The Evolution of Consciousness

Preview

• Thursday: more Godfrey-Smith
• Spring Break
• March 21, review for midterm and discuss paper
• March 23, midterm
• March 28, 30 -- self-awareness in animals; guest speaker Prof Howell

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 1. Recap

Questions

1. Which animals are conscious?
2. How is animal consciousness different from human consciousness? 

Approaches

1. The theory approach -- what IS conscious experience?
2. The epistemic approach -- no answer to what IS consciousness, but we can still use evidence to determine which animals have it
3. The biological approach -- the evolution of consciousness

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2. Peter Godfrey-Smith

Other Minds:The Octopus and the Emergence of Consciousness -- chapters 1 and 4

Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

"Gradualism and the Evolution of Consciousness"

Two topics

"Which were the first animals whose lives felt like something to them?" (today)

Octopus minds vs. our minds (Thursday)

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3. Basic concepts, terminology, positions

Subjective experience-- feels like something -- phenomenal -- qualia -- "what it's like"

1. Sentience -- the more basic forms of subjective experience (sensation, pleasure, pain, etc.)
2. Consciousness -- a more sophisticated type of subjective experience

 Views on the emergence of subjective experience 

1. Panpsychism -- everything is sentient
2. Dualism -- just the things with immaterial souls are sentient
3. Latecomer view -- experience entered the picture very late in evolution, with the development of sophisticated cognitive processing
4. Gradualism -- sentience and consciousness emerged bit by bit, not all at once
   
5. Transformation view -- once there's sentience, it can be transformed into full-blown consciousness by adding certain kinds of processing

What were the changes that gave animals experience? When did they occur?

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4. Evolution background: the  first few chapters of Other Minds

Google talk--up to 11:45

The Ediacaran-- 600 million years ago

The Cambrian Explosion -- over 540 million years ago

At this point animals start to have two new features that are "entry points" for experience: 

1. agency and self/other differentiation
2. integration     

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5. Agency & self/other differentiation

Seattle talk-- 

1 - 12:25

27:08 - 29:41

Agency 

• Sensing-acting feedback loop
• Self-world differentiation
• Perceptual constancy--objects/environment appears stable to animal because the animal is filtering out changes due to their own shifting perspective
• Examples

Argument based on Tactile Visual Substitution Systems (Other Minds chap. 4)

1. TVSSs doesn't produce experience of "things out there" in a stationary person
2. TVSSs do produce experience of "things out there" when the person moves around as an agent. THEREFORE
3. Agency may be able to "experientialize" a formerly non-sentient system

Is the agency view of early experience .... appealing? implausible? Can you think of objections?

We'll use WORKBOOK (if time)