This is a painfully simple answer. Without the unconscious you could never play tennis, a piano or drive a car. What we think of as our conscious perception only sees the immediate past. all the important stuff goes on without our understanding or knowledge. From as something as simple as a handclap appearing simultaneous with the sound of it, our brain tricks our conscious into a simultaneous world, as the sound waves reach the brain at a different time to the sensation of the clap and the sight of it with our eyes.
Were we to have to calculate the trajectory of a tennis ball, or think about each note on the page as we play the piano we would fail to achieve the simplest thing.

True.

This requires all contradictory intentions to be suppressed. Some particular attentional focus and state of intentionality emerges.

Then this in turn becomes the general constraint that places limits on habit-level performance. — apokrisis

You appear to take a step backward here, in your description of the process, and that is what throws me off. A particular intentional focus with a particular state of intentionality emerges. This can be nothing other than a particular set of constraints, unless we go back to a general state of intentionality. But in doing this the particular state of intentionality would necessarily be negated.

So I see no logical way for us to say that a particular attentional focus becomes the "general constraint". If the constraint is general rather than particular, we are right back at the level of general intentionality, which has the capacity to produce many different particular states of attentional focus. Then we have a vicious circle, and there is no explanation for the existence of the habit, which is the inclination toward one particular state of attentional focus.

Therefore the habit must be placed between the general intentionality, and the particular attentional focus, which emerges. The habit is prior to attentional focus, as constraining the general intentionality in particular ways, to produce a particular intention. The act of the habit constraining intentionality is manifested as attentional focus. Since the habit is at, or close to the sub-conscious level, this provides the appropriate representation of general intentionality as being within the subconscious.

It is the common language use, which associates intentions with conscious thought, which leads us astray when discussing general intentionality, which is of the subconscious.

Attentionally-focused intentionality is the generalised constraint on the freedom of learnt habits and automaticisms that arise to fill in the many particular sub-goals necessary for achieving that greater general goal. — apokrisis

So this is precisely where I see the problem with this representation. In actuality, habits place constraints on the general intentionality of the mind, not vise versa. This limits the freedom of the general intentionality, producing attentional focus, and particular intentions. It is not intentionality which puts constraints on habits, because intentionality being the more general, is the more free, and habits constrain this general intentionality in particular ways.

If we represent the relation between habit and intention in this way, we have a platform from which we can address the question of habit formation, and habit breaking. To do this, we must consider the relationship between habit and intentionality, free from the influence of attention. This is necessary in order to understand these issues, because attentional focus is what comes about, is created from, this relationship between intention and habit.

This is the importance of meditation. By focusing our attention on one very specific thing, we release ourselves from all other habits of attentional focus. Then we allow our mind to be released from this one particular attentional focus which has brought us to this state, to be as free as possible from all attentional focus. Now we may approach the level of having just intentionality and habits, demonstrating to ourselves, that we have the freedom to choose our habits. .

Well my point was consciousness is a confused folk psychology term. And that is why neuroscience tries to sharpen things by tieing what we sort of mean in the standard socially constructed folk view to constructs, like attention and habit, which are defensible as the objects of laboratory research. When we talk about attention, there is an information processing argument to explain what that is and identify it with actual brain architecture.

That is why it is better, in my opinion. — apokrisis

The puzzle for me is that in talking in these terms you seem to be adopting the information-processing approach you criticised earlier when I mentioned students of Pylyshyn proposing to dissociate attention from consciousness. Aren't you removing the phenomenological question and therefore the basic issue arising from the idea of 'consciousness'? Attention and habit are characteristics we seem to share with many other animals; consciousness is something we don't seem to share with all that many of them (as I would say), if any (as some say).

I was thinking about placebo studies, which I read a lot about earlier in the year. However cunning our studies of placebos, we can't scientifically get beyond something irreducible about 'belief' and 'expectation'. The I-viewpoint is not, as yet at any rate, susceptible to an 'information-processing argument'.

If the constraint is general rather than particular, we are right back at the level of general intentionality, which has the capacity to produce many different particular states of attentional focus. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are just muddling with words to prolong an argument. As is usual.

Another way of putting it is that vague intentionality becomes crisp intentionality through attentional focusing.

