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Varieties of Subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Peter Godfrey-Smith
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Abstract

In human conscious experience, many features are present in combination: objects are presented through the senses, information from different sensory modalities is integrated, events are marked with value, and we have a sense of our own location and state. Which of these might come before others in plausible evolutionary trajectories, or do they form a tight package of correlated features that cannot readily be dissociated? I take a comparative approach to these questions, focusing on a distinction between sensory and evaluative aspects of experience and looking at the distribution of subjectivity-relevant features in a range of invertebrate animals.

Type
Cognitive Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 87 , Issue 5: PSA 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II Symposia Papers , December 2020 , pp. 1150 - 1159
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This article was presented at a symposium on animal sentience at the 2018 Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association, Seattle. The symposium was organized by Jonathan Birch. The other speakers were Jonathan Birch, Christof Koch, Jennifer Mather, and Evan Thompson. I am grateful to everyone at the symposium, and to two anonymous referees, for helpful comments.

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