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.