%A Peter Carruthers
%J Evolution and the human mind: modularity, language and meta-cognition
%T The evolution of consciousness
%X 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.
%K consciousness, evolution, higher-order experience, higher-order thought, inner sense
%P 254-275
%E Peter Carruthers
%E Andrew Chamberlain
%D 2000
%I Cambridge University Press
%L cogprints1205

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