#88 Who’s Actually Conscious? The Animals That Complicate the Question.

Some animals don’t just react.

They anticipate.

In this episode of Think First, we explore a quiet idea most of us already sense but rarely say out loud: animals may notice shifts in the world before we do — emotional, social, and environmental — in ways that complicate how we think about consciousness.

From dogs that read the room before anything happens, to crows that plan, elephants that remember relationships, whales that communicate across vast distances, and octopuses that solve problems without a centralized brain, this episode looks at what animal behavior reveals — not about animals becoming human, but about humans reconsidering the frame.

No mysticism.

No metaphysics.

No forced conclusions.

Just observation, humor, and an open question that lingers:

What if consciousness isn’t rare — just unevenly distributed?

Chapters

• 0:00 The Dog Who Leaves Before The Scare
• 2:55 From Instinct To Awareness
• 5:00 Two Dogs, Two Strategies
• 7:15 Crows, Elephants, Whales, Octopuses
• 10:40 The Slider Model Of Consciousness
• 12:15 Three Cues Of Awareness
• 13:35 Book Plug: Distorted
• 14:20 Bringing It Home And Sign-Off

Transcript

Jim Detjen: 0:00

There's a moment in certain movies, before the villain appears, before the music swells, before anyone screams. Nothing has happened yet, but the air changes. A low frequency dread rolls in, like the room just got two degrees colder, and that's when my dog gets up and leaves. Not because of a bang, not because of a monster, because of the shift. She doesn't wait for the jump scare. She doesn't need proof. She doesn't need a plot. She's not on Rotten Tomatoes waiting to see how it ends. She's just out. And the first time I noticed it, I laughed. Like, okay, dramatic much? But then it kept happening. Scary movie begins. Nothing visible changes. No loud sound, no sudden movement. And she exits the room like she has a calendar invite. Meanwhile, the rest of us, highly evolved primates with college degrees, sit there like, wow, I wonder if this is going to be a feel-good romantic comedy. Here's the part that sticks. It's not only the movies. If I'm stressed, quietly stressed, she's already clocked it. Not reacting to a raised voice, because there isn't one. Not responding to obvious cues, because I'm not giving any. She just moves closer, or farther. Or she plants herself like a little furry therapist who doesn't accept insurance. And then there's the other dog. My golden doodle. Socially tuned, emotionally generous, deeply invested in everyone being okay. The kind of dog who seems to believe personal space is a cruel rumor invented by cats. If my mood dips, she's there. If someone's laughing, she's there. If someone's eating, she's there. If a leaf moves in the yard, she's there. Two dogs, an Aussie doodle and a golden doodle. Different temperaments, different wiring, but both are running something that looks suspiciously like awareness. And it forces a question we usually avoid because it gets weird fast. If an animal can detect the emotional temperature of a room before anything happens, what exactly is happening inside that animal? Not does it have a soul? We're not going there. But does it have something simpler and maybe more obvious? A lived experience, a point of view, consciousness, scaled differently than ours, but real enough to change behavior in advance. And today, we're going there. This is Think First, where we don't follow the script. We question it. Because in a world full of poetic truths and professional gaslighting, someone's gotta say the quiet part out loud. The safe story is simple. Animals run on instinct. Humans have consciousness. It's clean, it's flattering, and it keeps the ethical math manageable. And to be fair, it feels right. Dogs don't write journals, crows don't host podcasts, whales aren't applying for philosophy grants. So we quietly agree to downgrade what we're seeing. We call it instinct, conditioning, projection, conversation over. But there's a problem. Some animals don't just respond to what's happening, they adjust before it happens. They plan, they remember individuals, they pass things down. And when you watch that honestly, without trying to protect the category system, instinct starts sounding less like an explanation and more like a way to stop looking. This episode isn't here to declare animals human, it's here to say the part we usually edit out. The line between reaction and awareness is messier than we pretend. The official framing goes like this: humans think, animals respond. Anything that looks like intelligence in animals is either imitation, conditioning, coincidence, or us projecting feelings onto fur. And yes, anthropomorphism is real. Humans project constantly. We name our cars, we yell at printers, we believe