Abstract
Consciousness Evolved--But Why?
As if the ex post facto nature of adaptationist explanations didn't present enough problems, the project of accounting for the emergence of consciousness via natural selection seems saddled with another, even more insidious difficulty: the possibility that Nature could simply have selected for the behavioural capacities normally associated with consciousness without selecting for consciousness itself. In the absence of some extra selective advantage bestowed by consciousness, over and above such behavioural capacities, it would seem the adaptationist project is doomed to failure.
But it turns out that no such pessimistic conclusion is warranted. The argument against the selective relevance of consciousness turns on a misconstrual of the logic of scientific explanation and, in particular, on an ungrounded assumption about the modality of the supervenience relation between underlying physical processes and conscious experience. This talk explores the evolution of consciousness in a widely accessible manner, introducing and explaining technical notions like 'zombie' and 'supervenience' where necessary, and touching on related issues in computation theory and philosophy of mind.
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