Frontiers in Psychology
June 22, 2026
Thurston Lacalli
This paper extends an earlier analysis of the functions attributable to consciousness, applying it to a modular/constitutive model that limits the role conscious sensations are allowed to play in integrative processes operating at scale. The focus is on conscious vision because of the challenge it poses for any theory of consciousness, of how to account for a 2-dimensional perceptual display....
Frontiers in Psychology
2025
Thurston Lacalli
1 citation
Complexity in biology typically has less complex evolutionary antecedents which, for consciousness, begs the question of how a fully elaborated and unified consciousness, as we experience it, would have been scaled up from what we can assume to have been simpler, or at least different, beginnings. This poses difficulties for some theories, but is much simplified if the contents of consciousness...
Frontiers in Psychology
April 29, 2024
Thurston Lacalli
2 citations
The relationship between consciousness and individual agency is examined from a bottom-up evolutionary perspective, an approach somewhat different from other ways of dealing with the issue, but one relevant to the question of animal consciousness. Two ways are identified that would decouple the two, allowing consciousness of a limited kind to exist without agency: (1) reflex pathways that...
Frontiers in Psychology
2024
Thurston Lacalli
7 citations
The functions of consciousness, viewed from an evolutionary standpoint, can be categorized as being either general or particular. There are two general functions, meaning those that do not depend on the particulars of how consciousness influences behavior or how and why it first evolved: of (1) expanding the behavioral repertoire of the individual through the gradual accumulation of...
Frontiers in Psychology
2023
Thurston Lacalli
Few of the many theories devised to account for consciousness are explicit about the role they ascribe to evolution, and a significant fraction, by their silence on the subject, treat evolutionary processes as being, in effect, irrelevant. This is a problem for biological realists trying to assess the applicability of competing theories of consciousness to taxa other than our own, and across...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
February 14, 2022
Thurston Lacalli
The similarities between amphioxus and vertebrate brains, in their regional subdivision, cell types and circuitry, make the former a useful benchmark for understanding the evolutionary innovations that shaped the latter. Locomotory control systems were already well developed in basal chordates, with the ventral neuropile of the dien-mesencephalon serving to set levels of activity and initiate...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Thurston Lacalli
9 citations
This paper elaborates on a proposal for mapping a configuration space for selector circuits (SCs), defined as the subset of neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) responsible for evoking particular qualia, to its experiential counterpart, experience-space (E-space), as part of an investigation into the nature of conscious experience as it first emerged in evolution. The dimensionality of...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2021
Thurston Lacalli
Conscious experience can be treated as a complex unified whole, but to do so is problematic from an evolutionary perspective if, like other products of evolution, consciousness had simple beginnings, and achieved complexity only secondarily over an extended period of time as new categories of subjective experience were added and refined. The premise here is twofold, first that these simple...
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
2020
Thurston Lacalli
A number of conceptual difficulties arise when considering the evolutionary origin of consciousness from the pre-conscious condition. There are parallels here with biological pattern formation, where, according to Alan Turing's original formulation of the problem, the statistical properties of molecular-level processes serve as a source of incipient pattern. By analogy, the evolution of...
Consciousness and Cognition
July 1, 2018
Thurston Lacalli
Gene expression studies have recently identified the amphioxus homolog of a domain comprising the combined caudal diencephalon plus midbrain, regions implicated in locomotory control and some forms of primary consciousness in vertebrates. The results of EM-level reconstructions of the larval brain of amphioxus, reviewed here, highlight the importance of inputs to this region for light and...