Inventing Consciousness. Emotions, Sensations, and Self-Perception

We feel, therefore we exist. Conscious sensations ground us. They are crucial for our self-conception as conscious beings: present, existing, and significant. But is consciousness only inherent to humans? Merging intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes his fifty-year quest for answers: from the discovery of the blind spot in monkeys and groundbreaking work in social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of consciousness. The goal of the book is to tackle the complex task of explaining the astonishing fact of "phenomenal consciousness" – the redness of a poppy, the sweetness of honey, the pain of a bee sting. What does this dimension of experience boil down to? What is it for? And why did it evolve at all? Humphrey presents a completely new and advanced solution whereby phenomenal consciousness, far from being primitive, represents a relatively late and complex evolutionary development.