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Consciousness, complexity, and evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2022

Walter Veit Open the ORCID record for Walter Veit [Opens in a new window]
Walter Veit*
Affiliation:
School of History and Philosophy, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. wrwveit@gmail.com https://walterveit.com/
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Abstract

The idea that consciousness and complexity are closely related has been a major driver of the popularity of integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, despite its major formal, phenomenological, and neuroscientific shortcomings. Here, I argue that we can recover this intuition by replacing its biologically neutral notion of complexity with an evolutionary one that I shall dub “pathological complexity.”

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Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 45 , 2022 , e61
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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