An essay review of Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka's The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness
Absorbing the hard problem of consciousness
This well-documented, comprehensive, and deeply scholarly work presents a bold new theory that unlimited associative learning (UAL) lies at the core of the hard problem of consciousness.
The idea driving the theory is the fact that no matter when "subjective experiencing" may have emerged in biological history, it had to have been a distinct form of goal-directed behavior that evolved within the context of learning.
And, when it did evolve, it did so with an important twist: subjective experiencing always appeared accompanied by first-person accounts.
In other words, this theory asserts that consciousness is inherently tied to the concept of "having a specific point of view," something the philosopher Thomas Nagel had already alerted us to.
As a result, the process of subjective experiencing -- itself often seen as a stand-in for the "hard problem" of consciousness -- is now discovered to already be embedded within, and absorbed by, the definition of consciousness itself.
Thus, by sidestepping the formidable challenge of having to deal with the "so called" hard problem of consciousness, the authors immediately recognized that they now had a new open field for theoretical maneuvering.
What to do?
After an extensive review of the literature in chapters I-V, the authors chose a path already put to good effect by Hungarian Theoretical Biologist, Tivo Ganti.
Ganti had invented a "toy" theoretical model designed to define the minimum prelife conditions for defining life.
His "proof of concept logic machine" was called the Chemoton. Once it was loaded with the proper set of prelife characteristics, and given one turn of the logic crank -- viola! -- life appeared.
Ganti's Chemoton was not the first attempt to create life from prelife characteristics. To list just the first few that I am aware of: We have the test tube experiments of Miller and Urey; the deep sea thermal vents of Nick Lane; and, as has been carefully pointed out in this study, also Dr Karl Friston's free energy principle and its related experiments.
In each of these examples the scientists identified lists of key pre-life capacities that could in principle be used to produce life.
However, arguably, so far, the only case in which the experiment has ended in a resounding theoretical success has been Dr Ganti's Chemoton.
The pre-life capacities Professor Ganti used, not only defined the minimal conditions for producing life, but as functionally and logically arranged by his Chemoton machine, it, in principle, actually produced the perfect analog to life itself.
Thus, Ganti's toy model was no parlor trick, it was the real deal.
Now, armed at least with Ganti's logical analysis, and plenty of theoretical maneuvering room, a parallel research strategy emerged in these authors' minds: Why not repeat the Ganti trick using preconscious capacities instead of prelife capacities?
While they were not bent on developing a full-blown parallel "toy consciousness machine," the authors were keen to see just how far using a logic parallel to Ganti's Chemoton would take them down the road towards operationalizing minimal consciousness using a carefully selected set of preconscious capacities.
As far as I know, this book is the first and only example of a research strategy designed to define minimal consciousness by tracking the evolution towards consciousness through preconscious capacities.
The first half of the book provides an overview of the authors' efforts to extensively review the literature of biological research in search of a unique set of transition markers that would effectively signal a transition from preconsciousness to a state of minimal consciousness.
The second half of the book shows, how they did it -- how they succeeded in discovering a single diagnostic marker of the long evolutionary transition from biological reactivity to subjective experiencing in animals.
They called their marker "unlimited associative learning" (UAL).
UAL came with its own set of requirements:
Markers of UAL must be conditioned stimuli composed of discernible perceptual features.
These features must be either of a single sensing mode or combinations of different sense modalities.
The stimuli must also be novel, and neither reflex-eliciting nor pre-associated with an unconditional stimulus or past reinforcement.
And finally, second-order conditioning must be possible, meaning the process must be capable of forming long chains of associative links between stimuli and thus be capable of acting in an open-ended manner.
Once UAL was deployed as a trial diagnostic tool, the authors not only succeeded in reverse engineering the organizational structure that resulted in minimal subjective experiencing in animals, they also were able to test the trial set for robustness. (Thus, arguably, in principle at least, they had indeed exhibited the logic of their own parallel consciousness generating machine!).
What they discovered is that their trial set of transitional capacities was not just parallel to Ganti's life-producing Chemoton, but represented the minimal conditions for producing consciousness.
Thus, in principle, in logic, and in fact, it also defined consciousness itself.
The list of individual transitional capacities that served as the first ever set of markers of minimal consciousness are:
They must be:
embodied;
able to register a difference between self and other;
bindable into a single unit;
have global reach and accessibility;
selective in attention and exclusion;
integratabtle over time;
a flexible evaluative system.
possess intentionality and
a sense of being and agency.
The upshot of this study then is this:
If we discover a creature anywhere in the universe exhibiting these capacities, we can confidently assert that it is conscious.
This is so because within the logic of these pre-conscious capacities lives not only the minimal conditions for consciousness but also the organizational logic leading this procession of capabilities to a whole suite of more advanced and more complex evolutionary, epigenetic, information processing and mechanical developments, such as new hierarchical levels for storing neural information, new dedicated memory systems, novel functional units for reinforcing signaling; and high-level sensorimotor associations -- just to name a few of those revealed in this book.
Together as a unit, they define "consciousness proper" at its deepest level.
Thus, in my view, this book has essentially redefined the terms of the consciousness debate, setting new theoretical and research standards for all future studies.
This is no small accomplishment since, once again in the background, it brings together the two contending phenomenological domains of "brain mechanics" and "subjective experiencing."
To be able to do this has always been the holy grail of the search for the solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
Nobel Laureate Gerald M Edelman claims to have done so with the stochastic dance taking place due to complex reentrant circuitry deep inside the "dynamic core" of the thalamus.
Dr Richard Pico also claimed that this meeting of these two opposing Cartesian domains took place as a result of a perfectly timed and aligned multidimensional binding also taking place in the thalamus, and thus creating a new thermodynamic order called consciousness.
And while there may be others like these two that also lay well outside the Occam's razor criterion, I am convinced that the authors of this book are on the right track, because not only have they taken Edelman's reentrant circuitry into account as well as a broad range of William James' prescient theorizing, and even Thomas Metzinger's Ego Tunnel, and Karl Friston's Markov blanket, and have used them all as scaffolding to build a bigger and better theoretical edifice. There may be more to report once they have properly tweaked their strategy.
All things considered, these efforts have converged into a larger, more comprehensive understanding of consciousness and consciousness research. And in that sense it represents a glimpse into the future of theorizing about consciousness. For this, it is deserving of five stars.
(Article changed on Aug 20, 2026 at 7:42 PM EDT)
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