Phenomenal consciousness in insects? A possible way forward

Brian Key
2016 Animal Sentience  
Klein & Barron (2016) propose that subjective experience in humans arises in the midbrain and then argue that insects have the capacity for subjective experience because their nervous system can perform neural processing similar to that of the midbrain. This approach ultimately fails because it is built on the false premise that the midbrain is the source of the awareness of sensory stimuli. I instead propose that the capacity for subjective experience must be based on fundamental neural
more » ... tions that generate the "what it feels like" experience. Two such computations associated with metarepresentations and high level representations entering working memory are discussed as possible measures of the capacity for subjective experience.
doi:10.51291/2377-7478.1159 fatcat:jw5uvryyejfpdh3wa6gqmbt46y