#Sentience vs consciousness full

Taking a long view of his entire scientific career and peppered with brilliant anecdotes, Sentience crystallizes Humphrey's latest thinking on the evolution of consciousness. 'For half a century, Nick Humphrey has been a hugely influential figure across the fields of experimental psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, and, for my money, is the most inventive psychological thinker of his generation. Keith Frankish, philosopher of mind author of Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness It will fascinate general readers and inspire academic researchers.'

#Sentience vs consciousness full

Sentience is a beautifully written book, full of engaging vignettes, original ideas, and intriguing suggestions. Nicholas Humphrey is such a person, and in his new book he cements his claim to be one of the most insightful writers on this notoriously difficult topic. 'It takes a special kind of person to write illuminatingly about consciousness-a person who is not only steeped in cognitive science, biology, and philosophy, but also has a fertile imagination, an openness to new ideas, and a sensitivity to the richness and variety of experience in humans and other animals. The implications for the existence of sentience in nonhuman animals are startling and provocative. What does this magical dimension of experience amount to? What is it for? And why has it evolved? Humphrey presents here in full a new, plausible solution that phenomenal consciousness, far from being primitive, is a relatively late and sophisticated evolutionary development. 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. 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 his fifty-year quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. The story of a quest to uncover the evolutionary history of consciousness from a leading theoretical psychologist. If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.Įstablished in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.Ĭollaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.

MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. International Affairs, History, & Political Science.For example, although temporality and selfhood may be correlated, they are different concepts: it is conceivable that an animal could have a richly temporally integrated stream of experiences without any awareness of itself as the subject of those experiences, and it is conceivable that an animal could have temporally fragmented ‘staccato’ experiences while being aware of itself as the subject of those fragments.MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. We have tried to ensure that our dimensions are conceptually distinct. It does, however, matter that the dimensions are conceptually distinct from each other (that they are not the same thing described in two different ways). This is a hypothesis worthy of further investigation. For example, it may turn out that temporality is correlated with selfhood, because richer forms of temporal integration enable a species to evolve a higher grade of self-consciousness. If one dimension is found to correlate positively with another, this is an interesting result, not a problem. What is not required is that the dimensions should be completely uncorrelated. A second challenge is to make sure the dimensions are distinct enough from each other.