Research Program / Claims / animal-consciousness-11

Animals can perceive their impending death, and humans and animals are no different at this level.

动物能感知自身死亡在即，人与动物在此层面无异。

Concept animal consciousness · Domain Consciousness States and Attentional Dynamics · testable prediction · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Establish a prospective cohort of approximately 500 elderly or naturally ill dogs and cats, plus about 200 consenting terminally ill human patients, followed for 2–3 years; record behavior, activity, food intake, and clinical indicators, with humans additionally recording explicit expectations of death. Pre-register death predictions at 7 and 30 days, with controls recovering from serious illness, to test whether animal behavior adds predictive power beyond clinical indicators, with euthanasia handled separately. This study can identify end-of-life-related signals but cannot prove solely from predictive accuracy that animals understand irreversible death or share the same experience as humans.
Suggested paper title
Behavioral Indicators of Impending Natural Death in Companion Animals: A Prospective Multicenter Cohort Study
What it would overturn
If it is further demonstrated that animals explicitly represent their own impending and irreversible death, this would challenge the assumption that nonhuman animals lack prospective representations of their own death, rather than challenging the fact that they can feel illness and pain.
Candidate labs / funders
James R. Anderson; Dora Biro; André Gonçalves; Susana Monsó
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Limited: it proposes anticipation of one's own death and human–animal equivalence, but does not specify a time window, affected species, or criteria for distinguishing general malaise.
Note
Corpse recognition, grief, end-of-life withdrawal, and conceptual anticipation of one's own death must be separated; this question should not be studied by inducing lethal states.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim animal-consciousness-11, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/animal-consciousness-11