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Consciousness, complexity, and evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2022

Walter Veit*
Affiliation:
School of History and Philosophy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW2006, Australia. wrwveit@gmail.comhttps://walterveit.com/

Abstract

The idea that consciousness and complexity are closely related has been a major driver of the popularity of integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, despite its major formal, phenomenological, and neuroscientific shortcomings. Here, I argue that we can recover this intuition by replacing its biologically neutral notion of complexity with an evolutionary one that I shall dub “pathological complexity.”

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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