Sentience The Invention of Consciousness

The story of a quest to uncover the evolutionary history of consciousness from one of the world's leading theoretical psychologists.

We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. 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 in Sentience his quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind.

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. What does this magical dimension of experience amount to? What is it for? And why has it evolved? Humphrey presents here his new solution. He proposes that phenomenal consciousness, far from being primitive, is a relatively late and sophisticated evolutionary development. The implications for the existence of sentience in nonhuman animals are startling and provocative.

Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics, is a theoretical psychologist based in Cambridge, who studies the evolution of intelligence and consciousness. His interests are wide-ranging. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of 'blindsight' after brain damage in monkeys, did research on mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, proposed the celebrated theory of the 'social function of intellect' and has investigated the evolutionary background of religion, art, healing, death-awareness, and suicide. His honors include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal and the International Mind and Brain Prize. His most recent books are Seeing Red and Soul Dust.

Prologue vii
1. Sentience and consciousness 1
2. Foothills 13
3. The touch of light 16
4. Blythe spirits 21
5. What the frog's eye tells the monkey's brain 32
6. Blindsight 40
7. Sight unseen 50
8. Red sky at night 54
9. Nature's psychologists 67
10. On the track of sensations 77
11. Evolving sentience 101
12. The road taken 105
13. The phenomenal self 114
14. Theoretical misprisions 125
15. Coming to be: Sentience and body sense 130
16. Sentience all the way down? 134
17. Mapping the landscape 145
18. Getting warmer 148
19. Testing, testing 153
20. Qualiaphilia 158
21. The self in action 175
22. Taking stock 202
23. Machina ex deo 207
24. Ethical imperatives 214
Acknowledgments 219
References and notes 221
Index 239