Phenomenal consciousness: its scope and limits

In the history of life, consciousness of sensory states with ‘phenomenal properties’—the basis of ‘sentience’—is, arguably, a late evolutionary development, which occurred long after conscious access to a ‘global mental workspace’ had become widely established as a strategy for cognitive information processing. In this article, I focus on phenomenal consciousness. I propose a step-by-step sequence by which the mental representation of sensory stimulation could have acquired phenomenal content through small changes in the brain. Also—addressing the question of evolutionary function—I point to the crucial psychological benefits to an animal of having a ‘phenomenally conscious self’. A thread running through the article is the phenomenon of ‘blindsight’, which I take to be a model for the non-phenomenal cognition that characterizes the majority of insentient animal species. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’.