Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8kt4b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-19T19:49:52.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Consciousness, complexity, and evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2022

Walter Veit Open the ORCID record for Walter Veit [Opens in a new window]
Walter Veit*
Affiliation:
School of History and Philosophy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW2006, Australia. wrwveit@gmail.comhttps://walterveit.com/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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 “pathological complexity.”

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 45 , 2022 , e61
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Browning, H. (2019). What is good for an octopus? Animal Sentience, 26(7). https://doi.org/10.51291/2377-7478.1476Google Scholar
Browning, H., & Veit, W. (2020). The measurement problem of consciousness. Philosophical Topics, 48(1), 85–108. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics20204815CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Browning, H., & Veit, W. (2021). Evolutionary biology meets consciousness: Essay review of Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka's The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul. Biology & Philosophy, 36(5), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-021-09781-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
New England Anti-Vivisection Society, et al. (2020). Petition to include cephalopods as “animals” deserving of humane treatment under the public health service policy on humane care and use of laboratory animals. Harvard Law School Animal Law & Policy Clinic, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27522.30401Google Scholar
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2019). Evolving across the explanatory gap. Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology, 11, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.3998/ptpbio.16039257.0011.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, D. R. (1976). The question of animal awareness: Evolutionary continuity of mental experience. Rockefeller University Press.Google Scholar
Tononi, G. (2004). An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC Neuroscience, 5(42), 1–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tononi, G. (2005). Consciousness, information integration, and the brain. Progress in Brain Research, 150, 109–126.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: A provisional manifesto. Biological Bulletin, 215, 216–242.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tononi, G. (2012). Integrated information theory of consciousness: An updated account. Archives Italiennes de Biologie, 150, 290–326.Google Scholar
Tononi, G., & Koch, C. (2015). Consciousness: Here, there and everywhere? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B, 370, 20140167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veit, W. (2021). The evolution of knowledge during the Cambrian explosion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, e47. https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20000771CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Veit, W. (2019a). Model pluralism. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 50(2), 91–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393119894897CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veit, W. (2019b). Modeling morality. In Magnani, L., Nepomuceno, A., Salguero, F., Barés, C. & Fontane, M. (eds), Model-Based reasoning in science and technology (pp. 83–102). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32722-4_6CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veit, W. (2022). Health, Agency, and the Evolution of Consciousness. Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney. Manuscript in preparation.Google Scholar
Veit, W., & Huebner, B. (2020). Drawing the boundaries of animal sentience. Animal Sentience, 29(13). http://doi.org/10.51291/2377-7478.1595Google Scholar