Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the University of Illinois, and by Colin Allen (a professor at Indiana University) regarding the literature and research studying artificial intelligence in androids.The most commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do. There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems to violate the principle of parsimony, by postulating an invisible entity that is not necessary to explain what we observe. Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in an essay titled The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying. More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on the basis of behavior. A more straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people because of what they can do, including the fact that they can tell us about their experiences. Animal consciousness
The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell humans about their experiences.
William Lycan, for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)—and that even this list omits several more obscure forms.There is also debate over whether or not A-consciousness and P-consciousness always coexist or if they can exist separately. Although P-consciousness without A-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block, for instance, suggests the case of a "zombie" that is computationally identical to a person but without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I dont know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility." Consciousness in children
Of the eight types of consciousness in the Lycan classification, some are detectable in utero and others develop years after birth. Psychologist and educator William Foulkes studied childrens dreams and concluded that prior to the shift in cognitive maturation that humans experience during ages five to seven, children lack the Lockean consciousness that Lycan had labeled "introspective consciousness" and that Foulkes labels "self-reflection." In a 2020 paper, Katherine Nelson and Robyn Fivush use "autobiographical consciousness" to label essentially the same faculty, and agree with Foulkes on the timing of this facultys acquisition. Nelson and Fivush contend that "language is the tool by which humans create a new, uniquely human form of consciousness, namely, autobiographical consciousness." Julian Jaynes had staked out these positions decades earlier.