Few philosophical problems have acquired as much visibility in recent decades as the hard problem of consciousness. It is discussed not only in philosophy of mind, but across neuroscience, cognitive science, AI, and public intellectual culture. Part of the reason is obvious: consciousness seems to confront us with a peculiar difficulty. However detailed our scientific account of the brain becomes, it still seems possible to ask why any of it should be accompanied by subjective experience at all. Why is there something it is like to see red, feel pain, smell coffee, or hear music? Why is mental life not all processing and no presence?

This is what David Chalmers called the hard problem. The contrast is with the so-called easy problems: explaining how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, controls behaviour, produces reports, guides attention, and coordinates action. These problems are not easy in the ordinary sense. They are often extraordinarily complex. But they appear to belong, at least in principle, to the normal business of science. The hard problem, by contrast, seems different in kind. It asks not how cognition works, but why it is accompanied by experience at all.

It is not hard to see why this problem has been so influential. It appears to identify a genuine explanatory gap. No matter how complete an account we give of neural mechanisms, information processing, or behavioural capacities, such an account still seems not to capture the felt character of experience itself. One can imagine explaining every functional and physical aspect of colour vision and still not having explained why red looks the way it does. The same goes for pain, smell, pleasure, grief, or the sound of music. Something seems left out: not another mechanism, but the presence of experience as lived from the inside.

But from this it does not follow that consciousness science must solve that problem in order to count as successful. A science of consciousness does not need to dissolve the hard problem in order to make progress on consciousness itself.

That point is easy to miss, because discussion of consciousness often slides from one demand to another. Sometimes what is wanted is a scientific account of when consciousness occurs, how it is realised in nervous systems, what role it plays in cognition and behaviour, how it differs across organisms, and how it relates to memory, attention, perception, report, and action. At other times, what is wanted is something much more ambitious: an account that would somehow make the felt redness of red, or the painfulness of pain, transparent from a third-person point of view. These are not the same demand.

Science may be able to explain the conditions under which conscious states arise, the mechanisms that sustain them, the ways they shape behaviour, and the functions they serve, without thereby eliminating the sense that experience itself exceeds description. That would still be a major explanatory achievement. Indeed, it is hard to see why it should not count as one. A mature science of consciousness would not need to reproduce the qualitative character of experience from the outside in order to explain consciousness scientifically. It would need to explain how consciousness fits into the natural order: what it does, how it works, when it appears, and what kind of phenomenon it is.

This matters because the hard problem is often treated as if it were a special obstacle confronting consciousness alone, and thus a special challenge to the scientific study of mind. But that may mislocate the difficulty. The apparent gap between description and experience may not be a problem unique to consciousness. Consciousness is where that gap becomes especially vivid, because here reality is not merely described or inferred but directly lived. Yet the underlying issue may be more general.

For scientific description never seems to become fully identical with what it describes. However far explanation advances, reality is not thereby drained of its remainder. Matter becomes more intelligible, but not self-exhausting. Physics deepens, but does not finally abolish the question why there is anything at all. Biological explanation reveals extraordinary structure, but not a final transparency of life to thought. In every domain, explanation progresses by articulation, abstraction, formalisation, and integration. Yet what is given has continued to outrun its descriptions, despite tremendous scientific progress.

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Consciousness gives this condition a particularly intimate form. In conscious experience, what exceeds description is not merely some hidden depth of the external world, but the felt presence of experience itself. That makes the problem look uniquely local to the mind. But perhaps it is not. Perhaps consciousness does not introduce a wholly novel kind of mystery so much as stage, in especially vivid form, a more general limit in our attempts to render reality fully transparent to third-person explanation.

If that is right, then the hard problem is not best understood as a special burden placed on consciousness science. It is not a sign that the science of mind has uniquely failed where the rest of science succeeds. Rather, it reflects a broader philosophical difficulty concerning the relation between description and givenness: between what can be stated objectively and what is present at all, whether in experience or in the world more generally. Consciousness is where this difficulty becomes hardest to ignore, because it is where presence is immediate. But the difficulty itself is not necessarily born there.

