Dear TPOT community,

I’ve been noticing an increasingly common perspective in our discussions that I feel compelled to address. There seems to be a growing belief that non-human animals are somehow “enlightened by default” or exist in a state free from tanha (craving, aversion, and the resulting suffering). I’ve seen numerous posts suggesting that non-human animals are somehow naturally free from the mental patterns that create suffering in humans. While I deeply appreciate the sentiment behind this view – as indeed, animals do seem to access deeply bouba states more readily than most humans realize, and their capacity for pleasure is real and ethically relevant – I believe this represents a fundamental misunderstanding about animal consciousness that needs careful examination.

The probability that, say, free range cows (or other non-human animals in general) are experiencing constant bliss, lack tanha, or are “enlightened by default” is, by my estimation, very low (<0.2%). A claim of enlightenment-by-default requires extraordinary evidence, and what we see points in the opposite direction. Let me break this down from a qualia-centric perspective:

Consider first the clear evidence of suffering in prey animals – species like deer, rabbits, or gazelles must maintain constant vigilance against predators, a state that phenomenologically manifests as a persistent kiki-like tension in consciousness. This baseline of anxiety and alertness is fundamentally incompatible with persistent non-dual states. A prey animal experiencing constant bliss would be rapidly selected against in an environment with predators.

Even predators themselves are not free from tanha – we see intense craving manifesting in their sexual frustration during mating seasons, their constant drive for status within social hierarchies, and their restless search for food even when not immediately hungry. The apparent ease with which a lion rests in the sun masks the intense loops of desire and aversion that characterize their conscious experience.

In domesticated animals like cattle, we see equally clear evidence of craving, aversion, and suffering in their daily lives. Cows display intense maternal distress when separated from their calves, with both mother and offspring showing signs of anxiety and distress that can persist for days. They engage in competition for food resources and establish complex social hierarchies that generate ongoing stress for individuals lower in the pecking order. Their food-seeking behaviors demonstrate clear patterns of craving, and they exhibit territorial behaviors that indicate attachment and aversion patterns similar to those we recognize in humans.

The “gazelle shaking off trauma” observation that’s often cited in these discussions actually reinforces the presence of suffering rather than its absence. This isn’t evidence of enlightenment – it’s evidence of an evolved mechanism for rapid state-switching to maintain function. The ability to quickly return to a baseline state of persistent vigilance and anxiety after a threatening encounter is precisely what you’d expect from an organism optimized for survival rather than one experiencing persistent non-dual awareness.

Non-human animals are clearly stuck in loops of craving and aversion. Consider a dog who insists on affection or food: scratching at the door, howling, and persistently demanding attention. These behaviors are obvious manifestations of craving, and, as Rob Burbea points out, all craving is fundamentally based on patterns of body tension. These patterns are not unique to humans but are basic features of animal consciousness. Tanha is thus near or completely ubiquitous in the animal kingdom.

From a neurophysiological perspective, as David Pearce (who, notably, uses the term “non-human animals” to remind us that we too are animals, and that creating artificial distinctions makes it easier to rationalize a sense of separation) has consistently emphasized, we see remarkable conservation of emotional circuitry across mammals. The same neural architectures that give rise to fear, anxiety, and suffering in humans are present in cows and other animals. If cows had somehow evolved a fundamentally different way of experiencing consciousness, we would expect to see major divergences in neural architecture; we don’t see such differences. In fact, the evidence suggests that the capacity for suffering predates the development of the rational, linguistic mind. While humans can use our frontal lobes to rationalize and contextualize pain and suffering, this higher-order cognition isn’t a prerequisite for suffering – quite the contrary.

Consider that pigs have the emotional and cognitive capacity roughly equivalent to prelinguistic toddlers. They experience raw emotions without the buffer of linguistic rationalization that adult humans possess. Chimpanzees show clear signs of depression-like behaviors following social defeats, PTSD-like symptoms after conflict, long-term emotional impacts from loss of status, and evidence of social anxiety and strategic behavior. Birds, despite being separated from mammals by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, display sophisticated emotional responses including spite and vindictiveness. These observations all point to the same conclusion: the mechanisms behind tanha are ancient and deeply preserved across the animal kingdom. The capacity for suffering doesn’t require complex cognition or human-level linguistic capacities – it’s a fundamental feature of animal sentience that evolution has maintained and elaborated upon.

The “animals are enlightened” view seems to commit what I call the “blame language fallacy” – the assumption that consciousness without language or higher order cognition is in “its natural state” and must somehow be more pure or pleasant than our modern human experience. This is reminiscent of the noble savage myth, but applied to animal consciousness.

When we look at empirical evidence from animal welfare science (cortisol levels, behavioral indicators, physiological measures), we consistently see that animals experience a wide range of emotional states, including significant suffering. If animals were naturally enlightened, we wouldn’t observe the dramatic improvements in welfare metrics when we enhance their living conditions.

I suspect this view serves several psychological functions:

• It provides emotional comfort about the natural world
• It suggests an easier solution to suffering than actually exists
• It allows for a form of motivated reasoning about animal agriculture (itself likely one of the biggest sources of suffering in the world)

As someone deeply interested in consciousness and its varieties, as well as no-nonsense suffering reduction tech, I have to emphasize that while animals certainly can experience positive states, they are subject to the same fundamental constraints and physiology that shape all conscious experience on this planet. The goal should be to understand and work within these constraints to reduce suffering, not to pretend they don’t exist, as I see is happening more and more.

The path forward isn’t to romanticize animal consciousness but to better understand it in all its complexity. This requires engaging with the empirical evidence and being willing to update our views when they conflict with our preferred narratives about the nature of consciousness and its place in nature.

Finally, by my estimation it is quite likely that animal valence follows long-tail distributions (just as most things do in the context of consciousness). I think it will be crucial to identify the main species who suffer the most (likely not humans!) and help them first.

Sincerely,
Andres 🙂