The Passing of Pets

Very recently both of my cats passed on.  The one in October of last year, and the other remained with me only months until just two days ago.  I had assumed this would happen, as they were both aging, but it was still somehow unexpected.

And this brought to mind a long-hotly-debated topic that I though worthy of mentioning here.  Are animals conscious?  And if they are, what happens when they die? 

As my regular readers are aware, I try to refrain from posting personal opinions/beliefs here - though I do get asked quite often about my personal ethos and how these topics fit within my own framework.  However, in keeping with my tradition of attepting (but not always succeeding) to keep my opinions to myself, I want to discuss this in more depth using the paradigms we've discussed here previously regarding consciousness and what happens during the process of biomechanical death.  

First, though, we need to answer the question: are animals conscious beings? And of course, to answer this, we have to understand what consciousness is in the first place.  Is consciousness defined as the capacity to formulate thought? (i.e. Descartes' famous "I think therefore I am" axiom.) If we define consciousness in this way, then it is indeed very likely that animals are conscious, and I'll cite the memory of elephants and the grief of dolphins as examples here.  If we define consciousness as the deep, abiding awareness that undergirds all phenomena - that is irreducible, indestructible and fundamental to all things, even atoms and electrons - then animals are still to be considered conscious beings, since they are a part of the tapestry of localilzed experience.     Based this, I would say that it is highly like that animals - like humans - are conscious agents, and therefore may be entitled to an experience beyond biomechanical death, much as humans are.  

Interestingly enough, when I searched for the phrase "do animals have an afterlife" here, the results displayed an overly large number of christian-themed post responses, which isn't entirely helpful.  Christianity is a relatively new religion on the scene of humanity, after all, and tends to assign value to nearly everything as good vs. bad, and so this premise colors everything that its doctrine touches:  human souls in heaven: good; animals in heaven: bad.    So this isn't helpful.   However, arguments that consciousness extends to animals  are emerging more and more frequently, and its safe to consider (based on the view of science, that is) that animals have conscious experience just like we do. 

Extrapolating this further automatically then leads us to the disscussion of an afterlife for animals.  If consciousness extends to animals (as it may seem to do), and conscious beings may not experience death per se (only a cessation of biomechanical processes) then animals, too, may escape death and live on - and we are not at a point yet where we can render or access this data with any type of validity.  For now, then, this discussion must remain in the religious arena.

My guess, though, is that as we move toward a broader understanding of consciousness and its fundamental nature, we will begin to have a greater relationship with other conscious beings - including our animal friends.  Then, who knows? Maybe we can ask them directly.