title: The Transition to Minimal Consciousness through the Evolution of Associative Learning.
abstract: The minimal state of consciousness is sentience. This includes any phenomenal sensory experience - exteroceptive, such as vision and olfaction; interoceptive, such as pain and hunger; or proprioceptive, such as the sense of bodily position and movement. We proposeunlimited associative learning(UAL) as the marker of theevolutionary transition to minimal consciousness (or sentience), its phylogenetically earliest sustainable manifestation and the driver of its evolution. We define and describe UAL at the behavioral and functional level and argue that the structural-anatomical implementations of this mode of learning in different taxa entail subjective feelings (sentience). We end with a discussion of the implications of our proposal for the distribution of consciousness in the animal kingdom, suggesting testable predictions, and revisiting the ongoing debate about the function of minimal consciousness in light of our approach.
authors.affiliation: The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv UniversityTel Aviv, Israel; School of Psychology, Tel Aviv UniversityTel Aviv, Israel.
authors.forename: Zohar Z
authors.initials: ZZ
authors.lastname: Bronfman
authors.affiliation: Department of Natural Science, The Open University of Israel Raanana, Israel.
authors.forename: Simona
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ginsburg
authors.affiliation: The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv UniversityTel Aviv, Israel; The Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv UniversityTel Aviv, Israel.
authors.forename: Eva
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jablonka
keywords: evolution of associative learning; evolution of consciousness; evolutionary transitions; learning and consciousness; the distribution problem