This reframing does not make the hard problem disappear. Nor does it show that qualia are illusory, unimportant, or reducible in some simple way. It only suggests that the felt character of experience should not be turned into a special test that consciousness science, unlike every other science, is required to pass. The inability of third-person explanation to become identical with first-person givenness may reveal something real and important. But if so, it reveals not merely a problem about consciousness, but a more general feature of our epistemic situation.

Seen this way, the hard problem remains profound, but it is no longer correctly described as a challenge particular to consciousness. What is particular to consciousness science is the task of explaining the role, mechanisms, and realisation of conscious states. What is not particular to it is the deeper fact that reality may never be fully transparent to description. Consciousness merely makes that fact especially vivid.

And that is why the hard problem, though real, may be misclassified. It is often treated as a special deficiency in our scientific understanding of consciousness. But more plausibly, it is one local expression of a much broader limit: the fact that what is given, whether in experience or in reality more generally, is never simply exhausted by the terms in which we describe it.

This also allows a less defensive view of science itself. Science does not fail because it does not abolish mystery. Its achievement is not to eliminate wonder, but to make the world more articulate without pretending to make it final. Consciousness is one place where this becomes especially clear. The mystery here is unusually intimate, but not uniquely local.

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In my previous essay, I introduced my book-in-progress, Do Animals Make Art?—a project that questions the assumption that art is a uniquely human affair. I proposed an open “knockout contest,” where different candidate artists (teams) must survive elimination rounds based on various artistic criteria. If a species fails a criterion, it’s out; if it passes, the question becomes: on what grounds do we exclude it from the realm of art?

I promised to talk about aesthetics in this second essay—after all, many people see aesthetic value as a bedrock of “true art.” But first, two influential origin-of-art theories demand attention. Each purports to define a historical (or prehistorical) moment when uniquely human art first emerged. In theory, either of these views could slam the door on the possibility of nonhuman art from the start. So, let’s examine them—and see why each may be more fragile than it first appears.

Was Art Invented a Mere 200 Years Ago?

In his book The Invention of Art, philosopher Larry Shiner famously declared,

Art as we have generally understood it is a European invention barely two hundred years old.

During the European Enlightenment, new institutions—museums, concert halls—helped separate “fine arts” from craft, forging a new sense of cultural prestige around painting, sculpture, literature, and music. Before the Enlightenment, Shiner says, nobody lumped all these things together under one conceptual umbrella. Art was more utilitarian, less “for reflection,” and artists were rarely singled out as special geniuses.

At face value, that’s a bombshell for any animal candidates: if art only “began” in eighteenth-century Europe, then a pufferfish swirling mesmerizing sand patterns, or a bowerbird’s elaborate courtship display can’t possibly be real “art.” But wait—Shiner’s claim also means that Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) weren’t creating “art” in the modern sense, either. Neither was Shakespeare (1564–1616). Essentially, the entire Renaissance—home to some of the most celebrated works in the Western canon—falls outside Shiner’s cutoff. That’s quite the collateral damage.

The Trouble with Excluding Michelangelo

Philosopher Stephen Davies and others push back: if we accept Shiner’s logic, we exclude just about every masterpiece humans hold dear. Think of the Mona Lisa or David—both centuries older than the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Moreover, ancient cultures like the Greeks may not have categorized creativity quite like we do, but they plainly recognized certain “poetic” or “creative” practices as distinct from everyday craft. The Aztecs, likewise, collected and curated artwork from their predecessors as prized heritage. Was that not “artistic sense,” just under different social frameworks? In her book But Is It Art?, philosopher Cynthia Freeland argues that something akin to art can be found in every culture around the world.

So… Is the Theory Knocked Out?

