Inventing Consciousness. Emotions, Sensations and Self-Perception

We feel, therefore we exist. Conscious sensations ground us. They are crucial to our self-image as conscious beings: present, existing, and having significance. But is consciousness exclusive to humans? Combining intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes his fifty-year... search 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 aim of the book is to tackle a complex task: to explain 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 its purpose? And why did it evolve at all? Humphrey presents a completely new and advanced solution, according to which phenomenal consciousness, far from being primitive, represents a relatively late and complex evolutionary development.