There you go. Another statement which you can muddle away at forever. :)

Thought and feeling can be pretty passive. That was my point: not that consciousness isn't involved in habit, intent, and action, but that those things aren't necessary. — Mongrel

So thought, feeling and consciousness generally can also be "pretty active"?

In other words, you are making an irrelevant distinction given that one of my key points is that consciousness, or attention level processing, wants to be as little involved in the messy detail of responding to the world as possible.

The brain's architecture is set up to with this sharp division of labour that I describe - attention vs habit. It makes sense to learn to deal with the world in as much a rote, automatic, learnt, skilled fashion as possible. That in itself becomes a selective filter so that only anything which by definition is new, difficult, significant, surprising, gets escalated to undergo the exact opposite style of processing. One that is creative, holistic, tentative, exploratory, deliberative.

Note how talk of consciousness always comes back to the "thingness" of experience. It is classic Cartesean substance metaphysics. Consciousness is a something, a mental stuff, a mental realm. The unconscious is then another kind of stuff, another kind of realm. No surprise nothing feels explained by that kind of rhetoric.

But my approach zeroes in on the very machinery of reasoning and understanding. We can see how a particular division of labour - a symmetry breaking - is rational. The question becomes what else could evolve as an optimal way to set up a modelling relation between a self and a world?

The puzzle for me is that in talking in these terms you seem to be adopting the information-processing approach you criticised earlier when I mentioned students of Pylyshyn proposing to dissociate attention from consciousness. — mcdoodle

Well I said I would reject that old fashioned cogsci symbol-processing paradigm and instead of information processing, I speak of sign processing.

So instead of the 1970s conviction that disembodied, multirealisable, algorithms could "do consciousness", I am saying that actually we have to understand "processing" in a Peircean semiotic fashion as a pragmatic sign relation which seeks to control its world for some natural purpose. And this has become the reasonably widespread understanding within the field, with the decisive shift to neural network and Bayesian prediction architectures in neuroscience, and enactive or ecological approaches in psychology and philosophy of mind.

So all the laboratory experiments carried out in the name for the search for the attentional and automatic processes in the brain still stand. What has changed - for some of us - is the paradigm within which such data is interpreted.

Attention and habit are characteristics we seem to share with many other animals; consciousness is something we don't seem to share with all that many of them (as I would say), if any (as some say). — mcdoodle

What makes human mentality distinctive is that it is has an extra level of social semiosis because Homo sapiens evolved articulate, grammatical, speech. Language encodes a new possibility of cultural engagement with the material world. And that is of course revolutionary. It gives us the habit of self-aware introspection and self-regulation. It gives us the "powers" of autobiographically structured recollection and generalised creative imagination.

But apart from that, we are exactly as other animals. We share the same bio-semiotic level of awareness that comes from having a nervous system that can encode information neurally.

So this - as I said - is another reason why "consciousness" is such a bad folk psychology word. It conflates biological semiosis and social semiosis in ways that really leave people confused. It makes self-consciousness seem like a biological level evolutionary development.

I was thinking about placebo studies, which I read a lot about earlier in the year. However cunning our studies of placebos, we can't scientifically get beyond something irreducible about 'belief' and 'expectation'. The I-viewpoint is not, as yet at any rate, susceptible to an 'information-processing argument'. — mcdoodle

But it does make sense as a sign-processing argument. Straight away we can see that we don't have to search for the secret of those kinds of beliefs in bio-semiosis. They are instead the product of a linguistic cultural construct - social-semiosis.

And that is all right. It is the same naturalistic process - sign-processing - happening in a new medium on a higher scale.

OK, so you're setting out a schematic for functions of consciousness as opposed to reducing it. That's cool.

You are just muddling with words to prolong an argument. As is usual. — apokrisis

Oh, instead of addressing the issue which I pointed out, the fault in your described relationships between intentionality, attentional focus, and habit, this is all you can come up with? There's no argument to prolong, just prolonged ignorance on your part.

Another way of putting it is that vague intentionality becomes crisp intentionality through attentional focusing. — apokrisis

See, even here, you completely neglect the role of habit. Attentional focusing is a function of habit unless a particular crisp intention acts to focus attention rather than habit. So the issue which your model cannot deal with, is how vague, general intentionality can become a crisp particular intention without habit and attentional focusing. This is what we call creativity.