Yes—and by its own overreach. If your definition of art can’t accommodate Shakespeare, Michelangelo, or centuries of religious and courtly art, something’s gone wrong. Far from eliminating animal candidates, Shiner’s proposal can’t even accommodate huge swaths of human cultural output. In our “knockout contest,” therefore, the eighteenth-century argument is the first to fail. All our animal teams remain standing.

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Did Art Emerge During a “Creative Explosion” 40,000 Years Ago?

Another influential view locates the origin of art tens of thousands of years further back. The central idea is that art is inextricably linked to uniquely human symbolic thought, language, and what archaeologists call “behavioral modernity.”

Popular books like historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind have presented this “recent origins” model as the scientific consensus. In the graphic adaptation of Sapiens, for instance, Harari and colleagues point to about 70,000 years ago as the emergence of “the first objects we can reliably call jewelry,” reflecting “a revolution in sapiens’ cognitive abilities.” In light of Shiner’s claim that art is a mere two centuries old, calling 70,000 years ago “recent” may sound paradoxical. Yet, compared to the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens over 200,000 years ago, it is relatively late.

Some scholars impose even more stringent criteria on the archaeological record—for example, demanding evidence of musical instruments or figurative art—arguing that genuine art only appears in a “creative explosion” a couple of tens of thousand years later. Anthropologist Richard Klein, a leading proponent of this view, asserts,

irrefutable art and personal ornaments appeared only 50–40 thousand years ago, which suggests this was also when full-fledged language appeared

Either way, the confidence with which archeaological findings like these are sometimes interpreted as evidence of uniquely human symbolic thought has always struck me, as it seemed to overlook remarkable parallels in the animal world.

A Closer Look at the Archaeological Standards

Anthropologist Duncan Stibbard-Hawkes’s inspired a more systematic comparison. Studying living African forager groups—undeniably “behaviorally modern”—he found that many would leave scant evidence of symbolic artifacts. By conventional archaeological criteria, they might fail the test for symbolic cognition, suggesting these yardsticks are far from foolproof.

Building on Stibbard-Hawkes’s comparative approach, we extended this analysis in recent work with philosopher Alexis De Tiège. We tested the standard criteria for “uniquely human symbolic cognition” against notable nonhuman behaviors, using the strictest benchmarks—such as Klein’s focus on genuine musical instruments and figurative art—to ensure a rigorous comparison. Here’s a sampling of what we found:

• Personal Adornment. Ochre use in early humans is taken as a sign of symbolic thought. Yet bearded vultures also use ochre, apparently to signal status (females are larger, probably dominant, and darker colored). Intriguingly, their lineage predates humans; perhaps we learned from them!

• Decoration. Early hominin “manuports” (natural objects carried from their original environment presumably for their aesthetic appeal) and paint manufacture are also seen as evidence of human symbolic cognition. However, this is parallelled by male bowerbirds collecting and arranging objects (shells, stones, berries) for display and sometimes painting their bowers with processed plant materials. They even create theatres with forced perspective illusions, a technique humans only invented in the Renaissance.

• Figurative Art. Often touted as “irrefutable” evidence of symbolic cognition, yet many animal species intentionally create resemblances to real-world objects. Wild orangutans fashion and cuddle leaf “dolls”; a captive dolphin once imitated cigarette smoke.

A cloud of cigarette smoke was once deliberately released against the glass as [a dolphine calf named] Dolly was looking in through the viewing port. The observer was astonished when the animal immediately swam off to its mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk which engulfed her head, giving much the same effect as had the cigarette smoke.

• Musical Instruments. Palm cockatoos modify sticks and seedpods to drum on hollow trees during courtship, showing rhythm and individual styles - key features we associate with human music.

Even those stringent “irrefutable” markers for symbolic cognition don’t automatically exclude nonhumans. Some of the most sophisticated cognitive abilities—like vocal imitation, crucial for language—turn out to be widespread in whales, pinnipeds, elephants, bats, and birds, yet notably absent in nonhuman primates.

