In The Edge of Sentience, the sentience candidacy of fishes and reptiles is strengthened if one accepts midbrain-centric theories of human consciousness. In this commentary I attempt to untether the two positions. I suggest that we need not look for a one-to-one match between the neocortex and a single pallial structure outside of mammals. Instead, a sufficient similarity might exist between...
The Global Neuronal Workspace theory of consciousness offers an explicit functional architecture that relates consciousness to cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, memory, and evaluation. We show that the functional architecture of the Global Neuronal Workspace, which is based mainly on human studies, corresponds to the cognitive-affective architecture proposed by the Unlimited...
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,...