We suggest that the emergence of consciousness in living organisms entailed new goals and new functions, which gave rise to a new category of selection, which we call mental selection. Mental selection involves ontogenetic choices that are directed towards consciously perceived and affectively evaluated patterns. It expands the types, targets and regimes of natural and sexual-social selection...
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and on its own body. This idea of a ‘point of view’ is easiest to grasp in the case of vision. Ernst Mach, in the Analysis of Sensations, famously attempted to draw his own visual point of view (Figure 1). But there is far more to human subjective experience than vision. Our subjective point of view includes sounds, odours, tastes,...