Do Animals Have Consciousness? (Interview)

Abstract

In the interview given to Victoria Lysenko a well-known Indian primatologist Anindya Sinha talks about his studies of wild bonnet macaques’ intelligence. He touches upon the issues of social skills, decision-making and cheating in macaques, and dwells on the methodological approaches to the study of animal intelligence in general, and of intelligences in apes, in particular, which consists in the allocation of different functions associated with consciousness and studying them separately. Among others, a problem how to specify human language in comparison with sign language peculiar to apes, questions of associative learning as a cause of unconscious behavior, and of a continuity principle in evolution of species are also raised.