Seth's claim that only biological or biological-like systems can be conscious leaves open the question of what renders only some organisms conscious. We address this question by pointing to the material, ontogenetic, memory, and evaluative affordances of living organisms and arguing that evolved, minimal consciousness requires complex cognitive-affective architecture for which these biological...
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...
OverviewGoal-directed activities that do not depend on conscious will or preconceived design are referred to as teleonomic be hav iors.In living systems, the evaluative systems that underlie teleonomic be hav ior sense deviations from homeostasis and employ adaptive plasticity mechanisms that restore, sustain, and boost survival and reproduction.By virtue of their sustainability, all living...
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...
The scientific study of consciousness has seen a resurgence in the 21st century. This collection of reviews, essays, and theories on various aspects of comparative animal consciousness takes a biological and evolutionary approach. As defined here, consciousness refers to the process by which an animal has perceptual and affective experience or feelings, arising from the material substrate of a...
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,...
The current failure to construct an artificial intelligence (AI) agent with the capacity for domain-general learning is a major stumbling block in the attempt to build conscious robots. Taking an evolutionary approach, we previously suggested that the emergence of consciousness was entailed by the evolution of an open-ended domain-general form of learning, which we call unlimited associative...
Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework. The central idea is that there is a distinctive type of learning that can serve as a transition marker for the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to conscious life. The goal of this paper is to...
The minimal state of consciousness is sentience. This includes any phenomenal sensory experience - exteroceptive, such as vision and olfaction; interoceptive, such as pain and hunger; or proprioceptive, such as the sense of bodily position and movement. We propose unlimited associative learning (UAL) as the marker of the evolutionary transition to minimal consciousness (or sentience), its...