ABSTRACT
All organisms respond to their environments. At minimum this means making internal adjustments (e.g., to maintain temperature), effecting external changes in stance and behaviour (e.g., moving location; altering posture) or both. While such adjustments may be made in a reactive manner to ongoing changes, many organisms are so confi gured as to modify their state in anticipation of future environmental conditions (e.g., seed dormancy, animal hibernation). However such ‘programmed’ changes only relate to predictably regular environmental effects and cannot handle unanticipated events (e.g., tsunami, heat waves). In order to be able to respond effectively to future environmental uncertainty a creature logically needs to possess not only a memory (to be able to frame experiences) and sensory data about present conditions, but also some perception of an historic and future self. The latter requires more than what Damasio (1999) has called the ‘core consciousness’ of the higher mammals and has described as “the core self, a transient entity, ceaselessly recreated for each and every object with which the brain interacts”. At the very least it demands ‘extended consciousness’ of the sort possessed by chimpanzees, dolphins and humans, which have a sense of autobiographical self and memory as well as a sense of past and future. Consciousness at this level provides an individual with a perception of itself and its environment in the context of historical time.