They are instead the product of a linguistic cultural construct - social-semiosis.

And that is all right. It is the same naturalistic process - sign-processing - happening in a new medium on a higher scale. — apokrisis

Thanks apo. I haven't embraced this idea but I do feel I've understood it better.

That there is a lot of process, of function, both body and brain, or mental, of which one is not and/or cannot be aware, is pretty uncontroversial. But 'the unconscious' is not that.

The realm of the unconscious is established in the individual when he refuses to admit into his conscious life a purpose or desire which he has, and in doing so establishes in
himself a psychic force opposed to his own idea. This rejection by the individual of a
purpose or idea, which nevertheless remains his, is repression. "The essence of
repression lies simply in the function of rejecting or keeping something out of
consciousness." Stated in more general terms, the essence of repression lies in the
refusal of the human being to recognize the realities of his human nature. The fact that
the repressed purposes nevertheless remain his is shown by dreams and neurotic
symptoms, which represent an irruption of the unconscious into consciousness, producing not
indeed a pure image of the unconscious, but a compromise between the two
conflicting systems, and thus exhibiting the reality of the conflict. — Norman O Brown

Life against Death.

This is what someone might reasonably claim does not exist, only get the response, 'well of course you would say that, because you are repressing it.'

I agree that repression and the unconscious play a huge role in depression.

(Y) 3 (N) 1

Is "awareness" always "attentional awareness"? What about "blindsight"?
Is not our "mind" our "brain" in fact "aware" of (responsive to) many things that do not rise to the level of phenomenal awareness? Although I agree the terms "consciousness" and "subconsciousness" beg definition, I am not sure the terms "awareness" or "attention" and "habit" fare much better.

I am also interested in the application of those concepts to other creatures and life forms. At the less complex end of life forms, one could make an argument that response to the environment is all fixed stimulus response (habit). As the mind (nervous system) becomes more complex, attention to selected environmental stimulus appears, but much habit based behavior remains?

Attention- the selective filtering of perceptual information, must have appeared early in evolution of the mind. Most would say "consciousness" made a much later appearance, bringing the relationship between the two into question?

Again, the argument would be that attention (and habit) are neuroscientific terms. They speak to information processes that can be mapped to brain architecture. And so real questions can be asked.

Talk about consciousness is talk about phenomenology. Unless it is rephrased as some kind of information processing claim, there is no way of investigating it as a modelled construct.

So unless you ground the term conscious (or unconscious) in some kind of information processing paradigm, you can't even ask the question scientifically. And then the extent to which you tie your notion of "being conscious" to neuroscience, you find that it overlaps more and more with reportable attentional states.

That would seem to beg the issue. For "attention" is a feature of the behavior of even fairly primitive creatures, whereas "awareness or consciousness" would seem a much latter evolution acquired feature of "mind". That would be to leave out the linkage between attention and memory as well. Even the most cursory overview of the evolution of mind (or of neurological correlates) should show there is a separation between attention, memory, habit and the kind of perceptual awareness that we ordinarily associate with "consciousness".

As soon as you can define awareness or consciousness in a way that can be neuroscientifically investigated, then we can have a sensible debate about what exactly is extra or different.

You claim that even a cursory review of the literature supports you. I hope you don't just mean stuff like blindsight where those folk still had intact superior colliculi and so a preattentive path for guiding their visual search. Of course they could report having had an instinct to look somewhere as well as report they had no consequent visual image due to their particular brain damage.

should show there is a separation between attention, memory, habit and the kind of perceptual awareness that we ordinarily associate with "consciousness". — prothero

Staring at the problem, it appears there is no separation but rather a fluid movement between different qualities of attention. Habit, being a type of memory, functions without a no or nominal attention, depending upon the habit. The body memory simply does it unless intervened by a act of will. As activities present themselves to a mind, there may be greater or less awareness brought to a potential action which makes us more or less conscious of it, peripheral vision be being an example.

Problems arise when attempting to categories or separation, for some practical reason, onto a continuously flowing and changing process. It is the act of the mind to create an object, a conscious that creates a problem, but observing it there is no problem. It is just always changing in character.

What is most interesting is this state where the mind is seeking unconsciously apparently without any direct attention or awareness. The mind is pretty amazing.

