5 papers in the library · publishing 2022-2025
Adaptive Behavior December 27, 2025 W. Veit
In this article, I defend and expand my evolutionary account of consciousness developed in A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness against four critical replies. I respond to de Weerd’s challenge to the evolutionary bottom-up approach, clarifying what it entails. I address Sachs’s discussion of autopoiesis and enactivism, distinguishing my naturalistic framework from these...
Adaptive Behavior May 30, 2025 W. Veit
This essay functions as the introduction to a two-part special issue on Walter Veit’s recent monograph A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness published with Routledge in 2023. Veit introduces the purpose of this special issue and offers a summary of the first batch of commentaries.
Philosophia January 16, 2025 W. Veit
A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness aims to advance Donald Griffin’s vision of the “final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution” by firmly integrating animals within the science of consciousness. Although this field has largely neglected the questions of when and why consciousness evolved, this book champions a Darwinian philosophy where the experiences of other animals...
Biological Theory September 14, 2022 W. Veit
This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular...
Biological Theory August 30, 2022 W. Veit
In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c) to show that we can firmly ground a comparative study of animal...