Not the Final Verdict—But a Broader Perspective

One explanation is that these archaeological standards don’t truly separate symbolic from non-symbolic cognition. Figurative art, for instance, can arise from simpler sensory manipulation (common in animal communucation), rather than relying on symbolic meaning. All we can confirm from cave paintings is that they involve “semblance-making.” And as many working artists testify, creativity often involves improvisation—akin to generative AI “dreaming up” images—rather than deliberately encoding grand symbolic messages. Even Da Vinci may have been exploring freely when he arrived at the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile.

Alternatively, it could be that certain nonhuman species genuinely push beyond basic display or imitation, verging on deeper symbolic terrain. Cognitive scientist Irene Pepperberg—renowned for her work with the African grey parrot Alex—has long argued that crucial facets of symbolic thought aren’t exclusively human. New findings on other animals also support this view.

Either way, these “late-emergence” markers—personal adornments, musical instruments, figurative art—don’t by themselves shut out the possibility of art in other creatures. If bearded vultures or cockatoos can tick off the same boxes, perhaps we need to question how we’re defining “uniquely human” in this sphere.

Still in the Race

In other words, just like Shiner’s eighteenth-century claim, the “creative explosion” theory can’t automatically dismiss nonhuman art. It remains uncertain whether symbolic cognition is truly a prerequisite for art, and even if it is, that doesn’t necessarily shut out all animals. Too many species exhibit behaviors that look suspiciously like the “symbolic artifacts” archaeology holds dear.

That said, these two origin-of-art challenges hint at other big questions. Shiner’s approach, for instance, draws in historically important criteria like the artist’s creative genius, art’s “uselessness,” and the role of aesthetic intentions. In upcoming installments, I’ll dive deeper into creativity, functionality (or lack thereof), and aesthetics to see which—if any—of our nonhuman teams survive the next selection rounds.

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You have probably seen the footage of a tiny male pufferfish laboring for days to construct intricate geometric “mandala art” in the sand. These complex circular sculptures dwarf the fish that makes them. When Sir David Attenborough calls him “nature’s greatest artist,” it’s hard not to wonder—could this really be art?

It’s not just about pufferfish. Bowerbirds decorate their courtship arenas with colorful objects arranged in carefully orchestrated displays, sometimes even creating visual illusions.

Humpback whales sing elaborate songs that humanity appreciates so much, we’ve included their recordings (alongside Mozart’s) on spacecraft travelling through interstellar space—just in case alien tourists swing by. Much like humans, humpback whales learn these tunes from each other, transmitting them between populations across the entire South Pacific. If all this feels art-like, are we humans really the only ones who make and appreciate art? Or should we rather conclude animals really do make art?

Popular Vote: Yes!

In popular media, animals like pufferfish and bowerbirds are often hailed as artists. Some scientists back this idea, too. For example, biologist John Endler—known for discovering that male Great Bowerbirds arrange objects to create forced-perspective illusions from the female’s vantage point—went so far as to suggest they are “artists” who “judge art” and therefore possess an aesthetic sense.

Beyond birds, whales, and fish, you’ll find painting elephants, dancing peacock spiders, and more. Their behaviors can seem strikingly creative, even aesthetically driven. If you love these “yes!” stories, you might be tempted to say, “Of course animals make art!” Yet, in academic circles, the dominant consensus remains that art is uniquely human.

Academic Circles: No!

When I proposed this book to a well-known university press, the editor expressed great enthusiasm, but the reviewers… not so much. One reviewer, with a background in philosophical aesthetics, critiqued the question posed in the title—Do Animals Make Art?—and thus the premise of the whole endeavor. While they acknowledged intriguing parallels between human art and animal behavior, they asserted that art is a uniquely distinctive feature of our species.

This reflects a common stance in the humanities, where art is often assumed to express the human condition, with its exclusivity taken as a given rather than something to be examined. Such assumptions align with dictionary definitions of art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.” Yet, this premise is not necessarily justified. Tool-making was once considered a defining characteristic of humanity until overwhelming evidence from nonhuman animals forced us to abandon that bastion. Could the same be true for art?

