Nicholas Humphrey is one of those geniuses who help people like me understand what the world is like, something no politician has ever done for me.

Humphrey is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics ad has spent much of his life studying the evolution of intelligence and consciousness in people and animals.

He’s worked in Africa with Dian Fossey in Rwanda and investigated the evolutionary background of art, religion, healing, animals, death awareness, and suicide. 

His new book, which I am going through, chapter by chapter (and slowly) and have just about finished, is called Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness.

(Sentience, says Wikipedia,  is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations.

Philosophers in the 1630s first coined the word to describe the capacity to experience feelings and sensations from the ability to reason.)

A significant part of Humphreys’s research has been trying to understand why human beliefs about the sentient – consciousness – of animals and why we attach to them so intensely.

Is it only humans who have a sense of themselves as psychic beings? Or do other animals feel this way also?

We’ve undercut animals, says Humphrey,  by our epidemic emotionalizing of different species – octopuses, among others – while putting others on a much more scientific footing.

I have a good friend eager to dress up her French Bulldog in women’s clothing; she says she has always wanted to have a daughter. It’s not my thing, but Humphrey says in some way, this makes more sense than we might initially think.

But why do we see so many animals as sentient creatures like us and have so much trouble seeing them as animals without our ability to know who we are?

There is now plenty of science behind the belief that dogs can reason.

There is little or none to support the idea that octopuses do the same thing, despite all the books and documentaries emotionalizing and anthropomorphizing them.  

Its octopuses turn out to be the latest animal darling of humanity.

There is reason to believe they react with great instinct and skill but little to suggest they reason the way dogs or humans do or have the same sense of self.

Yet many people now care about them in the same way they care about dogs. Yes, I’ve seen the documentary on Netflix.

“We lack direct evidence and even agreed on arguments as to how far consciousness extends” to other creatures, Humphrey says, but don’t tell that to many animal lovers or to producers and publishers.

Most animal lovers, from dog owners to human rights activists, don’t care about science; they care about their own emotions, and that is what they project onto the animals around them.

Most people argues Humphrey,  probably already believe that they know a lot about what it’s like to be a dog – to feel the pain of a thorn, the coldness of a river, the sound of a whistle.

“Are they right?” he asks in his book. Yes, surprisingly.

He believes there are solid scientific grounds for saying that they are like us in that way.

He writes that humans have learned to enter a dog’s consciousness in many respects.  And dogs are believed to return the favor.

It almost makes sense that some people would dress up a dog, as more and more people are doing. In some ways, we are finding through rigorous scientific research that they are like us.

We love them so much; they have evolved as our emotional support systems, not just as hunters or protectors.

We have therefore found in science, says Humphrey, compelling reasons why we should extend our ethical and moral concerns to dogs.

But by the same token, he says, we have found reasons why we need not extend the same level of concern to octopuses and countless other species. We need to care for them but in different ways.

I highly recommend Humphrey’s book, his study of the evolution of human consciousness is gripping. I  have a much better understanding of my consciousness and how it has evolved to shape who I am and what I want.

Humphrey says we mostly have evolved to want to be happy, something humans never imagined for much of their existence.

Science isn’t everything, he writes.

There are plenty of reasons why humans should care for the welfare of the world’s animals, whether or not they are phenomenally conscious. He says we should care for them even if they’re unaware, which means there is less reason to care about them.

He says we should care about them as part of the web on which life on Earth depends, as miracles of biological design in their own right, as things of beauty, and as co-voyagers with humans into the future.

Sentience still counts above all else.

Phenomenally conscious animals have an absolute claim on us that insentient animals do not.

So the welfare of dogs should matter to us more than octopuses because dogs matter to themselves in a way that octopuses do not.

Humphreys says near the end of his book that if you were in the place of a dog, you would mind being treated well by humans; if you were in the area of an insentient octopus, he says, you wouldn’t.

“That puts humans under notice to get it right,” he warns. “We must be able to trust that our beliefs about who or what in the world is sentient is based on good intelligence,” not just emotions or impulse.

He argues that it is terrible to be wrong but irresponsible not to get it right. I love that thought.

There is a genuine morality to what we understand and believe. You are not likely to find it on social media.

This was a mind-altering book for me, not just about how we see animals but how we understand ourselves.

Our consciousness is the engine that drives our lives, and I was taken aback at how little I knew or understood about it.

This book is a chance for me to get it right and see why we can’t simply alter the biology and care of animals because we think they are cute or love us in the way we love things.

In our country now, science is taking a beating from ignorant and anti-democratic ideologues who have been taught to hate learning,  research, and science, seeing them as elitists.

. Humphrey reminds me of how evil and dangerous a thing that is.  During the pandemic, it is becoming clear now that thousands, even millions of people, lost their lives or suffered because ignorance and hatred have replaced science and hard work and cast them in doubt.

Humphrey makes me think, not just argue, and that is a sacred thing to me.

There is no end to what dogs and other animals can teach us. But it has to be learned, not assumed.