Making no assumptions is daft

I don't know why it's apparently such a problem for some people to accept a very simple and obvious truth :

When asked why he viewed animal behavior in terms of human experience, given that his more standard approach was to trace how humans are like other animals, Darwin responded by saying that it was “more cheerful,” and “less off-putting,” to think of the animals in human terms than to treat humans as having “beastial” qualities.

Humans and animals share certain properties and can therefore be said to be similar. If you prick them, do they not bleed ? Well, vertebrates do. If you wrong them, shall they not revenge ? Well, it might not be revenge exactly, but they sure as hell won't like it and will often retaliate. When it comes to the characteristics they have in common, it makes no difference to see humans as animals as it does to view animals as having human characteristics. No-one would dispute this for blood circulation or lung capacity or whatever. And yet :

Jane Goodall states, as a matter of fact, that “animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain." She “knows” what animals experience because she has seen signifiers of these emotions in their behavior. But if all we had to do to link conscious states like feelings to behavior was to observe behavior, we wouldn’t need arduous scientific research. Mere observation is not sufficient.

The scientific question in an experiment on humans or animals is not whether the organism has the capacity for consciousness in some general sense, but whether consciousness specifically accounts for the behavior that was studied. If this is not tested, the statement that consciousness was involved is not warranted scientifically.

Right then, prove I'm conscious. Go on, you. Prove that I specifically am conscious. You can't, can you ? How would you ever know ? If you wouldn't accept my behaviour as evidence, then you could, I suppose, monitor my brain activity and see that my brain behaves in a similar way to yours. And you presumably accept that you're conscious, so you could safely conclude that I'm conscious. Right ? The author of this piece bizarrely disagrees :

The philosophical “problem of other minds”is sometimes used to justify the conclusion that, since we only have access to our own mind, we don’t really know what is on the minds of other humans. Therefore, the argument goes, claims about animal consciousness are just as justified as claims about human consciousness. But this is not the case.

In human research, methods are available for distinguishing conscious control of behavior from non-conscious control. For example, visual stimuli can be presented in such a way as to allow or prevent conscious awareness (consciousness is prevented by briefly flashing the stimulus and following it with a longer-lasting stimulus that “masks” the first one).20 In such studies, humans cannot verbally report on the identity of the stimulus (they deny seeing anything). Nevertheless, non-verbal behavioral responses (pointing or pressing buttons) or changes in physiological responses (sweating, pupil dilation, or heart rate) can indicate that the stimulus was meaningfully processed. Because verbal responses (in the sense of a sincere, intentional report, as opposed to an automatically elicited exclamation) can only be given about things that one is aware of, verbal report is the gold standard in human consciousness research.

I call bullshit. The author is saying the behavioural responses are not enough to justify a claim of consciousness and then saying the exact opposite ! This is absurd. Who would claim that an illiterate mute human isn't conscious ? Nobody at all, that would be highly offensive. In the strictest sense, each of us can only ever know for certain that we ourselves are conscious. Consciousness is by definition a non-physical experience, there are no fields or particles of consciousness we can measure. Behaviour is really all we've got to go on. Even knowing the EM field in our brain won't tell us what someone is experiencing, not really - not in the strictest sense demanded here.

I agree that it's difficult to decide which behaviour is due to conscious thought and which isn't (and animals may well have different sorts of conscious and emotional experiences to us). But this is true of humans too ! If we apply the standards the author is suggesting here, that is, to make no assumptions whatsoever, we will all of us go around thinking that our inner mental realms are absolutely unique and everyone else is just a sort of squishy automaton; that other people fart in response to eating too many beans with the same degree of agency as when they write poetry in response to horrible tragedies. Come on, this is not a sensible way of doing science. Yes, in the strictest possible sense we can't know whether cats or whales or politicians are really conscious, but if we demand evidence that strict, to throw out common, basic assumptions about the way the world works, we will be essentially saying that we know nothing at all. And that's silly.

The Tricky Problem with Other Minds - Issue 75: Story - Nautilus

Human "exceptionalism" is for many people an unquestioned assumption. For the religious, it is a God-given fact; for humanists, it is a celebration of our unique mental capacities. No other species has created music, art, literature, or built skyscrapers, or imagined going to the moon and figured out how to go there and how to get back.