Citation

Author Website

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/userhome/psych/areber/

Thread

Arthur S. Reber, Caterpillars, consciousness and the origins of mind

Abstract

With the exception of the commentary by Key, the commentaries on Reber have a common feature: the commenters feel, with varying levels of enthusiasm, that there is at least some virtue in the core assumption of the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory that consciousness (or subjectivity or sentience) accompanies the earliest forms of life. The model has two important entailments: (a) it resolves the (in)famous Hard Problem by redirecting the search for the biochemical foundations of sentience away from human consciousness; and (b) it reduces the need for an emergentist miracle to a far simpler scale than is currently assumed. The CBC is grounded in classical principles of evolutionary biology, which it shares with allied areas of research on emotion, learning, memory and perception.

Author Biography

Arthur S. Reber is Broeklundian Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and currently Visiting Professor, Psychology, University of British Columbia. His research is on implicit learning, the process through which knowledge about the world about us is picked up largely independently of awareness of both the process and products of that learning. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/userhome/psych/areber/

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1175