Phenomenal consciousness: its scope and limits.

Phenomenal consciousness—the felt, subjective quality of sensory experience that underlies sentience—likely emerged late in evolution, after non-phenomenal conscious access to a global mental workspace had already become widespread for cognitive processing. The article proposes a step-by-step neural sequence through which sensory representations could have acquired phenomenal content via small brain changes. It argues that a phenomenally conscious self provides crucial psychological benefits to animals. Blindsight, where patients respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness, is presented as a model for the non-phenomenal cognition that characterizes most insentient species.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In the history of life, consciousness of sensory states with 'phenomenal properties'-the basis of 'sentience'-is, arguably, a late evolutionary development, which occurred long after conscious access to a 'global mental workspace' had become widely established as a strategy for cognitive information processing. In this article, I focus on phenomenal consciousness. I propose a step-by-step sequence by which the mental representation of sensory stimulation could have acquired phenomenal content through small changes in the brain. Also-addressing the question of evolutionary function-I point to the crucial psychological benefits to an animal of having a 'phenomenally conscious self'. A thread running through the article is the phenomenon of 'blindsight', which I take to be a model for the non-phenomenal cognition that characterizes the majority of insentient animal species.This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary functions of consciousness'.