I just found and am reading what CS Lewis says about animal personhood here, and so far it is right in line with what I have come to see as a real, unsavory flaw in most theologies. 

 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3818/is_199801/ai_n8802633/

On edit: The article was long and too theologically theoretical for my tastes, but for sure, I now know animal lovers really do have a bold ally in CS Lewis.

 Burl, I know you will appreciate these new findings. Unfortunately you need a subscription to read the source paper, but this article does a good job of summarizing the findings.

Selective Attention from Voluntary Control of Neurons in Prefrontal Cortex

Animals can learn to voluntarily control neuronal activity within various brain areas through operant conditioning, but the relevance of that control to cognitive functions is unknown. We show that monkeys can control the activity of neurons within the frontal eye field (FEF), an oculomotor area of prefrontal cortex. However, operantly driven FEF activity was primarily associated with selective visual attention and not oculomotor preparation. Attentional effects were untrained and were observed both behaviorally and neurophysiologically. Furthermore, selective attention correlated with voluntary, but not spontaneous, fluctuations in FEF activity. Our results reveal a specific association of voluntarily driven neuronal activity with "top-down" attention and suggest a basis for the use of neurofeedback training to treat disorders of attention. 

And an excerpt from the article:

While it has long been known that humans and other primates consciously control their brain activity in order to produce and regulate movement, recent studies of ADHD patients and others revealed that people can also consciously control activity in movement-related brain areas without moving at all. Now, the same ability has been discovered in monkeys: Macaque monkey can actively increase the neural activity of certain brain regions to improve their concentration and better identify visual targets, according to research published yesterday (May 26) on Science Express.

This is the first example of “direct” neural control in these animals, said Robert Schafer, a neuroscience postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author on the study. The monkeys were able to alter their brain activity “without eye movements, visual stimulation, or training of any behavioral response,” he said.

 

 milkyway

Good to hear from one of the gang.  

While your mentioned article is a bit biotech intense for me, I think it relates to a recent question I have been having - it is raised from a Panksepp statement that mammal cortex is just like computer RAM that is flexible space to store data and even 'programs/algorithms' like visual mapping in a different location if the normal location is removed in a rat.  He also said that those human brain centers identified w/ speech have analogous communication/association function in other animals.

How rich and varied is the info in the 'language' of dog utterances - whimper, growl, yelp, bark, yawn, etc?  It seems to me that we likely undervalue the variety of what is going on here.

Also to others (maybe ron and poodleowned), I have done a lot of looking into Einstein v Whitehead on relativity, and have some rich links to totally convincing arguments that ANW's General Theory of Relativity and gravity is the one that physics will need to turn to in order to fuse gravity w/ QM in light of dark matter/energy and/or gravitons (=aether)/

Having inflicted Whitehead on many of you over the last many months, I thought I would share this little 'essay' I I posted at a philosophy site.  I feel as if it came together in such a way as to make me feel like my 5 years of semi-addiction to his writing was because of a resonance of his 'philosophy of organism' w/ animal emotion.

Anyway, I think some folks here might get a bit more insight into this resonance.

Whitehead and Animal Emotion

Alfred North Whitehead (ANW) says Nature is an organism alive as an ‘ocean of feelings’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead  Nature is an organic whole from quarks to creature consciousness (which itself is a feeling).  All creatures are on a continuum, differing by degree only in how they take in their umvelt.

ANW’a most infamous and important coined term is prehension. Prehensions are how antecedant factors or objects in the environment are presently taken-in, grasped, or felt by an acting subject. A subject prehends an object when it experiences the object -- when it perceives, feels or otherwise takes it into account. The ‘stuff’ of a prehension is affective tone -- energy for non-mental entities, feelings/emotion for mental subjects.  Their role in the Universe is to facilitate the immanence among things.

But prehensions need not be conscious activity, and they are the main stuff of what our animal unconscious psychology is about. They also occur at lower levels of nature, as when cells feel and take account of their environment of other cells and inorganic particles, and also when sub-atomic events ‘feel’ and react to  the just-goings-on of similar energetic entities.

Another catchy phrase of Alfie’s is ‘perception in the mode of causal efficacy,’ which is non-sensory perception, as compared to the sense perceptions - sight, sound, taste/smell, and touch. Non-sensory perception is by far the more ubiquitous mode of perception in nature: atoms, cells, trees, and many lower animals have no eyes, ears, or noses, yet they take-in their umvelt.  And we humans are only infrequently consciously using our external sense awareness.

