title: The evolution of consciousness creator: Carruthers, Peter subject: Evolutionary Psychology subject: Philosophy of Mind description: How might consciousness have evolved? Unfortunately for the prospects of providing a convincing answer to this question, there is no agreed account of what consciousness is. So any attempt at an answer will have to fragment along a number of different lines of enquiry. More fortunately, perhaps, there is general agreement that a number of distinct notions of consciousness need to be distinguished from one another; and there is also broad agreement as to which of these is particularly problematic - namely phenomenal consciousness, or the kind of conscious mental state which it is like something to have, which has a distinctive subjective feel or phenomenology (henceforward referred to as p-consciousness). I shall survey the prospects for an evolutionary explanation of p-consciousness, on a variety of competing accounts of its nature. My goal is to use evolutionary considerations to adjudicate between some of those accounts. publisher: Cambridge University Press contributor: Carruthers, Peter contributor: Chamberlain, Andrew date: 2000 type: Book Chapter type: PeerReviewed format: text/html identifier: http://cogprints.org/1205/1/Concevol.htm identifier: Carruthers, Peter (2000) The evolution of consciousness. [Book Chapter] relation: http://cogprints.org/1205/