Do animals have minds?

Question

I would say yes. All mobile animals have minds. They need to have a certain level of consiouness to moved through space and time and survive. I cant see how an animal can be "Aware" of it`s surroundings and not have a concious mind.

Answer 1

Obviously they have minds. Some people, especially in the past, seem to have thought otherwise... although I can't imagine how. Animals clearly move and play and do things and express preferences and wills and emotions.

According to most religions, animals don't a have soul. Only humans do. But I don't believe in souls anyways. And for people that do believe in souls and believe that the soul IS the mind, then how do they explain that animals demonstrate having minds if they have no souls?

Answer 2

"Having a mind" is not the kind of yes-no property that is like "Pregnant". One cannot be just a little pregnant. Having a mind (let's abbreviate it to HaM) is a vague property, which some logicians identify with what is called a fuzzy set. Pregnancy on the other hand is a crisp set. Fuzzy sets have degrees of membership between 0 and 1, where 0 connotes "not a member" and 1 connotes "surely a member". Using this idea one could perhaps safely say that normal humans have a degree 1 in HaM, while amoebas perhaps have degree 0.001 in HaM, with our chimp cousins 0.9 in it.

If one were loath to use numbers, a list of qualitative features ordinarily associated with cognitive power may suffice. This may be a sequence of increasing power: awareness of the environment, self-awareness, having beliefs, ability to reason about the beliefs, having beliefs about the beliefs of others, etc. Humans lie. They do that only because they believe they can persuade others to adopt false beliefs, so that entails humans have a theory of other people's minds. Chimps are known to lie too. I am pretty sure frogs don't lie.

Answer 3

Any living creature has intelligence as a survival instinct.
From a slug to a dolphin to a man.
Only man has the ability of speech such they are capable of objectivity.
This allows him to be technological.
A slugs mind is projected parts of an inch a dolphin for miles and man appears to have no limit on the projection of his mind.

Answer 4

YES , they should be , by , accordances to your question or was that's an answers. Only them animals just don't have the human body and intellectual of abilities. THERE , ALSO , HOW DID ANIMALS MEMORISES for all sorts that had happening in them lives.

Answer 5

Animals must have minds.... I say this because I have seen their emotions and also the power to choose beyond instinct..... instinct for instance can not make the dog loyal.. it is a choice made in favor of the master and it doesn't hesitate to risk its life for the sake of loyalty.

Answer 6

I think the question use to be not if animals had minds but can they REASON. Of course they have minds. All humans have minds but can't all reason worth a damn. An animal can use logic and reason and does. I wish all humans did too.

Answer 7

The main thing that makes us more aware than the animals is we know we are mortal . We are also aware that the time and place of our execution is unknown.

Answer 8

I agree with you. They have minds and characters all of their own. They have wills, and wants that go beyond simple explanations like "genes" and into the mind of the creature.
Horses, pigs, dogs, cats, dolphins, porpoises, parrots, chimpanzees, gorillas, camels, and alligators and crocodiles.
They all have a mind of their own.

Answer 9

yes

Answer 10

yes