The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience

by Todd E. Feinberg, Jon M. Mallatt

Overview

How consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed, and why all vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates are conscious.

How is consciousness created? When did it first appear on Earth, and how did it evolve? What constitutes consciousness, and which animals can be said to be sentient? In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt draw on recent scientific findings to answer these questions—and to tackle the most fundamental question about the nature of consciousness: how does the material brain create subjective experience?

After assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem responsible for consciousness, and considering the fossil record of evolution, Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed. About 520 to 560 million years ago, they explain, the great “Cambrian explosion” of animal diversity produced the first complex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of consciousness; simple reflexive behaviors evolved into a unified inner world of subjective experiences. From this they deduce that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and bird. Considering invertebrates, they find that arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and cephalopods (including the octopus) meet many of the criteria for consciousness. The obvious and conventional wisdom–shattering implication is that consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago. Combining evolutionary, neurobiological, and philosophical approaches allows Feinberg and Mallatt to offer an original solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262333276
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/25/2016
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
Sales rank:	756,676
File size:	10 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Todd E. Feinberg is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York and coauthor (with Jon M. Mallatt) of The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience (MIT Press).

Jon M. Mallatt is Clinical Associate Professor in the WWAMI Medical Education Program at the University of Washington and the University of Idaho and coauthor (with Todd E. Feinberg) of The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience (MIT Press).

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xi

List of Figures and Tables xiii

1 The Mystery of Subjectivity 1

2 The General Biological and Special Neurobiological Features of Conscious Animals 17

3 The Birth of Brains 37

4 The Cambrian Explosion 51

5 Consciousness Gets a Head Start: Vertebrate Brains, Vision, and the Cambrian Birth of the Mental Image 69

6 Two-Step Evolution of Sensory Consciousness in Vertebrates 101

7 Searching for Sentience: Feelings 129

8 Finding Sentience 149

9 Does Consciousness Need a Backbone? 171

10 Neurobiological Naturalism: A Consilience 195

Appendix: Table References 229

Notes 251

References 287

Index 349

What People are Saying About This

Sy Montgomery

The Ancient Origins of Consciousness will get you thinking about thinking in a way you never have before. This important, challenging, and surely controversial book opens the possibility that our world's fellow creatures are far more alert, alive, and sentient than many scientists and philosophers have previously suggested. I hope it's read widely and discussed with vigor by both academics and laypersons alike.

Thurston Lacalli

This book provides a much-needed evolutionary context for examining the origin and material basis of sentience and consciousness. Treating these as adaptive responses to real biological needs, each with its own evolutionary history, demystifies a subject too often framed in a top-down, primate-centric way. Progress in science often depends on first tackling the simplest available example, as with the hydrogen molecule in the case of chemical bond theory. For the biological problem of sentience and consciousness, the equivalent is to seek rudimentary forms of these phenomena as they emerge in evolution. This is the perspective of the authors, who develop their argument at some length in a thought-provoking and insightful way.

Christof Koch

A very level-headed, deeply informed, and magisterial approach to the neurobiological basis of consciousness that considers the evolutionary history, the neuroanatomy, and the behavior of extant animals. The book casts a wide net and pinpoints the origin of consciousness to the time of the Cambrian explosion.

Endorsement

This book's argument that consciousness probably extends hugely further back in time than we commonly suppose is welcome. It is a thoughtful and immensely informative survey of evolutionary neurobiology, which is sure to become a classic in the field of consciousness studies.—Iain McGilchrist, consultant neuropsychiatrist; author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

From the Publisher

A very level-headed, deeply informed, and magisterial approach to the neurobiological basis of consciousness that considers the evolutionary history, the neuroanatomy, and the behavior of extant animals. The book casts a wide net and pinpoints the origin of consciousness to the time of the Cambrian explosion.

—Christof Koch, author of Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

The Ancient Origins of Consciousness will get you thinking about thinking in a way you never have before. This important, challenging, and surely controversial book opens the possibility that our world's fellow creatures are far more alert, alive, and sentient than many scientists and philosophers have previously suggested. I hope it's read widely and discussed with vigor by both academics and laypersons alike.

—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

This book provides a much-needed evolutionary context for examining the origin and material basis of sentience and consciousness. Treating these as adaptive responses to real biological needs, each with its own evolutionary history, demystifies a subject too often framed in a top-down, primate-centric way. Progress in science often depends on first tackling the simplest available example, as with the hydrogen molecule in the case of chemical bond theory. For the biological problem of sentience and consciousness, the equivalent is to seek rudimentary forms of these phenomena as they emerge in evolution. This is the perspective of the authors, who develop their argument at some length in a thought-provoking and insightful way.

—Thurston Lacalli, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of Saskatchewan; Adjunct Professor of Biology, University of Victoria

This book's argument that consciousness probably extends hugely further back in time than we commonly suppose is welcome. It is a thoughtful and immensely informative survey of evolutionary neurobiology, which is sure to become a classic in the field of consciousness studies.

—Iain McGilchrist, consultant neuropsychiatrist; author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Iain McGilchrist

This book's argument that consciousness probably extends hugely further back in time than we commonly suppose is welcome. It is a thoughtful and immensely informative survey of evolutionary neurobiology, which is sure to become a classic in the field of consciousness studies.

Editorial Reviews

[Feinberg and Mallatt's] neuroevolutionary approach is the best we will have if we are to respect the power of our own human consciousness and also to locate it within a biological framework.—The Guardian—

From the Publisher

[Feinberg and Mallatt's] neuroevolutionary approach is the best we will have if we are to respect the power of our own human consciousness and also to locate it within a biological framework.

The Guardian

[Feinberg and Mallatt's] neuroevolutionary approach is the best we will have if we are to respect the power of our own human consciousness and also to locate it within a biological framework.

The Guardian - Steven Rose