the Roomba is judging us. But there's an equal and opposite reflex we rarely talk about. Anthropodenial. That's the habit of refusing to see continuity between humans and animals, even when the behavior is right in front of us, because acknowledging it would complicate things. So, we minimize. A crow solves a multi-step problem. Wow, birds are smart. Then immediately. Anyway, it's just a bird. An elephant appears to recognize itself. Interesting. Then anyway, animals don't really know things. We bounce off the implication, and the implication is the point. I have two dogs, an mini Aussie Doodle, and a mini golden doodle, which, if you know the breeds, already tells you a lot. The Aussie side comes from herding dogs bred to monitor movement, intention, and deviation. They're not just watching what is happening, they're watching what's about to happen. They notice patterns early, they're allergic to nonsense. Which explains why my Aussie Doodle doesn't wait around for horror movies to prove their case. She's not afraid. She's efficient. Which is a useful trait when you're managing livestock, and apparently when you're managing humans who think they're hiding stress well. The Golden Doodle, on the other hand, has an entirely different operating system. Golden retrievers were bred for cooperation, retrieval, and emotional steadiness around people. They're socially tuned, they track faces, they orient toward connection. There's a reason Goldens consistently rank at the top for emotional responsiveness and behavioral studies. They don't exit the room when things get weird. They move closer. My Golden Doodle responds to tension the way customer service responds to a complaint. Hi, yes, I heard someone here is not okay. I'd like to help resolve this immediately. Two dogs, two strategies, neither looks like instinct alone. Both look like awareness without a storyline. They're not asking why you're stressed, they're just registering that you are, and adjusting, which is a form of cognition we're oddly reluctant to name. If dogs ease you in, crows are where the story starts to misbehave, because crows don't just notice things, they manipulate them. They bend wires into hooks, they solve multi-step problems, they remember individual humans for years, and respond differently depending on past interactions. And, recently, researchers showed something even stranger. Crows can be trained to produce a specific number of calls, one, two, three, or four, on command. Not randomly, not approximately, deliberately. The acoustic pattern of the first call even predicts how many are coming next, which means the crow isn't reacting midstream, it's planning the output before it starts. That's not instinct in the simple sense. That's control. And control implies a point of view. Here's the unsaid part people avoid because it sounds uncomfortable. If a crow can hold an intention long enough to execute it, then calling it a bird brain says more about us than the bird. Elephants don't impress you by being clever, they do it by being serious, they remember individuals, they maintain long-term social bonds, they recognize family members after years apart. And recently, researchers found evidence that elephants may use individually specific name-like calls, not human language, not sentences, but consistent vocal labels directed at particular elephants. Playback experiments suggest the calls aren't generic, they're targeted, which requires recognizing who's being addressed, remembering who that individual is, and adjusting behavior accordingly. That's not herd instinct, that's social memory. It's also why people get oddly quiet around elephants. They don't feel like animals performing, they feel like someone who knows you're there. And that sensation, whether we admit it or not, rattles the hierarchy. Whale watching in Hawaii messes with your categories because when a humpback surfaces near your boat, you don't think animal, you think presence, not threat, not curiosity, presence. And then they drop the hydrophone into the water. What comes through isn't noise, it's structured, low frequency, patterned. Some large whales produce low-frequency calls that have been detected hundreds and in some cases thousands of miles away because sound moves through the deep ocean very differently than it does through air. Whale songs change gradually over time. They spread across populations, they're learned, which means something is being carried forward, not reacted to, but remembered. Here's the part people rarely say out loud. Whales don't just live in the ocean, they live in time. Their calves learn patterns older than they are. That's not reflex, that's continuity. And once you feel that, really feel it, consciousness stops sounding like a yes or no question and starts sounding like scale. And then there's the octopus, which