I fully acknowledge the difficulties in defining the terms "consciousness" or "awareness". I find definitions for "habit" and "attention" equally problematic.

Most such studies of "attention" involve vision and the presentation of various forms of stimulus to the visual field, which does make for simple experimental paradigms.

There are also studies involving various forms of perception and regional brain activity as seen on PET or other functional scans.

Then we have information from various lesions of the brain and the accompanying functional or perceptual defects that result (leading to a somewhat modular approach to neurologic correlates) facial recognition say.

The assertion here is that "attention" is a primitive neurological function, seen in say frogs and fruitflies. Do we wish to say they are "aware" and "conscious" in the same manner as humans?

In "blindsight" is the subject "aware" of the object in the visual field?. Not by verbal report only by behavioral response. So once again the topic of awareness links with the topic of attention and by implication consciousness.

A simple search of awareness, consciousness and attention will readily yield discussions of these topics and indicate it is not nearly as clear cut as some are asserting.

Personally most I think most of the mental operations (broadly defined) involved in walking, driving, etc.) never rise to the level of voluntary attentional awareness. Instead so called sub conscious (mental activities not amenable to verbal report) constitute the bulk of mental processing and voluntary intentional awareness is only the tip of the iceberg of mental operations. Furthermore the special skills of the human mind (brain) are layered on top of more primitive neural functions and circuits which have evolved over time and many of which are found in simpler less complex organisms.
Language is a special feature of human mental operations and allows for uniquely abstracted conceptual forms of thought. I do not equate language with thought. I do not think all awareness (or attention) or all experience is "conscious" in the usual sense we understand that term.

On examination there seem to be many forms of "attention". Some of which rise to the level of "conscious awareness" and are voluntary and others of which are "habits" and involuntary. Discussions of various forms of attention and the relationship between consciousness and awareness can be found in the relevant literature. Some forms of attention involve primitive neural circuits which have been preserved in the evolution of the mind.

Perception,memory and response are integrated in the intact organism. It is possible however to show separate neural circuits responsible for the various components and to disrupts the smooth integration through damage to specific areas of the mind or brain. It is precisely the integration and unification of these "informational circuits or modules" that leads to "consciousness" and disruption of the neural circuits responsible for this "integration" leads to loss of "consciousness" or various degrees of "functional" impairment. I am just objecting to the seeming overly simplistic nature of a its all "attention" and "habit" approach.

Dogs can neatly "calculate" the trajectory of a tennis ball or a frisbee, as can lions the flight path of a gazelle. Most mental operations never rise to the level of "conscious awarenss" in animals or in humans. Most so called "higher" mental functions depend on underlying non conscious mental operations as do most skilled actions.

I think that once one begins looking at the mind as some neural systems, all is lost. It would be like looking at a TV set to try to understand the nature of program development.

Well here I have to side with Apokrisis, we need some experimental (empirical) paradigm to approach the problem. Neuroscience (anatomy, biochemisty, etc.) allow us to study the relationship between mental operations and brain physiology. There is more understanding and progress to be had there than in speculation free of science.

We also have natural experiments in the form of brain tumors, injuries, strokes, etc which are quite informative about the relationship between structure and function. We can also induce experimental lesions in animals. We can study brain activity with PET and other functional scans.

Another area is the evolution of minds and brains in nature. More progress in the last few decades than in the previous few millennium.

The assertion here is that "attention" is a primitive neurological function, seen in say frogs and fruitflies. Do we wish to say they are "aware" and "conscious" in the same manner as humans? — prothero

Is it a difference in kind or difference in scale? Is mind something only humans have or does the degree correlate with neural organisational complexity?

Both are reasonable hypotheses. And what we do know is that the degree of organisational complexity actually does correlate with how most people would rank sentience.

As to the rest, I don't think you could have read my earlier posts.

Science travels a different path nowadays. The one lined with money. I have as much faith in their pronouncements as I have in Merck's or Big Tobacco. I'm going a different route (and it is all about faith).

Is it a difference in kind or difference in scale? Is mind something only humans have or does the degree correlate with neural organisational complexity? — apokrisis

Well at least now we are talking about "mind" and "neural organisational complexity" instead of just attention and habit.. I think it is a difference in scale but then I am a panpsychist (panexperientialist) of sorts. Still a combination problem although neuroscience helps with how things get informationally integrated.

