All Categories
    Filters
    Preferences
    Search

    Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness

    £17.99
    £19.99
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9780198858539
    Products specifications
    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorHumphrey, Nicholas (Emeritus Professor o
    Pub Date27/10/2022
    BindingHardback
    Pages400
    Publisher: O.U.P.
    Ship to
    *
    *
    Shipping Method
    Name
    Estimated Delivery
    Price
    No shipping options
    Availability: Available for despatch from the bookshop in 48 hours
    Conscious sensations ground our sense of self, but is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Nicholas Humphrey tells the story of his quest to understand the evolutionary history of consciousness and explains the startling answers he has come to.

    We feel therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are essential 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? To answer these questions we need a scientific understanding of consciousness: what it is and why it has evolved. Nicholas Humphrey has been researching these issues for fifty years. In this extraordinary book, weaving
    together intellectual adventure, cutting-edge science, and his own breakthrough experiences, he tells the story of his quest to uncover the evolutionary history of consciousness: from his discovery of blindsight after brain damage in monkeys, to hanging out with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, to
    becoming a leading philosopher of mind. Out of this, he has come up with an explanation of conscious feeling - 'phenomenal consciousness' - that he presents here in full for the first time. Building on this theory of how phenomenal consciousness is generated in the human brain, he turns to the morally crucial question of whether it exists in non-human creatures. His conclusions, on the evidence as it stands, are radical. Contrary to both popular and much scientific opinion, he argues that
    phenomenal consciousness is a relatively recent evolutionary innovation, present only in warm-blooded creatures, mammals and birds. Invertebrates, such as octopuses and bees, for all their intelligence, are in this respect unfeeling zombies. And for now, but not necessarily for ever, so are man-made
    machines.