This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to (...) deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions”. Our responses are organized by theme rather than by author. We present a minimal functional architecture for Unlimited Associative Learning that aims to tie to together the list of capacities presented in the target article. We explain why we discount higher-order thought theories of consciousness. We respond to the criticism that we have overplayed the importance of learning and underplayed the (...) importance of spatial modelling. We decline the invitation to add a negative marker to our proposed positive marker so as to rule out consciousness in plants, but we nonetheless maintain that there is no positive evidence of consciousness in plants. We close by discussing how UAL relates to development and to its material substrate. (shrink)

The evolutionary emergence of consciousness is a research topic that has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. In a brief span of time, the debate surrounding various models in this area is driving the development of an increasingly specific research agenda. In this article, we examine the main available models of emergence. All the models we discuss assume, with varying degrees of caution, that consciousness emerged through convergent evolution in three distinct phyla within the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, they provide (...) a unified account that aims to comprehensively cover all independent tokens of emergence. After analyzing the suitability of this unifying strategy through the lens of contemporary evolutionary theory, we recommend adopting a token-by-token, phylum-by-phylum approach. At this point, we emphasize the advantage of accumulated comparative knowledge regarding vertebrate evolution, advocating for an interoceptive view of the emergence of consciousness in vertebrates. (shrink)