Both are reasonable hypotheses. And what we do know is that the degree of organisational complexity actually does correlate with how most people would rank sentience. — apokrisis

I am no more sure how to define, interpret or measure "sentience" than any of the other terms. If the organism responds appropriately to information in the environment (and what surviving organism does not) then I would say it is paying "attention" is "aware" or has "sentience". Self-awareness is something different as is consciousness in my mind. The laws of nature may be "habits".

As to the rest, I don't think you could have read my earlier posts. — apokrisis

Read them all actually; now you can say I did not properly understand them.
You have to admit even among the neuroscience community these issues are not as simple, uncontrroversial or straighforward as you present.

I think it is a difference in scale but then I am a panpsychist (panexperientialist) of sorts. — prothero

OK, so it is a difference in scale as the neuroscience suggests. But then you want to make some kind of claim about a difference in kind?

This is where we might discover if anything useful can be said about what you feel to be missing from my pragmatic account based on naturalistic or ecological information processing principles.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857829/

Theor Biol Med Model. 2010; 7: 10.
Published online 2010 Mar 30. doi: 10.1186/1742-4682-7-10
PMCID: PMC2857829

A thalamic reticular networking model of consciousness
Byoung-Kyong Min 1

Conclusions: I propose that the thalamocortical integrative communication across first- and higher-order information circuits and repeated feedback looping may account for our conscious awareness. This TRN-modulation hypothesis for conscious awareness provides a comprehensive rationale regarding previously reported psychological phenomena and neurological symptoms such as blindsight, neglect, the priming effect, the threshold/duration problem, and TRN-impairment resembling coma. This hypothesis can be tested by neurosurgical investigations of thalamocortical loops via the TRN, while simultaneously evaluating the degree to which conscious perception depends on the severity of impairment in a TRN-modulated network

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7bb0/e25195329956ac3dd49eb38c4c7e880d78b0.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm0XvAWlhAHLlYYYCeXTbwz_163fwA&nossl=1&oi=scholarr

Towards a true neural stance on consciousness
Victor A.F. Lamme

Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Roeterstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, the Netherlands

A second advantage is that we would be able to dissociate consciousness from other cognitive functions such as attention, working memory and reportability, which is a prerequisite for using the term at all. Elsewhere [10,33], I have shown how, from the neural perspective, attention and consciousness can be orthogonally defined as entirely separate neural processes. When other cognitive functions are neurally defined as well, we do not lose explanatory power at all by adopting the neural stance. It can be easily understood why there is no reportability of conscious experience in the case of IB, split brain, neglect and other conditions; in all these cases there are other cognitive functions than consciousness (neurally defined) that are manipulated, which is causing the failure of reportability.
END

My objection is that trying to simplify mental operations into two categories “attention” and “habit” although useful in some experimental paradigms does not solve the problems posed by “conscious” and “unconscious or subconscious” mental activity.

I find the “neural correlates of consciousness” approach both more interesting and informative. Using this approach we know there are separate neural circuits and locations for the processing of verbal, auditory and other sensory input. We know that disruption of the thalamic cortical connections interferes with the subjects ability to recall or report (language). We know that recurrent processing loops and cortical thalamic connections seem to be associated with “conscious awareness”. We know that even in the absence of these connections, some aspect of the “brain” the ventral medial structures still “perceives” and “recognizes” the object and that this “stored information affects later choice and behavior on the part of the subject.

Various experiments (split brain, blindsight, visual agnosia, backward masking, Transcranial magnetic stimulation, binocular rivalry, neglect/extinction, change blindness, inattentional blindness, attentional blink, etc.) all indicate the difficulties with the notions of “attention”, “awareness” or consciousness.
Lesions of the CNS (brain) (strokes, tumors, injuries) give us information about the function of various anatomic structures and pathways.

Oliver Stacks wonderful series of books and human cases demonstrate the types of very selective deficits of memory or perceptual processing that can occur without impairing global consciousness.

In the absence of voluntary recall (memory) or ability to report (language) can the subject be said to have been “conscious” of the “experience” or “perception”? Can the subject be said to have been “attentive” or displaying “attention”. IMHO opinion we now have voluntary and involuntary attention states which seems little improvement over conscious and un or sub conscious mental operations.

