Consciousness Research Has a Human Problem (Why studying the most familiar mind is making us worse at understanding all the others)

I’m concerned.

I really worry about the way we are studying consciousness. Although I’m not an expert in the field (I’m a PhD student in avian social cognition), consciousness is my favorite topic in neuroscience and psychology.

I often read books and papers about the topic and track how the field develops, while I dream of working on animal consciousness someday.

My first concern is that we are facing a blind spot by relying on studying consciousness with a third-person view, particularly a neurotypical adult human point of view (or human singularity). My second concern is that we’re looking for a magic formula to explain subjective experiences (a lá Newton), using us as the reference point.

To point out how problematic this is, imagine a super-intelligent bat scientist asking humans to echolocate in a dark room, as they think sound perception is universal and a minimal marker of consciousness.

The issue is that, of course, we can’t do that.

Now, imagine these bats concluding that we are not conscious.

Because of this finding, they conclude it is safe to perform surgery in humans without anesthesia, deprive us of food as they wish, and even exploit us in masses to feed their population.

This is very similar to how we are doing research on consciousness.

See why I’m concerned?

Ah, Consciousness — What Is It?

I think that is easy. At least, most neuroscientists agree that consciousness is any subjective experience, and that it is the dependent variable to be explained (Mudrik et al., 2025).

From that, everyone differs in how to study it, whether phenomenological consciousness is real, etc.

For example, higher-order theories (HOT) would claim that consciousness arises when a higher-order thought is represented. Basically, the most convincing way to confirm that is through a verbal report. If we take this as the only valid method, then we have no clear evidence that non-human animals and preverbal babies are conscious.

Of course, that is extreme anthropocentrism.

And it is not only about HOT theories. No. This problem involves the whole science of consciousness. What I find interesting, though, is that everyone agrees on this problem (anthropocentrism), but no one proposes a solution.

This is a blind spot.

We depend on our human view to do science.

We Need a Darwin

There’s something more that makes me concerned.

There are far more scientific articles, news, and blogs speculating about the possibility of AI being conscious than there are papers on consciousness in babies and other animal species.

But I understand why this is.

Large language models “talk.” It is easier to “understand” them. Many love them because they match our neurotypical adult human point of view. They answer in our language, respond to our questions, and mirror our concepts back at us. Of course, we find them relatable. Of course, we wonder if they feel something.

However, the problem is that we are using ourselves as the reference point.

Again.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked: What is it like to be a bat? His point was not that bats are conscious (and if they are, their experience would be so radically different from ours that we may never access it from the inside). We can study bat brains, bat behavior, bat evolution, etc., but the bat’s subjective world, if it exists, is not ours to inhabit.

That question has been sitting in philosophy for fifty years (the hard problem of consciousness). Although science has made significant progress, much of it falls under the cognitive-science view, using ourselves and computation as the reference point.

And that is exactly why we need a Darwin, not a Newton.

Newton gave us laws: universal, elegant, top-down. A Newtonian approach to consciousness looks for a single principle that explains everything — a unified theory, a master equation, a formula that tells us when experience switches on. That’s what most consciousness research still pursues or uses as a framework to understand it.

But Darwin gave us something different. He gave us a framework for diversity. He looked at the variety of living forms and asked: What are the mechanisms that produced all of this? What do they share? Where did they diverge? He didn’t start from an ideal type and ask why everything else falls short, as we do in consciousness research.

He started from the variation itself.

That is what consciousness science needs right now.

Instead of asking “Does this system meet the human standard for consciousness?”, we should be asking:

• What forms can consciousness take across different bodies, different nervous systems, different evolutionary histories?
• What are the minimal conditions?
• What varies, and what is conserved?

A crow solving a puzzle, an octopus changing color in its sleep, a bee apparently playing. None of these are curiosities at the margins of consciousness research. They are the data.

The diversity of minds is not a problem to explain away. It is the phenomenon.

What This Means in Practice

Studying animal consciousness is hard.

Animals can’t tell us what they experience. But that is precisely why it’s valuable. It forces us to develop methods and criteria that don’t depend on verbal report, and those methods will ultimately be more general, more honest, and more useful than anything built on human self-report alone.

It also means we need to take seriously the idea that consciousness is not a single thing with a single origin, but something that evolution has produced across many lineages, in many forms, for many reasons.

Just as wings evolved independently in birds, bats, and insects, subjective experience may have emerged independently across the tree of life, shaped by different bodies and different worlds.

So, studying only humans — or only systems that talk like humans — will give us a profoundly incomplete and biased picture.

Worse, it will give us a picture we mistake for complete.

So, Are We on the Right Path?

Not yet.

But the path exists. It runs through jungles, oceans, aviaries, and beehives. It requires patience, creativity, and a willingness to encounter minds that do not mirror ours.

That is harder than building a chatbot.

It is also more important.

Darwin didn’t discover evolution by studying one species.

He collected.
He compared.
And he sat with the full, bewildering variety of life until a pattern emerged.

Consciousness science needs that same spirit: the humility to look outward before theorizing inward, and the curiosity to ask what it is like to be something radically other than ourselves.

We owe it to those other minds.

And honestly, we owe it to ourselves, too.

Thanks for reading!

See you,

Axel

References

Mudrik, L., Boly, M., Dehaene, S., Fleming, S. M., Lamme, V., Seth, A., & Melloni, L. (2025). Unpacking the complexities of consciousness: Theories and reflections. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 170, 106053. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106053