Peter Godfrey-Smith (University of Sydney)
Human conscious experience combines a number of features. Objects in our environment are presented through the senses, information from different sensory modalities are integrated, events are marked with value (positive or negative), and we have a sense of our own location and state. It is difficult to work out which of these might be fundamental to subjective experience, which might come before others in plausible evolutionary trajectories, and which might form a tight package of correlated features. We can make progress on these questions by looking at the distribution of subjectivity-relevant features in non-human animals, especially invertebrates.
