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  1. Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness.Walter Veit - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (3):175-190.
    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 (...)
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  • Health, consciousness, and the evolution of subjects.Walter Veit - 2022 - Synthese 201 (1):1-24.
    The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to (...)
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  • Towards a Comparative Study of Animal Consciousness.Walter Veit - 2022 - Biological Theory 17 (4):292-303.
    In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c ) to show that we can firmly ground a comparative study of animal consciousness by drawing on the resources of state-based behavioral life history theory. By (...)
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  • Health, Agency, and the Evolution of Consciousness.Walter Veit - 2022 - Dissertation, The University of Sydney
    This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...)
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  • Defending the Pathological Complexity Thesis.Walter Veit - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (3):200-209.
    In this article, I respond to commentaries by Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg and by David Spurrett on my target article “Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness,” in which I have offered the first extended articulation of my pathological complexity thesis as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins and function of consciousness. My reply is structured by the arguments raised rather than by author and will offer a more detailed explication of some aspects of the pathological complexity thesis.
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  • Defending Sentientism.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2023 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2):168-170.
    The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the possibility of suffering in nonhumans, including animals only very distantly related to us, as well as artificial intelligence systems. Much...
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  • Confidence Levels or Degrees of Sentience?Walter Veit - 2022 - Asian Bioethics Review 15 (1):93-97.
    I applaud recent improvements upon previous guidelines for the assessment of pain in non-human species and the application of their framework towards decapod crustaceans. Rather than constituting a mere intermediate solution between the scientific difficulty of settling questions of animal consciousness and the need for a framework for the purposes of animal welfare legislation, I will argue that the longer lists of criteria for animal sentience should make us realize that animal sentience is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that must be studied (...)
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  • Darwinian and Autopoietic Views of the Organism.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2022 - Constructivist Foundations 18 (1):103–105.
    Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.
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  • Précis of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness.Walter Veit - 2025 - Philosophia:1-7.
    A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness aims to advance Donald Griffin’s vision of the “final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution” by firmly integrating animals within the science of consciousness. Although this field has largely neglected the questions of when and why consciousness evolved, this book champions a Darwinian philosophy where the experiences of other animals are put centre-stage in investigations of consciousness. This synopsis offers a summary of the book’s core arguments for the advancement of a truly (...)
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  • Ancient Inner Feelings: Interoceptive Insights into the Evolution of Consciousness.Asier Arias Domínguez - 2024 - Biological Theory 19 (4):246-266.
    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 (...)
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