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Recent work within such disparate research areas as the epistemology of perception, theories of well-being, animal and medical ethics, the philosophy of consciousness and theories of understanding in philosophy of science and epistemology has featured disconnected discussions of what is arguably a single underlying question: What is the value of consciousness? The purpose of this article is to review some of this work and place it within a unified theoretical framework that makes contributions (and contributors) from these disparate areas more visible to one another. Before reviewing recent work bearing on the question ‘What is the value of consciousness?’, it might be useful to get clearer on what the question means. When we speak about the value of X, there are three different kinds of value we might have in mind: epistemic, ethical or aesthetic. These are fundamentally distinct and incommensurable: one may find a certain quantity Q of epistemic value more valuable than some quantity Q* of epistemic value, but when considering a quantity Q of epistemic value and a quantity Q* of ethical value, no meaning attaches to the question of which is more valuable simpliciter.
Uriah Kriegel (Thu,) studied this question.