Even in evolutionarily inclined fields, such as evolutionary psychology, which frequently draw comparisons between human and animal behavior, art is typically framed as a uniquely human adaptation or a byproduct of human-specific psychological traits. For instance, in The Art Instinct, Dennis Dutton writes (p. 9): “[A]nimals construct stunning objects and put on spectacular performances. Animals, nevertheless, do not create art.”

But is this framing a reflection of the evidence—or of the framework itself? Evolutionary psychology emphasizes species-specific psychological adaptations, often viewing the human mind as a product of evolutionary pressures unique to our lineage. Could this lens predispose the field to interpret art as inherently species-specific, not because of a lack of evidence in other organisms, but because of its foundational assumptions about the distinctive nature of the human mind?

A Journey

So, which is it: Yes! or No!? It’s tempting to pick a side, but both camps typically rely on assumptions rather than conclusive evidence. The “no!” side claims it’s obvious that art belongs exclusively to humans—but rarely spells out why. Is it symbolic cognition, creative imagination, or some other requirement that animals supposedly lack? When such criteria are considered, the arguments often fail to address two key points: (1) why the criterion is necessary for art and (2) the evidence substantiating its absence in nonhuman organisms.

Meanwhile, the “yes!” side often projects human aesthetic preferences onto animal behavior, without solid proof that the animals themselves experience it in a similar way.

This ambiguity isn’t new. Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man, argued for a sense of beauty and aesthetic tastes shared even with animals as “low” as insects and spiders. In modern times, many scientists and philosophers have dismissed Darwin’s claims as overly sweeping, suggesting that animals lack the necessary sensibility and emphasizing that aesthetic tastes aren’t even universally agreed upon among humans, let alone across distantly related species.

Still, mounting discoveries in animal cognition, communication, and neuroaesthetics suggest we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of shared aesthetic capacities—and even tastes—too quickly.

The Book’s Purpose

My upcoming book (I’ll be sharing previews here on Substack) revisits this question with the help of new research. In recent decades, we’ve seen breakthroughs in:

• Animal Cognition and Communication
  New findings on learning, mental representation, problem-solving, and the realistic possibility of consciousness in creatures once thought “mindless.”

• Evolutionary and Empirical Aesthetics
  Studies that revolutionize our understanding of aesthetics as a fundamental aspect of how and why humans and other organisms process, interpret, and act on sensory information.

• Neuroaesthetics
  Brain-scanning technologies that hint at how we and potentially other species experience aesthetic pleasure.

• Philosophy of Art
  Classic theories—from Plato to Arthur Danto—re-examined through the lens of modern science.

Could these insights open the door to genuine “art” in nonhuman animals? Or will they reinforce art’s status as a distinctly human domain? It’s not a trivial question. If art exists outside our species, it challenges long-held assumptions about the boundaries between “us” and “them.”

The Knockout-Contest Approach

Throughout human history, attempts to define “art” have produced a dizzying array of criteria—creativity, non-utility, aesthetic intention, embodied meaning, cultural variation, aesthetic pleasure, and more. Yet even among experts, there’s no single feature that everyone agrees is necessary or sufficient for something to qualify as art. Rather than wrestle endlessly with semantics, I propose an operational approach—one that acknowledges art’s complexity and multifaceted nature while still seeking concrete points of evaluation. It’s a way to explore the question systematically without getting stuck in rigid definitions of art.

Instead of singling out a cherry-picked criterion (e.g., “art must be symbolic” or “art must be creative”), my book lays out a cumulative strategy. Because no single feature of art is universally accepted as defining, we use several overlapping criteria, eliminating any behavior that fails to meet one or more. Think of it as an open-ended “knockout contest” with multiple selection rounds, like the Turner Prize or the Eurovision Song Contest. To name just a few rounds:

• Aesthetic Sense
  Does the “realistic possibility” of insect subjective awareness—and their capacity to experience pleasure—also imply a realistic possibility of insect aesthetic pleasure?

