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  -