Evolutionary views on consciousness and work by Dawkins, Darwin,Lamarck, and Nagel

Question 1

Darwin

Answer 1

if many slightly different creatures have to compete for food, water, or other resources, and many of them die, and if the survivors passon whatever helped them survive, then their offspring must be better adapted to that environment than their parents were. With long repetitionof selection over billions of years, extraordinary adaptations can gradually appear, including fur, legs, wings, and eye

Question 2

Dawkins

Answer 2

the ultimate beneficiary of natural selection is neither the species, nor the group, nor even the individual, but the hereditary information: the gene.

Question 3

Lamarck

Answer 3

Lamarck believed that if an animal used a particular faculty to change itself, the effect would be passed on to its offspring. So, a giraffe that spent its life stretching to the highest branches would have calves with slightly longer necks; a blacksmith who worked hard and developed huge muscles would pass on the effects to his children

Question 4

Nagel

Answer 4

As Nagel put it, when we say that another organism is conscious we mean that ‘there is something it is like to be that organism [. . .] something it is like for the organism’; ‘the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat’