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Yes, that’s just what it sounds like. Every morning, the alarm clock rings, and there is a new theory of consciousness. Today’s contender is from Michael Graziano at Atlantic:
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right—and that has yet to be determined—then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species. More.
If drowning in information was really that big a problem, all life would have drowned long ago. Life forms use senses for filtering and focusing necessary information, but it is not clear that consciousness as such has any kind of adaptive value in the matter.
Consciousness may well be present in invertebrate species. See Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain?
What most human beings mean by consciousness is a sense that an experience is happening to oneself = self vs. not-self. But that sense need not imply any kind of reasoning ability. See Animal minds: In search of the minimal self.
The big problem with consciousness studies is that the researchers are looking for a naturalist (materialist) explanation that probably does not exist, or not in the form they are looking for.
See also: Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?
and
New Scientist astounds: Information is physical
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