Perception and memory are the primary types of creature prehension, both of which Charles Hartshorne, a follower of ANW, says are “intuitions of the past.”  For ANW.  the present occasion is brief and CLOSELY bounded by an immediate past and future. He often uses speech to exemplify this idea, as well as how the past is immanent in the present (future w/r just past).  Before we finish a sentence, the first words are already in the past and grasped as consciously present via prehension.  ANW says ‘we finish sentences because of our past urge to start them’ – this urge retains its causal grip, its immanence into its future.

Examples of non-sensory bodily perception are our short and long term memories; interioceptive sensation of organs such as  toothaches, strained muscles, indigestion, flutters of the heart; and the proprioceptive feelings of movement and balance, like the flow as we dance.  

Anthropocentric tendencies in science and philosophy have largely ignored non-sensory perception preferring the more clearly illuminated conscious awareness and reasoning associated with our external data as perceived via the 5 senses known as exterioception.

ANW holds that the characteristics of life are ‘absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, and aim’ – things of which science remains silent because science only deals with half the evidence given to human experience – that of rational mentality – largely ignoring the emotional affects of our animal embodiment.

ANW criticizes the Newtonian-Humean legacy to modernity as what he calls ‘nature lifeless.’  The excessive abstractions, such as instantaneous (durationless) time and simple point location of vacuous, billard ball particle matter gave us Newton’s laws - like that of gravity as force between masses - but gave no explanatory reason as to what, how, or why.  Likewise, Hume locks us in a Nature with only the bare sensa of sense perception which do not provide the data necessary for their own interpretetion.

The agency of non-sensory perception for causing past events to become immanent in the present is the very causality Hume did not see:  What Hume considers as the ‘force and liveliness’ of character transmitted between separate but successive sense perceptions is de facto recognition of the immanence of the past in the future. This is the necessary continuity of transmission of energy/affective tone in Nature -– causality.

Pat Churchland’s neuroethics is a realistic accounting of non-anthropocentric man in the wake of Darwin.  Listen to her speak of our embodiedness in this short video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpJSeLY8cWs&feature=youtu.be

Jaak Panksepp is a neuroscientist who  offers affective neurophysiology to explain our common mammalian emotional behaviors and who has stunningly discovered an affective state called SEEKING, wherein we are alive aimless and  appetitively poised for novelty, for enjoyment. Jaak sees emotions as the number one causal agent of organisms, as did ANW.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/npsa/videos/26/

Neuroscientists like Churchland and Panksepp know the importance of emotion in our mental experience, unlike the unfeeling non-rational creatures of DesCartes  With both Hume and Whitehead, all would now agree that as we observe similarities in behaviors among animals, we can assume the creatures have subjective experiences much like ours, all SEEKING ‘absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, and aim’ while sharing in a ‘nature alive.’

The language of dog, indeed.

 I have mentioned before of my dog communicating information to neighbor dogs and their responses. And was debated by LCK on that. Either one or both us may have been making assumptions. From what I could see, my dog "said" something and the other dogs processed and used that information. I won't use the "straw boss" of Occam but it seemed like it was just a grand assumption that dogs did not communicate and simply reacted to sound stimuli as assuming they were communicating. Except for that nagging little fact that the neighbor dogs, rather than barking back and "arguing" with my dog took up positions of observation to observe the wandering stranger cat where he would be, before he came into view. That is, information received, and then extrapolated to predict a future event. To ignore that is to ignore the nose on one's face. Yes, you can ignore your nose. To what benefit?

 To me, that is evidence that dogs communicate and can think.

 Of course they communicate via barking, whines, growls, etc (not to mention body language).  It is arrogant anthropocentric ignorance to suggest otherwise.

As for thinking, the same must be said of anyone who suggests that our brains serve a completely different function than that of all the other creatures.

The only thing is we cannot explicitly know what the animals are saying or experiencing.  Our emotions are our sharpest bridge in developing a better understanding.

Burl

 Of course they communicate via barking, whines, growls, etc (not to mention body language).  It is arrogant anthropocentric ignorance to suggest otherwise.

As for thinking, the same must be said of anyone who suggests that our brains serve a completely different function than that of all the other creatures.

The only thing is we cannot explicitly know what the animals are saying or experiencing.  Our emotions are our sharpest bridge in developing a better understanding.

 

You speak much truth, my twin brother from another mother.