Mona-Marie Wandrey

The evolution of phenomenal consciousness remains a central challenge in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Although many argue that consciousness can be understood as a biological phenomenon, there is considerable disagreement about its origins. Competing theories range from early evolution views, which trace consciousness back to the Cambrian period around 540 million years ago, to latecomer theories, which associate it with complex cognition in mammals or humans. We argue that this divergence stems largely from unresolved debates about how to identify consciousness in extant animals. Which behavioural and neural properties we regard as evidence of consciousness directly impacts how we reconstruct its evolutionary history. These issues carry significant ethical implications for how we treat nonhuman animals. This paper maps the key positions in the debate, analyses their underlying disagreements and explores how evolutionary approaches might move the discussion beyond anthropocentric assumptions towards a more inclusive understanding of animal consciousness.

Diagnosing patients with disorders of consciousness involves inductive risk: the risk of false negative and false positive results when gathering and interpreting evidence of consciousness. A recent proposal suggests mitigating that risk by incorporating patient values into methodological choices at the level of individual diagnostic techniques: when using machine-learning algorithms to detect neural evidence of responsiveness to commands, clinicians should consider the patient’s own preferences about whether avoiding false positives or false negatives takes priority (Birch, 2023). In this paper, I argue that this proposal raises concerns about how to ensure that inevitable non-epistemic value judgments do not outweigh epistemic considerations. Additionally, it comes with challenges related to the predictive accuracy of surrogate decision-makers and the decisional burden imposed on them. Hence, I argue that patient values should not be incorporated at the level of gathering evidence of consciousness, but that they should play the leading role when considering how to respond to that evidence.

In The edge of sentience, Jonathan Birch proposes a democratically inclusive framework for protecting potentially sentient beings. While experts assess and communicate evidence of sentience, the public deliberates on proportionate policy responses to avoid causing gratuitous suffering. While we think there are many virtues to Birch's analysis and approach, in this commentary, we raise the concern that the proposed framework fails to sufficiently account for the presence of non‐epistemic values in science. We discuss strategies from the values in science literature for evaluating and managing these values in a democratic and inclusive way.