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abstract: '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.'
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chapter: 12
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creators_name:
- family: Carruthers
given: Peter
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date: 2000
date_type: published
datestamp: 2001-01-22
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- family: Carruthers
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- family: Chamberlain
given: Andrew
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keywords: 'consciousness, evolution, higher-order experience, higher-order thought, inner sense'
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:28
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pagerange: 254-275
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publication: 'Evolution and the human mind: modularity, language and meta-cognition'
publisher: Cambridge University Press
refereed: TRUE
referencetext: |
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status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:36:57
subjects:
- evol-psy
- phil-mind
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title: The evolution of consciousness
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