In Search of the Origins of Consciousness

Abstract

The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul is a landmark attempt to make progress on the problem of animal consciousness. Ginsburg and Jablonka propose a general cognitive marker of the presence of consciousness: Unlimited Associative Learning. They use this marker to defend a generous view about the distribution of consciousness in the natural world, on which a capacity for conscious experience is common to all vertebrates, many arthropods and some cephalopod molluscs. They use this inferred distribution to defend a view about the evolution of consciousness, on which it has evolved at least three times, first evolved at around the time of the Cambrian explosion (just over 500 million years ago), and was in fact the driving force behind that explosion. In this essay review, I reflect critically on the book's central idea: the proposal that Unlimited Associative Learning provides a general marker of consciousness.

Dimensions of Animal Consciousness

“…The cognitive route involves looking for cognitive tasks that are linked to conscious perception in humans and then testing how well the target species of animal performs those tasks when the stimuli are presented in a particular modality. Various forms of learning have been linked to conscious perception [ 22 , 23 ]. One important example is trace conditioning, a version of classical conditioning in which the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli are separated in time.…”

Unlimited Associative Learning and the origins of consciousness: a primer and some predictions

“…The approach, if it succeeds, promises to place origins of consciousness research on a firm theoretical and methodological footing, in a deliberate attempt to replicate the way origins of life research was placed on firmer foundations by the work of Gánti, Maynard Smith and Szathmáry. In a review of the book, Birch (2020) posed some problems for the UAL approach and highlighted the need for more explicit predictions. Here, our aim is to stimulate discussion of the UAL framework by providing a primer on its key claims ( Part I ) and a clear statement of its main empirical predictions ( Part II ).…”

Modern approaches to the development of relevant competencies in the socio-cultural environment

“…If organization begins to exceed the value of this constant, then X appearsintuition». That is, intuition appears (jump) at the level of mental operations (and example in [Birch, 2020]). Spontaneous formation of thoughts, determined by semantic structures, occurs better in the native language than in the SL, unless the knowledge of the SL in one area or another becomes better than the knowledge of the native language.…”