TY - GEN
ID - cogprints1205
UR - http://cogprints.org/1205/
A1 - Carruthers, Peter
Y1 - 2000///
N2 - How might consciousness have evolved? Unfortunately for the prospects of providing a convincing answer to this question, there is no agreed account of what consciousness is. So any attempt at an answer will have to fragment along a number of different lines of enquiry. More fortunately, perhaps, there is general agreement that a number of distinct notions of consciousness need to be distinguished from one another; and there is also broad agreement as to which of these is particularly problematic - namely phenomenal consciousness, or the kind of conscious mental state which it is like something to have, which has a distinctive subjective feel or phenomenology (henceforward referred to as p-consciousness). I shall survey the prospects for an evolutionary explanation of p-consciousness, on a variety of competing accounts of its nature. My goal is to use evolutionary considerations to adjudicate between some of those accounts.
PB - Cambridge University Press
KW - consciousness
KW - evolution
KW - higher-order experience
KW - higher-order thought
KW - inner sense
TI - The evolution of consciousness
SP - 254
AV - public
EP - 275
ER -