Episodic memory (EM) enables the conscious recollection of personally experienced events, including contextual features such as visual, auditory and emotional details. However, the role of bodily signals has been largely neglected in EM, although the observer's body provides a rich bodily context during the encoding, storage and recall of events, and has recently been associated with a bodily...
Psychedelic-assisted therapy, particularly with psilocybin, is increasingly proposed as a treatment for major depressive disorder, yet the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying its effects remain under investigation. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder received a single, moderate dose of psilocybin...
How does the sense of self emerge in human development, and could an artificial system acquire a similar sense using algorithmic principles and given a suitable embodiment and experience? Here, we describe a machine learning framework, inspired by developmental psychology and neurobiology, that acquires a self-world distinction and minimal self-model. Unlike previous approaches, we introduce a...
Ego-dissolution is a phenomenon of central interest across interdisciplinary research on psychedelics. In this paper, we present a philosophical and qualitative critique of the claim that ego-dissolution can result in conscious states with no phenomenal sense of self, i.e., states that completely lack any form of self-consciousness. We first turn to recent publications by Chris Letheby and...
I wake up in the morning, I see my hand and I know it is me. This seemingly simple skill lies at the foundation of our agentive selves. We assume that the development of the self, in both biological and synthetic agents, is grounded in sensorimotor embodiment and inductive learning biases, as well as in the principle of predictive coding. Here, we explore the core inductive biases and process...
The sense that ourself is continuous over time is a ubiquitous human experience. Although episodic autobiographical memory (AM) makes some contribution to one's subjective sense of self-continuity-also known as I-self continuity or phenomenological continuity-there is growing evidence that individuals with memory disorders report intact phenomenological continuity. These observations suggest...
Interoception provides a link between bodily states and cognitive and affective processes across both unconscious and conscious domains and is fundamental for a coherent sense of self. While previous research linking interoception to mental health has predominantly focused on interoceptive accuracy, attention, self-beliefs and insight, we argue that the higher-order interpretation of...
How does the brain generate meaning from the continuous flow of sensory input? We propose that meaning is not the product of isolated regions or circuits but an emergent property of large-scale recurrently connected networks in which the hippocampus plays a pivotal role. Drawing from cognitive science, developmental studies and systems neuroscience, we outline five key principles by which the...
An increasing number of authors are willing to attribute phenomenal consciousness to relatively simple organisms like insects. Yet it is not at all clear what functional role the substrates of consciousness would play. Here, we argue phenomenal consciousness is a consequence of how mobile animals with spatial senses and a capacity for goal-directed behaviour resolve the complex problem of...
DC. Dennett (2020,personal communication) asked: 'How do we go from doing things for reasons to having reasons for doing things?'. This question targets a fundamental shift in nature: while all organisms act in the way they do for reasons that are shaped by extrinsic evolutionary cost functions, some also act for reasons of their own, even engaging in behaviour that may be detrimental to their...
did consciousness evolve? Assuming that some species (e.g. humans) have consciousness and others (e.g. redwoods or mushrooms) do not, what problem(s) did consciousness evolve to solve? From a biological and evolutionary viewpoint, and regardless of which species have consciousness (or to what degree), this question of the adaptive function(s) of consciousness is central. Nonetheless, the...
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...
We present the social origins of consciousness hypothesis, according to which the ability to coordinate with group members was the original adaptive function of consciousness. We offer three arguments. The phylogenetic argument presumes that consciousness is widespread among existing animals, and that widespread capacities are probably evolutionarily old. Early animals relied on consciousness...
Understanding consciousness remains a significant challenge in science. What distinguishes conscious beings from unconscious systems, such as organoids, artificial intelligence or other non-sentient entities? Research on consciousness often focuses on identifying brain activity associated with conscious and non-conscious states, primarily in neurotypical human adults. However, this approach is...
The evolution of consciousness is a neglected topic that plays a surprisingly insignificant role in all major theories of consciousness. Furthermore, substantial disagreements can be observed in the dominant views on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), which focus too much on cortical brain regions. In order to dissolve some of the contradictions among these views and to constrain...
This essay articulates three distinct but interrelated challenges facing evolutionary explanations of consciousness. These are: (i) lingering misconceptions about evolutionary explanations that stem from evolutionary progressivism and adaptationism; (ii) the 'measurement problem,' or the challenge of gathering comparative data on consciousness, as required by any evolutionary accounts, in the...
In the history of life, consciousness of sensory states with 'phenomenal properties'-the basis of 'sentience'-is, arguably, a late evolutionary development, which occurred long after conscious access to a 'global mental workspace' had become widely established as a strategy for cognitive information processing. In this article, I focus on phenomenal consciousness. I propose a step-by-step...
An important feature of conscious experience is the subjectivity of time. Even within short durations, ranging from milliseconds to a few seconds, time slows down in threatening situations, while it compresses during familiar tasks. Do these temporal distortions have a function? In this article, I argue that they do. Because the perceived duration of events is often in line with what seems...
Self-awareness in animals is often documented by showing evidence for mirror self-recognition (MSR), which is confirmed by the mirror mark-test. The classic assumption about self-awareness was that it is a complex cognitive process, restricted at best to a few large-brained species. Indeed, early MSR research yielded positive results only in great apes, elephants, dolphins and magpies, while...
The interoceptive nervous system uses signalling mechanisms distinct from those of exteroceptive, voluntary motor, cognitive and linguistic processes. While interoception relies mainly on analogue-like processing, the other systems favour digital-like signalling. This physiological feature allows interoception to map the state of the organism’s internal milieu in real time, in stark contrast to...
The word ‘consciousness’ is often used as if it is a single thing, and as if everyone knows, in a general sense, what that thing is. The very notion of a theory of consciousness implies that someday this thing will be accounted for. But suppose that multiple kinds of consciousness exist. If so, an adequate theory of consciousness would have to be multifaceted rather than unitary. And,...
In this article, we start from the assumption that consciousness is not the ultimate triumph of human evolution but rather represents a more basic cognitive process, possibly shared with other animal phyla. In this article, we show that there is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) they also have the neural architecture that may be necessary for this. We...
A fundamental question in comparative cognition concerns the evolution of consciousness. It is unlikely that consciousness appeared in humans without any precursors in other animals. Yet, the concepts that dominate our understanding of consciousness are inherently human centred, focussing on subjective experiences with a rich use of language. This understanding of consciousness is probably...
Ever since Tulving's influential 1985 article 'Memory and consciousness', it has become traditional to think of autonoetic consciousness as necessary for episodic memory. This paper questions this claim. Specifically, it argues that the construct of autonoetic consciousness lacks validity and that, even if it was valid, it would still not be necessary for episodic memory. The paper ends with a...