C Consciousness Rocco J. Gennaro University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, IN, USA This chapter will address the extent to which nonhuman animals are conscious. Most important perhaps is what criteria should be used in making such a determination. We have certainly come a long way from the Cartesian view that animals are mere “automata” and do not even have conscious experience. In addition to the obvious and signif- icant behavioral similarities between humans and many animals, much more is known today about our neurophysiological and genetic similarities. Still, there are some grey areas and genuine diffi- culties in interpreting some experimental results pertaining to animal cognition and in analyzing the comparative neuroanatomy. The more general “problem of other minds,” including the so-called argument by analogy, is introduced in the section “Animals and the Prob- lem of Other Minds”. In the section “Lloyd Mor- gan’ s Canon and Parsimony ,”“Morgan’ s Canon” and the related principle of simplicity is addressed especially as they pertain to attributions of animal consciousness. The section “More on Some Hard Cases and Brain Structure” focuses on some of the harder cases, such as fish and insects, where it is necessary to delve more deeply into some com- parative neurophysiology. Finally, in the section “Animal Consciousness and Higher-Order Thought Theory ,” the charge that one prominent philosophical theory of consciousness (the higher-order thought theory) is inconsistent with animal consciousness is explored. Here the focus is on the possibility of self-awareness and meta- cognition in animals. Philosophical and scientific work on animal minds and consciousness has surged in recent years with the publication of several major studies and reviews, such as Tye (2016), Andrews and Beck (2018), Allen-Hermanson (2018), as well as the recently launched on-line journal Animal Sen- tience (see, e.g., Harnad 2016, Klein and Barron 2016; see also Allen and Trestman 2016, Andrews 2016). Much of this work takes on the challenge of the most difficult borderline cases, such as reptiles, crabs, insects, and fish, as well as further examination of the evolution of consciousness. Perhaps the most commonly used notion of “conscious” is captured by Thomas Nagel’ s “what it is like” sense (Nagel 1974). When I am in a conscious mental state, there is “something it is like” for me to be in that state from the first- person point of view. When I smell a rose or have a conscious visual experience, there is something it “seems like” from my perspective. This is pri- marily the sense of “conscious state” that I use # Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 J. Vonk, T. K. Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1611-1