There is, for one, the problem of animal awareness.One school of ethologists devoted to the study of animal behavior has itthat human beings are unique in the possession of consciousness,differing from all other creatures in being able to think things over,capitalize on past experience, and hazard informed guesses at the future.Other, "lower", animals (with possible exceptions made for chimpanzees, whales, and dolphins)cannot do such things with their minds;they live from moment to momentwith brains that are programmed to respond,automatically or by conditioning, to contingencies in the environment.Behavioral psychologists believe that this automatic or conditioned response accounts for human mental activity as well,although they dislike that word "mental".On the other side are some ethologists who seems to be more generous-minded,who see no compelling reasons to doubt that animals in general are quite capable of real thinking and do quite a lot of it ――thinking that isn't as dense as human thinking,that is sparserbecause of the lack of language and the resultant lack of metaphors to help the thought along, but thinking nonetheless.The point about this argument is not that one side or the other is in possession of a more powerful array of convincing facts;quite the opposite.There are not enough facts to sustain a genuine debate of any length; the question of animal awareness is an unsettled one.
