Philosophia
March 1, 2026
Walter Veit
It is my pleasure to respond to three thoughtful commentaries on A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness in this issue (Veit 2023a ). The commentaries by Pober ( 2025 ), as well as Barrett and Fischer ( 2025 ), both focus on the relationship between valence, common currencies of value, and consciousness, and so I will largely respond to their arguments together. Afterwards, I will...
Asian Journal of Philosophy
February 5, 2026
Walter Veit
Abstract Goldstein and Kirk–Giannini have recently argued that artificial language agents can possess well-being in the absence of phenomenal consciousness. Here, I challenge their position, contending that their arguments fail to establish that consciousness is dispensable for well-being. Moreover, their arguments generate counterintuitive implications that are more problematic than those they...
Adaptive Behavior
February 1, 2026
Walter Veit
In this article, I demonstrate the value of the pathological complexity thesis for comparative consciousness research. I discuss how Ristau’s piping plover research illuminates links between life-history complexity and intentionality. How Sinha’s bonnet macaque studies demonstrate how social drivers of pathological complexity predict self-awareness and mindreading capacities. And how Ross’s...
Adaptive Behavior
June 1, 2025
Walter Veit
What is the role of consciousness in nature? The science of consciousness has largely neglected the question through its emphasis on human experience. In this précis of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness , I outline how we can move from a top-down approach that begins with investigations in humans to an evolutionary bottom-up approach that targets the adaptive origins of even...
Animal cognition
May 2, 2025
Walter Veit, Heather Browning, Elias Garcia-Pelegrin et al.
6 citations
Corvids have long been a target of public fascination and of scientific attention, particularly in the study of animal minds. Using Birch et al.'s (2020) 5-dimensional framework for animal consciousness we ask what it is like to be a corvid and propose a speculative but empirically informed answer. We go on to suggest future directions for research on corvid consciousness and how it can inform...
Synthese
2023
Walter Veit
20 citations
The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
March 23, 2022
Walter Veit
The idea that consciousness and complexity are closely related has been a major driver of the popularity of integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, despite its major formal, phenomenological, and neuroscientific shortcomings. Here, I argue that we can recover this intuition by replacing its biologically neutral notion of complexity with an evolutionary one that I shall dub...
Philosophical Topics
2020
Heather Browning, Walter Veit
This paper addresses what we consider to be the most pressing challenge for the emerging science of consciousness: the measurement problem of consciousness. That is, by what methods can we determine the presence of and properties of consciousness? Most methods are currently developed through evaluation of the presence of consciousness in humans and here we argue that there are particular...