Citation

Author Website

https://scholar.google.co.il/citations?user=ht7VjFYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

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Jonathan Birch, Précis of The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI

Abstract

In The Edge of Sentience, the sentience candidacy of fishes and reptiles is strengthened if one accepts midbrain-centric theories of human consciousness. In this commentary I attempt to untether the two positions. I suggest that we need not look for a one-to-one match between the neocortex and a single pallial structure outside of mammals. Instead, a sufficient similarity might exist between the mammalian neocortex and the combination of pallium and midbrain in fishes and reptiles. Adopting an evolutionary perspective in the study of vertebrate brains could point to new investigation priorities in human and animal research.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License

Author Biography

Oryan Zacks is a postdoctoral fellow at The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. She studies the evolution of consciousness, memory and imagination through broad phylogenetic comparisons of neuroanatomy and behavior. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1965