ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to offer an explanation for the evolutionary origins of consciousness. It is here that the pathological complexity thesis will be explicated in detail. The evolution of hedonic valence can be understood as an adaptive response to a computational explosion of pathological complexity that occurred during the Cambrian, allowing Darwinian agents to track what matters to them and to make the right decisions at the right time. It is in this context that proximate interests or imperative motivations are born, giving rise to a new mode of animal agency in these Benthamite creatures with efficient action control and action selection. Lastly, the chapter argues that sensory experience plausibly evolved as an enrichment in the discriminatory capacities of evaluation, whereas minimal selfhood plausibly evolved in further enrichments on the sensory side, involving the distinction between interoception and exteroception. Integration of experience at a time and across time can simply be seen as further transformations in the structure of consciousness, instead of constituting their own explanatory gaps. It is ultimately their being part of an evaluative system that makes these capacities felt.