politely ignores everything we think intelligence is supposed to look like. Octopuses solve puzzles, they escape enclosures, they show individual preferences, but their nervous system isn't centralized. Much of their neural processing happens in their arms, which means decision-making isn't all routed through a single command center. If consciousness requires a neat hierarchy, the octopus didn't get the memo. It evolved problem solving without our architecture. And that forces a quiet realization. Maybe consciousness isn't something you have, maybe it's something systems do. Before we go any further, it's worth steel manning the reasonable objection. Because there is one. It goes like this you're seeing impressive behavior, but behavior isn't consciousness. Animals learn, animals adapt. That doesn't mean there's a lived experience behind it. But here's where the frame starts to crack. Even if you fully explain how a behavior is learned, you still haven't explained what it feels like to execute it. And science quietly avoids that question, not because it's unimportant, but because it's hard to measure. Absence of measurement is an absence of experience. Here's the mental model that helps collapse the confusion. Consciousness isn't a switch, it's a slider board. Different species have different sliders turned up. Dogs have social attunement turned up. Crows have planning and control turned up. Elephants have relational memory turned up. Whales have continuity across time turned up. Octopuses have problem solving without a central command turned up. Humans happen to have language and narrative turned way up. But none of those sliders cancels the others. That's the part we usually edit out, because if consciousness is a spectrum, not a crown, then minimizing animal awareness starts to look less like science and more like convenience. And, as my book Distorted, lays out, confusion isn't a bug in modern storytelling. It's often the point. Once you notice this, you start seeing the same pattern everywhere. We reserve rich inner lives for beings that resemble us. We downgrade anything that doesn't. Not because the evidence is weak, but because the implications are awkward. Here are three cues you're seeing awareness, not just reflex. First, anticipation. Behavior changes before the obvious stimulus arrives. Second, correction. Mistakes are adjusted midstream instead of reset. Third, relationship memory. Behavior depends on who is present, not just what is happening. Those cues show up across species. They're subtle and easy to dismiss if you want to. Quick note before we move on. If you've ever watched your dog react to something before you do, such as leave the room, move closer, read the mood, you've already felt the core idea behind my book, Distorted. Distorted isn't about animals, it's about how humans get nudged, framed, and subtly steered by stories that feel true long before we stop to question them. Dogs notice chips early. Humans, not always. Distorted is about learning to notice those chips sooner, calmly, clearly, and without losing your sense of humor. It's available February 10th in paperback and Kindle at Barnes Noble, Apple Books, Amazon, and your favorite local bookstore. The audiobook will be out shortly after. Alright, back to the show. Once you see consciousness as unevenly distributed, not magically bestowed, the argument changes. Not because animals become human, but because humans stop being the only reference point. And that, my friends, is where most conversations quietly end. After all of this, the funny part is how little changed at home. My Aussie doodle still leaves the room when the vibe goes sideways. My golden doodle still shows up like she's been dispatched by customer support. And yes, I still spend an embarrassing amount of time on the Foggy Dog website. Seasonal sweaters, new collars, the occasional bow. And I just found the perfect dog bed at Barber, that rugged British brand. Rugged but with good manners. The one with those wax jackets that somehow last forever. At some point, this stops being shopping and becomes emotional preparedness. Which feels fitting, because the animals that complicate our theories the most are usually the ones asleep at our feet. You don't need all the answers, but you should question the ones you're handed. If you're curious how I think through these stories, the framework lives at gaslight360.com. Until next time, stay skeptical, stay curious, and always think first. Tonight, you're probably not going to rethink consciousness, but you might notice your dog get up before you do. And if that happens, don't worry, your dog won't explain it. They'll just handle it. The funny thing is, after all this, your dog still isn't going to explain anything. No theories, no framework, no podcast, just a look that says, you'll catch up eventually.