• Mimesis (Representation)
  Wild orangutans have been observed fashioning and cuddling “dolls” made from leaves, while a captive dolphin calf named Dolly once spontaneously imitated a visitor’s cigarette smoke by squirting her mother’s milk—an astonishing example of real-time mimicry. Do these instances count as representing physical reality?

• Art for Its Own Sake
  Does dolphin bubble play—or even the playful behaviors recently noted in bees—fulfill the criterion of doing something purely for enjoyment? And, regardless, shouldn’t we distinguish between proximate factors like subjective enjoyment and ultimate (potentially hidden) adaptive functions of human art?

• Creativity & Culture
  Should we interpret innovations in whale songs, transmitted across vast oceans, as evidence of a genuinely creative culture?

As long as an organism’s behavior or phenomenon passes all the relevant tests we can conceive—successfully surviving each selection round without disqualification—we can’t simply dismiss it as “not art.” The burden of proof is on human exceptionalism; it is to be shown art is distinctively human, not assumed.

Format: Teams & Judges

To keep it playful, I’m dividing the living world into “teams,” each represented by a signature species. For instance:

• Team Pufferfish (representing non-tetrapod vertebrates—fish)

• Team Bowerbird (representing nonmammalian tetrapods, such as birds)

• Team Humpback Whale (representing non-primate mammals)

• …and so on, culminating in Team Abramović (named after the “grandmother of performance art”) as our human benchmark.

Each team enters the knockout race, with historical heavyweights like Darwin and modern philosophers like Danto as judges. We’ll see who gets eliminated in each round. If any nonhuman team remains, we might need to rethink whether “art” truly belongs to humans alone.

Yes, it’s whimsical—like a televised art competition for the natural world. But using metaphors can help us grapple with a complex question in an accessible way. (“Plus, you can root for your favorite animals!” my AI-assistant added.)

Forum

This Do Animals Make Art?-series isn’t just a place for me to publish polished drafts—it’s a forum to explore the question together. As I post essays on each round of this fictive art contest, you are invited to:

• Challenge the Ideas
  If you believe animals can’t make art, tell me why. Which criterion do you consider non-negotiable?

• Share New Findings
  If you spot fascinating studies on animal behavior, creativity, or aesthetics, share them!

• Offer Insights & Ideas
  I’m blending philosophy, art, biology, neuroscience, and more. If something sparks an idea or a connection, feel free to reach out.

My hope is that we’ll discover—or eliminate—potential “art” in unexpected places. Is the pufferfish truly the Picasso of the seabed, or just a masterful incubator engineer?And what’s the difference between the two, anyway? Are insects mere bugs or does “imagination” really “make a bee think of honey” as Chet Baker sang? Let’s dig in and challenge our preconceptions.

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Looking Ahead

In the next post of this series, I’ll dive into one of the most pivotal rounds in the Knockout Race: Aesthetics. Darwin’s surprisingly comprehensive aesthetic theory—a framework often dismissed by later biologists as naïve or flawed—will take center stage. I’ll argue that when viewed as a whole and reconsidered alongside emerging insights from neuroaesthetics, empirical aesthetics, and animal communication, Darwin’s ideas appear remarkably prescient. We’ll examine whether this reconceptualization of the aesthetic is omnipresent in the art of the human benchmark team and, if so, whether it disqualifies any of the non-human teams as a necessary criterion.

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Between posts in this series, I’ll share essays on related topics and timely issues in evolution and behavior. These may include explorations of biophilia, dark behavior, cute aggression, and the emerging notion that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution information.

As we look to the future, things are expected to get too weird to ignore. Technology is becoming more life-like, biology more engineered, and the boundaries between the organic and the artificial are blurring in fascinating ways. These transformations challenge the boundaries we’ve traditionally drawn between the natural and the human-made—boundaries that this series also questions in its exploration of art across species. I’m keen to explore the quirks and implications of these changes.