Research Program / Claims / animal-consciousness-1

Animals and bodily consciousness have almost no concept of age; they are 'young' in every present moment of existence.

动物和身体意识几乎不具年龄概念，在存在的每个当下都是“年轻”的。

Concept animal consciousness · Domain Consciousness States and Attentional Dynamics · ontological claim · 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
Divided into two phases: first, use about 240 dogs (120 young and 120 old) over 6 months for novel stimulus response, exploratory preference, and learning tests, controlling for audiovisual function, pain, motor speed, and training history, with a pre-registered equivalence boundary rather than relying on P > 0.05; second, use about 60 trained dogs over 12-18 months to test the ordering of life stages and its transfer to the dog's own historical cues. The first phase can only test whether cognitive performance changes with age; the second phase also still needs to verify whether the measurement truly corresponds to the concept of age; neither can directly adjudicate 'young in every present moment'.
Suggested paper title
Age-Related Differences in Novelty Responses and Temporal Self-Representation in Dogs: A Pre-registered Study
What it would overturn
If it merely confirms the lack of an age concept, it would not overturn cognitive aging mechanisms, because subjective age representation and age-related cognitive changes are different hypotheses.
Candidate labs / funders
Lisa J. Wallis; Nicola S. Clayton; Christelle Jozet-Alves
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Low: does not define the concept of age, youthful experience, or applicable species, nor does it predict which behaviors remain unchanged with age; reaction time equivalence is a newly added hypothesis.
Note
In this review, 'untested' means no direct test was detected this time, not guaranteeing that no one globally has studied it; sample sizes are planned magnitudes and must be adjusted via power analysis; the cited Ratcliffe et al. (2021) was not confirmed, so verified papers are listed instead.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim animal-consciousness-1, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/animal-consciousness-1