Some neuroscientists and philosophers, like Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, proposing that insects have the capacity for consciousness. Their reasoning behind this: Other scientists have argued that a part of the human brain called the midbrain can, on its own, give a person lacking more advanced parts of the brain simple awareness. The insect brain does something similar to the midbrain in absorbing information from the environment, from memory and from the body to organize its activity. If the insect brain does the same job as the vertebrate midbrain, then the insect has the capacity for awareness. If this line of reasoning is correct, Dr. Barron and Dr. Klein say, a robot built with artificial intelligence that could integrate sensory data, memory and body awareness would have the capacity for the minimal level of consciousness they describe. Their colleagues, Christof Koch, the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, and Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, support this reasoning, proposing that consciousness is nearly ubiquitous in different degrees, and can be present even in nonliving arrangements of matter, to varying degrees. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/s...-consciousness-brains.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0 Paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/13/1520084113.abstract
