7 papers in the library · 16 citations · publishing 2018-2026
Animal Sentience August 3, 2026 Brian Key, Deborah 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...
Neuroscience and 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...
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...