This volume provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the emerging concept of the evolution of consciousness. It presents an overarching model that moves us to a new level of meaning and understanding of our place in the world.

The Evolution of Consciousness brings together interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science to explain consciousness in terms of the biological function that grounds it in the physical world. Drawing on the novel analogy of a house of cards, Paula Droege pieces together various conceptual questions and shows how they rest on each other to form a coherent, structured argument. She asserts that the mind is composed of unconscious sensory and cognitive representations, which become conscious when they are selected and coordinated into a representation of the present moment. This temporal representation theory deftly bridges the gap between mind and body by highlighting that physical systems are conscious when they can respond flexibly to actions in the present. With examples from evolution, animal cognition, introspection and the free will debate, this is a compelling and animated account of the possible explanations of consciousness, offering answers to the conceptual question of how consciousness can be considered a cognitive process.

Based on his life's research, Robert Ornstein provides a look at the evolution of the mind. He explains that we are not rational but adaptive, and that it is Darwin, not Freud, who is the central scientist of the brain. Our minds have evolved to help us survive, not to reason. At the same time, our individual worlds have developed our minds and destroyed many of our natural abilities.

When Alice stepped through the looking-glass, she encountered a peculiar world where she meets animated chess pieces, characters from nursery rhymes, and talking animals. Everything there is inside out and upside down: so it is with consciousness. Reflecting on the inception of consciousness, it is natural to suppose that there are just two alternatives. Either consciousness appeared in living beings suddenly, like a light switch turning on, or it appeared gradually, like the biological development of life itself, through borderline cases which became the collective experience over time. For the former theory, consciousness is an on/off matter, but once it was there it became richer over time, like a beam of light becoming brighter and broader in its sweep. For the latter theory this is not the case, and there are shades of grey in how consciousness develops. Unfortunately, both alternatives face deep problems. The solution to these problems lies in the realization, strange as it may be, that a key element of consciousness itself was always here, as a fundamental feature of micro-reality. Varying conscious states were not, however: they appeared gradually. In Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness, Michael Tye addresses the questions that this raises. Where in the brain is consciousness located? How can consciousness be casually efficacious with respect to behaviour? What is the extent of consciousness in the animal world? How can all of this be so?

Too many people have little regard for their lives, as though they consider it out of their hands and beyond control. Should we just absorb the slings and arrows, or should we look for truth and how to cope with it? There is nothing more crucial to the life of an organism than its nervous system. It is the source of all sensation, action, and motivation. In short, it is the mechanism that sustains life. Sensation is the nervous system's communications facility; it monitors all incoming events that impact the body and directs them to the brain where they can be analyzed and acted upon. To be precisely understood, the brain communicates in just one language-the language of "sensation". Universally used throughout the human nervous system, we see examples of sensation language in its messages to us, such as touch, taste, smell, sound and sight-our five senses. But these are only examples of its extensive use. Sensation began with life, itself, and evolved from meager beginnings into its enormous variations in modern humans. Within all organisms, the occurrence of each sensation corresponds to a unit of consciousness.

