Well if all animals except humans think only subconsciously, then I do not think so. Because, isn't confidence a conscious effort? I would then assume a mouse has no confidence in whatever it does... the mouse just "does it."
I am really sorry that I don't know how to make it more clear. Or does the concept of confidence apply to a mouse?
Ofcourse. Look at the difference between a pet mouse and a wild mouse as they walk along a clothesline. If that isn't a feasible thing for you to set up right now I will tell you there is a huge difference. A wild mouse excudes confidence during physical activity. And this increases with age. Confidence is actually a very basic primal sense. I think we have all seen an animal lack confidence right? I mean, you've seen a horse stop short of a fence instead of jumping over it? Well, where there is a lack of confidence, there is obviously the potential for there to be confidence. It is more obvious in some animals than others. Some killer whales for example show copious amounts of confidence, even neglecting efficiency in favour of style at times. And then there are the extremely unconfident killer whales, usually young, that will visibly panic when they don't feel they are ready for something they were about to attempt. Also, try and watch a gibbon swing through the trees at a thousand miles an hour and tell me they aren't feeling confident.
How do you know animals have some degree of consciousness? You, me, and everyone else learns a lot subconciously.
I heard some will cry when kowing their fate, but I never saw one. The boundary between sub and conscious is not clear cut, there is some grey area.
Don't you pukes realize that bipeds are the weakest things on this planet? "Conscience do make cowards of us all", courtesy of a melancholic named Hamlet. I'm sitting here with a mind I adore and yet I'm nothing to the primal will of a flea, a mouse, or a panther. Nothing.
Yinyiwag: With my head high and all over your face with stilletos on. Our 'will' is shit to that of the wilderness. And so, you, you, and you are the ones crouching in the bush when the elephant passes. That elephant has the same thing a mouse does but you only fear it becuase of size.
my mouse isn't too bright at all but he sure is cute and fluffy. the farthest he ever got was recognizing my smell as mommy. he still hasn't figured out that his wheel doesn't lead him down a hallway out of his cage.
Warm blooded animals have consciousness. You're using the obsolete Freudian model of conscious/subconscious. Nowadays everyone who studies psychology (except most MDs, the last holdouts) uses the Jungian model of conscious/unconscious. Notwithstanding the terminology, virtually all warm-blooded animals have a conscious and an unconscious state. Dogs, parrots, and other mammals and birds show the same distinctive brain wave patterns identifying wakefulness, dreamless sleep, and dreaming. In humans, mental activities while awake are conscious and mental activities while dreaming are unconscious. There's no reason not to apply the same model to other animals. It's pretty difficult to watch a parrot impatiently and gleefully learn how to unscrew his first left-hand-threaded nut and bolt without attributing consciousness to him. I think consciousness is an attribute of all that extra grey matter that evolved out of the lower vertebrates' olfactory lobe and became what we think of as our higher brain. And yes, I agree that it may all be just a model, to avoid getting way too metaphysical here.
Re: Warm blooded animals have consciousness. Both models have limitations, I tend to combine them. like the term sub-, or un-, or intuition or learned.
