Focusing attention can help an pet find meals or flee a predator. In addition, it may have resulted in consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses illustrations from the natural world showing how neurons 1st allowed animals to build up simple forms of attention: consuming messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as required.

After that some animals evolved covert attention-a roving mental focus that can ingest information apart from where the approximately Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory.

Graziano proposes that to be able to monitor and control this specialized interest, the mind evolved a simplified style of it-a cartoonish self-description depicting an interior essence with a capacity for understanding and experience. In other words, consciousness.

With this eye-opening function, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being resulted in empathy and formed us into social beings. The idea may point the best way to technical engineers for building awareness artificially. Graziano discusses just what a future with artificial consciousness may be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary potential.