Is your cat or dog conscious? What about fish? Or honeybees? How would you even know? Paula Droege, a philosopher at Pennsylvania State University, regularly wrestles with how to investigate these ...

Humans have had relationships with their pets for thousands of years, talking to them, coddling them, and imbuing them with human attributes. But are these animals “thinking,” and do nonhuman animals ...

The “problem of other minds”—knowing that someone else has a mind like yours, and in the case of consciousness, subjective experiences similar to yours—is not too much of a problem when we are ...

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. All three of these discoveries came in the last five years — indications that the more scientists test animals, the more they find ...

But two new papers on the possibility of consciousness in animals and AI suggest new theories for how to test this—one that strikes a middle ground between sensationalism and knee-jerk skepticism ...

Animal consciousness should not be thought of as a light switch, which can be on or off, philosophers say. They advocate a different approach. There are reasons to assume that not only humans but also ...

In the past, many scientists believed that only mammals and birds could feel or think in complex ways. Reptiles, fish, and insects were seen as simple creatures that reacted purely on instinct. But ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed. She had a severe brain ...

Bees play by rolling wooden balls — apparently for fun. The cleaner wrasse fish appears to recognize its own visage in an underwater mirror. Octopuses seem to react to anesthetic drugs and will avoid ...