there is also no shortage of anti-dualist philosophers and scientists who are not yet comfortable with materialism and are casting about for something in between, something that can actually make some progress on the science of consciousness without falling into either. The trouble is that they tend to misdescribe it, inflating it into something de

To summarize, animals, plants, and even microorganisms are equipped with competences that permit them to deal appropriately with the affordances of their environments. There are free-floating rationales for all these competences, but the organisms need not appreciate or comprehend them to benefit from them, nor do they need to be conscious of them.

Throughout our journey, we will need to identify uncomfortable facts without indulging in premature explanations or rebuttals.

Luciano Floridi, in his useful primer (2010), distinguishes economic information as whatever is worth some work. A farmer is wise to take the time and trouble to count his cows, check the level of the water in the well, and keep track of how efficiently his farm-hands labor.

Evolution by natural selection starts with how come and arrives at what for.

Before we can have competent reproducers, we have to have competent persisters, structures with enough stability to hang around long enough to pick up revisions.

Moreover, on this topic everybody’s an expert. People are calmly prepared to be instructed about the chemical properties of calcium or the microbiological details of cancer, but they think they have a particular personal authority about the nature of their own conscious experiences that can trump any hypothesis they find unacceptable.

Darwin understood this: The term “natural selection” is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of “elective affinity”; and certainly an acid has no more choice in combining with a base, than the conditions of life have in determi

a fortuitously “good” mutation almost never happens. But evolution depends on those rarest of rare events.