An evolutionary naturalism hospitable for life and its sentience should have been a philosophical priority since Darwin, but dualistic temptations have swayed vitalisms, emergentisms, and panpsychisms. Tracing sentience's evolution from biological beginnings was the modest naturalistic proposal from pragmatist John Dewey. Curiously, his endorsement in his 1925 Experience and Nature of affective...
Plant "intelligence" and "sensation" are controversial notions in contemporary botany. While some scientists argue that sensory awareness, learning, memory, communication, and possibly a kind of consciousness should be ascribed to plants, a substantial part of the scientific community dismisses such claims because of insufficient evidence and the lack of neural systems in plants. In this paper,...
The autopoietic enactive account of cognition explains the emergence of normativity in nature as the norm of self-maintenance of life. The autonomous nature of living agents implies that they can differentiate events and regulate their responses in terms of what is better or worse to maintain their own precarious identity. Thus, normative behavior emerges from living organisms. Under this basic...
Peter Godfrey-Smith's Metazoa and Joseph LeDoux's The Deep History of Ourselves present radically different big pictures regarding the nature, evolution and distribution of consciousness in animals. In this essay review, I discuss the motivations behind these big pictures and try to steer a course between them.