Event Detail

The first part of the talk will briefly survey animal evolution, with an emphasis on the origin of felt experience — consciousness in a minimal sense —in several lineages. Then I will look at two philosophical questions that arise around these origins. How could felt experience arise gradually and exist in partial or borderline forms? And how might we decide whether there’s a single feature here —“experience,” “consciousness” — with a few origins and variants, as opposed to a cluster of distinct traits with little real unity.