Wonderfest: Evolution of Consciousness: The Participatory Perspective

Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and animal welfare advocates tend to agree that consciousness evolved to support action. Yet, puzzlingly, most accounts take relatively passive sensory experiences and bodily sensations (e.g. pains, visual perceptions, and hunger pangs) to be the basic contents of subjective experience. What if consciousness were not a “point of view,” but rather a “point of do,” where the conscious subject is not an observer but a participant who interacts with an environment that pushes back? Thinking carefully about action experience might help us better understand the biological evolution of consciousness on Earth.

Speaker: Mariel Goddu, Stanford University