creators_name: Carruthers, Peter editors_name: Carruthers, Peter editors_name: Chamberlain, Andrew type: bookchapter datestamp: 2001-01-22 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:28 metadata_visibility: show title: The evolution of consciousness ispublished: pub subjects: evol-psy subjects: phil-mind full_text_status: public keywords: consciousness, evolution, higher-order experience, higher-order thought, inner sense abstract: 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. date: 2000 date_type: published publication: Evolution and the human mind: modularity, language and meta-cognition publisher: Cambridge University Press pagerange: 254-275 refereed: TRUE referencetext: Armstrong, D. 1968. A Materialist Theory of the Mind. London: Routledge. Armstrong, D. 1984. Consciousness and causality. In D. 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