically, Freud was a Neo-Lamarckian, who believed in both the modification of organisms through need and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, in _Civilization_, Freud argued that because human nature is immutable, society has dim odds of improving substantially. Lamarckians, of course, rejected that any species-nature is immutable, as species can always be transformed via the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In fact, many of Freud’s Viennese contemporaries—such as Wilhelm Reich, Julius Tandler, and Paul Kammerer—took their Lamarckism to license precisely the sorts of radical social projects Freud deemed impossible. Thus the Freud of _Civilization_ helped himself to a rigid view of human nature which, given his associated biological views, he seemingly ought to have rejected. In this paper, I explain this apparent inconsistency, and suggest Freud resolved it in the following way: Freud was not merely a Lamarckian, but also a strong and peculiar kind of recapitulationist, who believed stages of psychological development both recapitulate phylogeny, and “remain with us” throughout both individual lives and future species-history. I suggest Freud’s recapitulationism supposed a certain inertia: what occurred in phylogenetic history cannot un-occur, and therefore there are aspects of our nature which we cannot un-acquire. In this way, Freud reached a rigid conception of human nature despite his Lamarckism.