Animal Sentience
August 3, 2026
Brian Key
Klein & Barron (2016) propose that subjective experience in humans arises in the midbrain and then argue that insects have the capacity for subjective experience because their nervous system can perform neural processing similar to that of the midbrain. This approach ultimately fails because it is built on the false premise that the midbrain is the source of the awareness of sensory stimuli. I...
Animal Sentience
August 3, 2026
Brian Key, Deborah J Brown
Mikhalevich & Powell argue that the exclusion of the vast majority of arthropods from moral standing is unwarranted, particularly given the purported evidence for cognition and sentience in these organisms. The implied association between consciousness and moral standing is questionable and their assumption that rich forms of cognition and flexible behavior are dependent on phenomenal...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
June 25, 2026
Brian Key
The sensory horizons hypothesis as an explanation of consciousness depends on visual experience directly affecting neural activity underlying conscious model-based planning. Given that there is no known mechanism for subjective experience to generate action potentials, the sensory horizons hypothesis lacks explanatory insight into the function of consciousness. We contend that a better strategy...
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
October 1, 2025
Brian Key, Deborah J Brown
1 citation
There is a commonly held assumption that feelings such as pain are causes of behaviour. We say we withdrew our hand from the hotplate because it hurt or that we flinched at the needle because it stung. The causal role of pain is widely implicated in theories of learning and decision-making. But what if this commonsense idea that feelings cause behaviour is just wrong? To date, there is no known...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2024
Brian Key, Deborah J Brown
6 citations
Internal feeling states such as pain, hunger, and thirst are widely assumed to be drivers of behaviours essential for homeostasis and animal survival. Call this the 'causal assumption'. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the causal assumption is incompatible with the standard view of motor action in neuroscience. While there is a well-known explanatory gap between neural activity and...
Biology & Philosophy
August 23, 2023
Oressia Zalucki, Deborah Jean Brown, Brian Key
7 citations
Abstract Deciphering the neural basis of subjective experience remains one of the great challenges in the natural sciences. The structural complexity and the limitations around invasive experimental manipulations of the human brain have impeded progress towards this goal. While animals cannot directly report first-person subjective experiences, their ability to exhibit flexible behaviours such...
Reading Descartes
2023
Deborah J Brown, Brian Key
In arguing against the likelihood of consciousness in non-human animals, Descartes advances a slippery slope argument that if thought were attributed to any one animal, it would have to be attributed to all, which is absurd. This paper examines the foundations of Thomas Willis’ comparative neuroanatomy against the background of Descartes’ slippery slope argument against animal consciousness....
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2022
Brian Key, Oressia Zalucki, Deborah J Brown
9 citations
Understanding the neural bases of subjective experience remains one of the great challenges of the natural sciences. Higher-order theories of consciousness are typically defended by assessments of neural activity in higher cortical regions during perception, often with disregard to the nature of the neural computations that these regions execute. We have sought to refocus the problem toward...
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
2021
Brian Key, Oressia Zalucki, Deborah J Brown
How subjective experience is realized in nervous systems remains one of the great challenges in the natural sciences. An answer to this question should resolve debate about which animals are capable of subjective experience. We contend that subjective experience of sensory stimuli is dependent on the brain's awareness of its internal neural processing of these stimuli. This premise is supported...
July 30, 2020
Deborah J Brown, Brian Key
Few practitioners or researchers in psychology would think of the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes, as the founding father of their discipline. Yet, it is difficult to see how psychology could have emerged as a discipline in its own right without the contributions of Descartes. Descartes’ theoretical and experimental contributions to our understanding of rationality,...
Frontiers in Physiology
2018
Brian Key, Deborah J Brown
There is compelling evidence that the "what it feels like" subjective experience of sensory stimuli arises in the cerebral cortex in both humans as well as mammalian experimental animal models. Humans are alone in their ability to verbally communicate their experience of the external environment. In other species, sensory awareness is extrapolated on the basis of behavioral indicators. For...
Biology & Philosophy
2015
Brian Key
115 citations
Phenomenal consciousness or the subjective experience of feeling sensory stimuli is fundamental to human existence. Because of the ubiquity of their subjective experiences, humans seem to readily accept the anthropomorphic extension of these mental states to other animals. Humans will typically extrapolate feelings of pain to animals if they respond physiologically and behaviourally to noxious...