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A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness
This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multidimensional phenomenon in nature rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field’s periphery to its very centre, thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness.
162 pages, Paperback
Published June 16, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 11, 2025
For many, several years now I've been convinced that consciousness (or "subjective experience", for a less loaded term) is a multidimensional, dynamically integrated process, and that as such it admits of gradations across its many dimensions. And given that it's such a complex biological process (meaning that it's costly to maintain), as good Darwinians we should look not only for such gradations, but also for the adaptive value/function of such a process. While I have myself entertained different possibilities of how consciousness might have evolved in its most minimal features/dimensions, with the aid of contributions made by many great contemporary authors in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, I have never thought of a more specific framework with which to organize my thinking. So I'm very glad to see that Veit has done exactly that! By taking thorough Darwinian thinking seriously, this book manages to sketch a framework that pays close attention to the life history of organisms in order to ask what advantage could a novelty such as subjective experience confer to newcomers.
Veit calls his framework the "pathological complexity thesis" (building on the influential Godfrey-Smith's work on environmental complexity in the 1990's), and goes on to argue that the first sparks of subjectivity have arisen through an evaluative system that manages to use hedonic valence as a common currency in order for a highly mobile, flexible animal with a lot of degrees of freedom to make decisions about the many tradeoffs it faces in order to take appropriate actions to survive and keep itself within healthy states. I know this is a mouthful, but every part of this characterization is explained clearly enough in the book. For now we can summarize it along the following lines: the ability to feel (in "first person", as it were) experiences negatively or positively has adaptive advantage because these feelings simplify complex tradeoffs decisions and induce an animal to seek healthy states and avoid pathological ones. And for us to put the pathological complexity framework to do real work, Veit argues that we need to rely on the conjunction of state-based theory and life-history theory in biology, so that we can be in a position to understand the ecological pressures that presented certain species with some tradeoffs that could best be solved by conscious states. Both state-based and life-history theories are well established methodologies in biology, which is a huge plus for Veit's framework.
On the downside, to my taste Veit isn't a very good writer. He's too repetitive with terms and phrases, and the chapter presentations betray an author too contaminated with how analytic philosophy papers are structured. More substantively, I think Veit's defense of how an evaluative dimension is "more basic" than any other dimensions, especially the sensory one, doesn't quite show this dimension really has the upper hand. I agree with him that the more dimensions we require to form the most minimal kind of subjective experience, the closer we move the idea that there's a threshold after which subjectivy just pops into existence, already with a suspicious degree of complexity in place. But accepting this doesn't mean there can't be a threshold of sorts where proto-evaluative and proto-sensory capacities dynamically integrate and then we start having some semi-hemi-demi-sentience. But to be honest I'm not sure how much Veit disagrees with this idea, for it seems that evaluative capacities can be cashed out in some interoceptive terms. In any case, Veit himself recognizes the sensory-first x evaluative-first contest is still a legitimate open question in thinking about the origins of subjectivy. And what's more important, these are empirically resolvable questions, so we need not rely on the anti-naturalist habit of embracing intuition as if it had any evidential force on these matters. Veit himself does a fine work in making reference to some available scientific literature in order do adjudicate the aforementioned dispute. So despite all of its perceived shortcomings, I consider Veit's book as excellent for the great accomplishment of really taking Darwinian thinking seriously, and by doing so he's able to provide us with a very useful framework that enables us to better think about the evolution of consciousness and thus to ask better questions that can be empirically investigated.
Veit calls his framework the "pathological complexity thesis" (building on the influential Godfrey-Smith's work on environmental complexity in the 1990's), and goes on to argue that the first sparks of subjectivity have arisen through an evaluative system that manages to use hedonic valence as a common currency in order for a highly mobile, flexible animal with a lot of degrees of freedom to make decisions about the many tradeoffs it faces in order to take appropriate actions to survive and keep itself within healthy states. I know this is a mouthful, but every part of this characterization is explained clearly enough in the book. For now we can summarize it along the following lines: the ability to feel (in "first person", as it were) experiences negatively or positively has adaptive advantage because these feelings simplify complex tradeoffs decisions and induce an animal to seek healthy states and avoid pathological ones. And for us to put the pathological complexity framework to do real work, Veit argues that we need to rely on the conjunction of state-based theory and life-history theory in biology, so that we can be in a position to understand the ecological pressures that presented certain species with some tradeoffs that could best be solved by conscious states. Both state-based and life-history theories are well established methodologies in biology, which is a huge plus for Veit's framework.
On the downside, to my taste Veit isn't a very good writer. He's too repetitive with terms and phrases, and the chapter presentations betray an author too contaminated with how analytic philosophy papers are structured. More substantively, I think Veit's defense of how an evaluative dimension is "more basic" than any other dimensions, especially the sensory one, doesn't quite show this dimension really has the upper hand. I agree with him that the more dimensions we require to form the most minimal kind of subjective experience, the closer we move the idea that there's a threshold after which subjectivy just pops into existence, already with a suspicious degree of complexity in place. But accepting this doesn't mean there can't be a threshold of sorts where proto-evaluative and proto-sensory capacities dynamically integrate and then we start having some semi-hemi-demi-sentience. But to be honest I'm not sure how much Veit disagrees with this idea, for it seems that evaluative capacities can be cashed out in some interoceptive terms. In any case, Veit himself recognizes the sensory-first x evaluative-first contest is still a legitimate open question in thinking about the origins of subjectivy. And what's more important, these are empirically resolvable questions, so we need not rely on the anti-naturalist habit of embracing intuition as if it had any evidential force on these matters. Veit himself does a fine work in making reference to some available scientific literature in order do adjudicate the aforementioned dispute. So despite all of its perceived shortcomings, I consider Veit's book as excellent for the great accomplishment of really taking Darwinian thinking seriously, and by doing so he's able to provide us with a very useful framework that enables us to better think about the evolution of consciousness and thus to ask better questions that can be empirically investigated.
December 7, 2023
This book proposes how animal consciousness could have gradually evolved, and is a challenging, thought-provoking, but worthwhile read. Read my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2023...
January 13, 2024
Caveat that most of this material was new to me, but I found the overall approach (how might we think of consciousness emerging gradually in response to Darwinian natural selection) super interesting and obvious in retrospect (the best kind of obvious!).
4 stars = one of the best books of the year; if non-fiction, makes novel/revelatory arguments.
4 stars = one of the best books of the year; if non-fiction, makes novel/revelatory arguments.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews