creators_name: Humphrey, Nicholas editors_name: Heyes, Celia editors_name: Huber, Ludwig type: bookchapter datestamp: 2000-11-23 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:25 metadata_visibility: show title: The Privatization of Sensation ispublished: pub subjects: bio-ani-cog subjects: bio-evo subjects: cog-psy subjects: evol-psy subjects: percep-cog-psy subjects: phil-mind full_text_status: public keywords: sensations, qualia, consciousness, evolution abstract: It is the ambition of evolutionary psychology to explain how the basic features of human mental life came to be selected because of their contribution to biological survival. Counted among the most basic must be the subjective qualities of conscious sensory experience: the felt redness we experience on looking at a ripe tomato, the felt saltiness on tasting an anchovy, the felt pain on being pricked by a thorn. But, as many theorists acknowledge, with these qualia, the ambition of evolutionary psychology may have met its match. Everyone agrees that a trait can only contribute to an organism's biological survival in so far as it operates in the public domain. Yet almost everyone also agrees that the subjective quality of sensory experience is (at least for all practical purposes) private and without external influence. Then, maybe we must either concede that the subjective quality of sensations cannot after all have been determined by selection (even if this is theoretically depressing) or else demonstrate that the quality of sensations is not as private as it seems to be (even if this is intuitively unconvincing). No. I believe neither of these solutions to the puzzle is in fact the right one. I argue instead that the truth is that the quality of sensations has indeed been shaped by selection in the past, despite the fact that it is today effectively private. And this situation has come about as a result of a remarkable evolutionary progression, whereby the primitive activity of sensing slowly became "privatized" - that is to say, removed from the domain of overt public behavior and transformed into a mental activity that is now, in humans, largely if not exclusively internal to the subject's mind. date: 2000 date_type: published publication: The Evolution of Cognition publisher: MIT, Cambridge, Ma. pagerange: 241-252 refereed: FALSE referencetext: Dennett, DC (1988) Quining Qualia. In Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Marcel, AJ, Bisiach, E, eds), pp 42-77. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dennett, DC (1991) Consciousness Explained. New York: Little Brown. Empson, W (1930) Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto & Windus. Gregory, RL (1996) What do qualia do? Perception 25: 377-8. Humphrey, N (1992) A History of the Mind. London: Chatto & Windus. Humphrey, N (1995) The thick moment. In The Third Culture (Brockman, J, ed) pp 198-208. New York: Simon & Schuster. Locke, J (1690 / 1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Nidditch, P, ed). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marcel, AJ (1988) Phenomenal experience and functionalism. In Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Marcel, AJ, Bisiach, E, eds) pp 121- 158. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frege, G (1967) The Thought: a Logical Inquiry. In Philosophical Logic (Strawson, PF, ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reid, T (1764 / 1813) An Inquiry into the Human Mind (Stewart, D, ed). Charlestown: Samuel Etheridge. Reid, T (1785 / 1813) Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Stewart, D, ed). Charlestown: Samuel Etheridge. Steadman, P (1979) The Evolution of Designs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L (1958) Philosophical Investigations (Anscombe, GEM, trans). Oxford: Blackwell. citation: Humphrey, Nicholas (2000) The Privatization of Sensation. [Book Chapter] document_url: http://cogprints.org/1077/1/sensationmit.htm