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1/9 This is a thread about my new feature from our March issue. It's called, ~~A Journey Into the Animal Mind~~ It's about consciousness. Specifically, animal consciousness. (There may not be any other kind.)https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
2/9 Consciousness is that mysterious interior state of awareness you feel during every waking moment. In the West, it was long thought to be a divine gift bestowed solely on humans.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
3/9 Animals were seen as unfeeling automata, like self-driving cars This didn't change after Darwin showed our kinship to animals Many just assumed consciousness evolved recently, as though the first mind winked into being after we split from chimpshttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
4/9 Now, scientists are finding evidence of an inner life in many kinds of animals. And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales—but alien-seeming creatures (think insects) that evolved on *really* distant limbs of life’s tree.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
5/9 The evolution of consciousness was a cosmic event that opened up possibilities not previously contained in nature. It may have happened more than a *half billion years ago* as the result of some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
6/9 Scientists deserve a lot of credit for illuminating this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we appear to share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
7/9 Apart from Pythagoras and a few others, ancient Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implications.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
8/9 Especially India's Jains, who have taken animal consciousness seriously as a moral matter for nearly *3,000 years*https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
9/9 As perhaps the first culture to extend mercy to animals, Jains pioneered a profound expansion of the human moral imagination I went to India to see their animal hospitals and places of worship and to think through animal consciousness in their midst:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ …
fantastic!
What an amazing adventure .. and, nearly equally amazing read ~ thank you, for allowing me to tag along 
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