Highlights from Other Minds

What is the case, though, is that the senses, the nervous systems, and the behaviors of each animal began to evolve in response to the senses, nervous systems, and behaviors of others. The actions of one animal created opportunities for and demands on others. If a yard-

The Cambrian witnessed the appearance of both the compound eyes seen today in insects and camera eyes like our own.

these animals.

only three of the major animal groups produced some species with complex active bodies (CABs). Those groups are arthropods, chordates (animals like us with a nerve cord down their back), and one group of mollusks, the cephalopods.

anomalocarid.

What an amazing image: in a long evolutionary process, a motion-controlling brain marches up through your head to meet there some light-sensitive organs, which become eyes.

When we try to compare one animal’s brainpower with another’s, we also run into the fact that there is no single scale on which intelligence can be sensibly measured.

panpsychists

tactile vision substitution systems (TVSS),

The story I am working toward is one of gradual change: as sensing, acting, and remembering became more elaborate, the feel of experience became more complex along the

The senses can do their basic work, and actions can be produced, with all this happening “in silence” as far as the organism’s experience is concerned. Then, at some stage in evolution, extra capacities appear that do give rise to subjective experience: the sensory streams are brought together, an “internal model” of the world arises, and there’s a recognition of time and self.

These results do provide support for a view of pain as a basic and widespread form of subjective experience, one present in animals with very different brains from ours.

try. The title of this chapter

Subjective experience does not arise from the mere running of the system, but from the modulation of its state, from registering things that matter. These need not be external events; they might arise internally. But they are tracked because they matter and require a response. Sentience has some point to it. It’s not just a bathing in living activity.

deimatic

These sensations

The nervous system arose through one internalization of sensing and signaling, and the internalization of language as a tool for thinking was another.

Diaries and notes-to-self are embedded in a sender/ receiver system, just like more standard kinds of communication.

Cells can generate the right arrangement when a person is conceived, born, and develops from a baby to an adult. Why can’t the arrangement needed to keep you alive be constantly regenerated by the newly arriving cells?

The evolutionary theory of aging gives us an explanation for the basic facts of age-related decay. It explains why breakdown starts to appear in old individuals as if on a schedule.