Consciousness: An Evolutionary Approach

The evolutionary approach to basic consciousness – to the basic ability to experience rather than to merely process information – is not prominent among scientists who study the neurobiology of consciousness. We argue that an evolutionary approach, specifically an approach focused on evolutionary transitions, can be useful. First, the type of organism that appeared immediately after the transition would be the simplest of its kind and will – if we are able to identify it – enable us to recognize the most fundamental organizational principles involved in experiencing. Second, the evolutionary-transition framework and the approaches used by scientists studying a very different yet theoretically analogous transition, the transition to life, can point to useful analogous explanatory strategies. Third, organizing the existing and mostly fragmentary hypotheses about the evolution of consciousness with a focus on their evolutionary suppositions and implications may facilitate comparisons between different theories and make explicit and testable some of their underlying assumptions.