Philosophical 'thought experiments' invoking inverted spectra, zombies, et cetera suggest that conscious sensations have no function, and psychological studies finding no correlation between vivid visual imaging and visual problem solving suggest that conscious images have no function. Furthermore, both philosophical and psychological theories suggest that self-consciousness has no function. Countering such suggestions, the post-Darwinian double-aspect theory which Professor Robert Kunzendorf's introduces in the first chapter of his monograph On the Evolution of Conscious Sensation, Conscious Imagination, and Consciousness of Self points to evolutionary functions of certain sensations, youngling vivid images, and self-consciousness. Kunzendorf's second chapter presents evidence that the most primitive sensation-pain, the subjective aspect of free nerve endings or nociceptors-has a survival-promoting function. But as the pressure nociceptor mutates into a touch receptor, the heat nociceptor into temperature receptor, and the chemical nociceptor into a taste receptor, the painful qualia of these nociceptors evolve respectively into touch sensation, temperature sensation, or taste sensation-painless sensations that add no survival benefit to their receptor's physical aspect. Building on evidence that retinal receptors embodying visual qualia evolved from primitive eyespots responsive to injurious 'heat at a distance' or painful light, the third chapter presents evidence that visually imagined sensations are the subjective qualities of retinal receptors that are corticofugally innervated in warm-blooded animals-for the developmental purpose of testing cortically hypothesized sensory-motor rules that have greater survival value than cold-blooded stimulus-response associations. The fourth and final chapter focuses on self-conscious reality-testing and on visuo-spatial self-conceptualization, and presents evidence that such manifestations of self-awareness evolve only in those warm-blooded animals whose rule-developing youth lasts two years or longer-that is, those mammals and birds whose survival during the imaginal testing of rules is subjected to prolonged risk if self-consciousness that one is imaging sensations (rather than perceiving sensations) is absent.

For the last four centuries, science has tried to account for everything in terms of atoms and molecules and the physical laws they adhere to. Recently, this effort was extended to try to include the inner world of human beings. Gary Lachman argues that this view of consciousness is misguided and unfounded. He points to another approach to the study and exploration of consciousness that erupted into public awareness in the late 1800s. In this "secret history of consciousness," consciousness is seen not as a result of neurons and molecules, but as responsible for them; meaning is not imported from the outer world, but rather creates it. In this view, consciousness is a living, evolving presence whose development can be traced through different historical periods, and which evolves along a path to a broader, more expansive state. What that consciousness may be like and how it may be achieved is a major concern of this book. Lachman concentrates on the period since the late 1800s, when Madame Blavatsky first brought the secret history out into the open. As this history unfolds, we encounter the ideas of many modern thinkers, from esotericists like P. D. Ouspensky, Rudolf Steiner, and Colin Wilson to more mainstream philosophers like Henri Bergson, William James, Owen Barfield and the psychologist Andreas Mavromatis. Two little known but important thinkers play a major role in his synthesis --Jurij Moskvitin, who showed how our consciousness relates to the mechanisms of perception and to the external world, and Jean Gebser, who presented perhaps the most impressive case for the evolution of consciousness. An important contribution to the study of consciousness ... a must-read.

Thomas McNamara, in Evolution, Culture, and Consciousness, presents the first comprehensive theory of human perception and consciousness based on the generally accepted principles of evolutionary psychology. This theory, building on the best evolutionary research, explains that just a few simple neurological changes in the primate brain account for human speech, self-consciousness and the creation of meaning out of experience. All primates can learn, but our species evolved a new instinct for learning, which makes childhood learning just as powerful as the other biological instincts found in all other primates. McNamara shows that children are genetically programmed to learn not just what to think, but how to think, shaping the preconscious process for creating meaning out of experience. However, because our environment has changed radically since our origin, this archaic form of consciousness has become a major block to human development and success. After explaining how we have all been programmed to preconsciously create meaning out of experience, McNamara shows how we can create a new and more successful way of thinking and feeling, resulting in a happier, more productive, stress free life.

A Seminal Work of Visionary Hope, Updated for the 21st Century In this era of government gridlock, economic and ecological devastation, and seemingly intractable global violence, our future is ever more ripe for — and in need of — fresh, creative reimagining. With her clear-eyed, inspiring, and sweeping vision of a possible global renaissance in the new millennium, Barbara Marx Hubbard shows us that our current crises are not the precursors of an apocalypse but the natural birth pains of an awakened, universal humanity. This is our finest hour. Conscious Evolution highlights the tremendous potential of newfound scientific knowledge, technological advances, and compassionate spirituality and illustrates the opportunities that each of us has to fully participate in this exciting stage of human history. As we do, we will bring forth all that is within us and not only save ourselves, but evolve our world.

This volume of essays offers an interdisciplinary examination of the evolution of the human mind.