Abstract I argue that creature consciousness depends on specific neurobiophysical properties that constitute the medium for phenomenally conscious states. Such properties are not medium flexible in the way required by computational functionalism. Therefore, computational functionalism fails, and one of the following holds: biological naturalism, a nonbiological yet noncomputational version of...
Situated approaches to cognition maintain that cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive, and affective (and extended, but that is not relevant here). Situated approaches are often pitched as alternatives to computational and representational approaches, according to which cognition is computation over representations. I argue that, far from being opposites, situatedness and neural...
This chapter is about how consciousness might have evolved, and why. It discusses phenomenal consciousness—the ways subjective experiences feel. The chapter points out that there are several ways that a biological trait such as phenomenal consciousness might have arisen during evolution: it might have been selected for because it performs an adaptive function, it might have arisen as a...