Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness (Preprint)

This article introduces and defends the ‘pathological complexity thesis’ as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call ‘pathological complexity’. By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life-history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals