Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness

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MIT Press, Mar 14, 2023 - Science - 256 pages
The story of a quest to uncover the evolutionary history of consciousness from one of the world's leading theoretical psychologists.

We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Weaving together intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes in Sentience his quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind.

The goal is to solve the hard problem: to explain the wondrous, eerie fact of “phenomenal consciousness”—the redness of a poppy, the sweetness of honey, the pain of a bee sting. What does this magical dimension of experience amount to? What is it for? And why has it evolved? Humphrey presents here his new solution. He proposes that phenomenal consciousness, far from being primitive, is a relatively late and sophisticated evolutionary development. The implications for the existence of sentience in nonhuman animals are startling and provocative.
 

Contents

Sentience and consciousness
1
Foothills
13
The touch of light
16
Blythe spirits
21
What the frogs eye tells the monkeys brain
32
Blindsight
40
Sight unseen
50
Red sky at night
54
Theoretical misprisions
125
Sentience and body sense
130
Sentience all the way down?
134
Mapping the landscape
145
Getting warmer
148
Testing testing
153
Qualiaphilia
158
The self in action
175

Natures psychologists
67
On the track of sensations
77
Evolving sentience
101
The road taken
105
The phenomenal self
114
Taking stock
202
Machina ex deo
207
References and notes
221
Index
239
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About the author (2023)

Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics, is a theoretical psychologist based in Cambridge, who studies the evolution of intelligence and consciousness. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” in monkeys. He has also studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, proposed the celebrated theory of the “social function of intellect,” and investigated the evolutionary background of religion, art, healing, death-awareness and suicide. His honors include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal, and the International Mind and Brain Prize. His most recent books are Seeing Red and Soul Dust.

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