All Animals are Conscious: A New Premise in the Cognitive Science of Consciousness
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Distribution Question (DQ) asks: Can we know which animals beside humans are conscious? The current best practices for answering DQ rely on a version of a marker approach, which seeks to find some observable features that indicate consciousness. I argue that the marker approach all but guarantees a positive answer regarding any animal selected for investigation-including sponges. This makes answering the DQ currently unachievable. What will turn it into an achievable goal is to have a robust theory of consciousness, which, I argue, requires we adopt the premise that all animals are conscious.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it