So while I bow to your expertise in neuroscience, I object to your insistence on a single approach limited to attention and habit and on briefly reviewing some literature find many other approaches in the field.

I'm puzzled that you think "an NCC approach" or "an integration via recurrent networks" is somehow different to what I said. I'm also puzzled if you don't think I was specific about human introspective self-awareness being an added, culturally-evolved, linguistic skill.

If you want to side with Lamme and replace the dichotomy of habit~attention with feed-forward vs feedback - as the best way of getting away from having to talk about unconscious vs conscious - then that is not really different from what I said. I said habits are emitted fast and direct while attention is about the slower top-down evolution of novel states of global focus or constraint.

So where does an important difference lie with the cites you provide? I would say Lamme is an example of representationalism - the idea that consciousness involves some bottom-up data crunching that has to rise to some level and produce "a display" ... with all the homuncularity that then ensues in having pushed the "witnessing self" out of the picture again.

Byoung-Kyong Min is then an example of trying to locate consciousness to a particular brain structure rather than just focusing on the dynamics of integrative (and differentiating) neural processes. Again, representationalism hovers in the background. The talk is of neural states that are to be imagined as some sort of display (to whom?). Consciousness becomes a thing, a substance, as representationalism - in begging the question of how the extra quality of awareness arises - is basically dualistic and leaves us always with the two things of the neural display and the unanswered issue of how this extra feature of reportable witnessing can arise.

As I argue, the habit vs attention distinction is the routine way into understanding the functional anatomy of the brain. Anyone taking a general information processing route to explaining the brain will find this is a core structural dichotomy.

And then I distinguished my own position within this general standard approach. I said I was taking the ecological, systems thinking, sign processing, etc, etc, angle. So that marks a big shift in paradigm from data-processing and representationalism. It puts semiosis or a modelling relation approach centre stage.

When you hear me talk about attention, you immediately think about that as the creation of some kind of state of display. But I am thinking about attention in terms of constraint and the globally coherent suppression of possible neural activity. Attention brings things into focus by creating fleeting useful states of limitation. It is repression for a purpose, if we want to put it simply.

I object to your insistence on a single approach limited to attention and habit and on briefly reviewing some literature find many other approaches in the field. — prothero

Well you are misunderstanding what I said. Attention vs habit is a general distinction used to organise our scientific understanding of how brains "process the world". It was what got experimental psychology going in the 1800s. It kind of got lost with the heavily computational, data-processing, representationalism of 1970s cogsci, but has come back again as a foreground distinction with 1990s neuroscience.

Then within cognitive neuroscience - the study of the brain's functional anatomy - I stand with a number of counter-positions. So as I say, I am with the dynamicists, ecologists, the anti-representationalists, the Bayesians, and most particularly, the semiologists.

If you go in that direction far enough, you are then talking about brain function in terms of sign processing rather than information processing. The implicit dualism of representationalism has been left behind and now it is about a triadic modelling relation in which self and world co-emerge as a concrete causal state of affairs. The "I" is not a mysterious homuncular witness but instead the very action of imposing a state of constraint on material possibility.

Yes, this doesn't seem to explain "consciousness" - as a dualist/representationalist will always still believe it needs to be explained. It just doesn't speak to the issue of "the psychic cause of an aware display". But tough. That is why consciousness is such a bad term when it comes to doing science. It carries with it all its dualist/representationalist overtones. It is a verbal trap. Shifting the conversation to attention vs habit is the first step to breaking with this culturally and religiously entrenched metaphysical paradigm.

Well leaving aside the Piercian triad and semiosis for the moment.

I want you to engage engage in speculation based on intuition which is colored by your education experience and knowledge.

I think most mental activity never rises to the level of attentional awareness. Most mental activity is below this threshold. The mental activities below the level of attention however are not primitive but instead a lot of decision making, analysis and even creative production resides there as well as most emotions and many intentions.. In fact if all important reactions or decisions had to pass through deliberative attention and analysis we would all be dead before the evening. Animals are not dumb automatons but instead smart adaptive intentional affective creatures who without language are focused intently on the hear and now, different from us only in degree not in kind and in fact most human mental activity and sensory processing closely parallels our mammalian cousins. This is more in the spirit of the OP.