Alien minds, animal minds, the cosmic mind -- all of these categories can be set aside as incidental to the human mind.
Montaigne wrote about whatever crossed his mind: animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt.
Aside from jobs like this, sweeping and minding animals, the children say they have nothing to do before rains arrive in a few weeks' time and farming of staple crops including millet, maize, sorghum and cowpea gets under way.
Much of his book is devoted to preparing and presenting that argument; much of the rest is devoted to asking what kinds of mind animals and babies might have if they don't have the inferentialist/language of thought kind.
In 2002 I published a book called Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart, and my concern for individual animals has continued on for decades as I also work in the rapidly developing fields called cognitive ethology (the study of animal minds) and compassionate conservation (please also see and the website for Minding Animals International).
They said I was constantly minding animals; not only was I attributing minds to them, but I also was very concerned with how they were treated and always said we also needed to mind and care for them because they couldn't do it for themselves (please see Lybi Ma's "Take a Walk on the Rewild Side").
Representative recordings of iCa in single wt, mdx and MinD fibres from 2 3 months old (left panel) and 12 18 months old mice (right panel) are shown in Fig. 3 A. For all ages, iCa amplitudes and kinetics were similar in fibres from wt and MinD animals.
Thus, plants probably lag one step behind the experiential world of animals, for although both plants and animals may have attained state 2 (of Brain) and maybe state 3 (of Mind), animals (and humans in particular) have achieved the possibility of self-reflective consciousness (state 4).
"People had been saying we shouldn't study animal minds or animal consciousness but only things we can observe.
More recently, writers like Joy Williams, Barbara Gowdy and, most notably, J. M. Coetzee have used fiction to make radical inquiries into questions of animal minds and animal rights.
In the 1970s, Donald Griffin, who made his reputation taking careful physical measurements to prove that bats use echolocation, made a considerable splash with his plea for a return to questions about animal minds, especially animal consciousness.
