Walter Veit

University of Reading · Department of Philosophy

Fiery Cushman argues that “[r]ationalization is designed not to accurately infer unconscious mental states, but to construct new ones; it is not a discovery, but a fiction”. While we agree in broad strokes with the characterization of rationalization as a ‘useful fiction’, we think that Cushman’s claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: (i)...

In his 2009 monograph, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith accuses biologists of demonstrating ‘Darwinian Paranoia’ when they engage in what he dubs ‘agential thinking’. But as Daniel Dennett points out, he offers neither an illuminating set of examples nor an extended argument for this assertion, deeming it to be a bri...

This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that...

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down...

Ever since John Leslie Mackie’s ‘popularization’ of moral error theories in meta-ethics, increasing attention has been focused on how to escape the force of nihilism. For many opponents of the moral error theory, ‘moral nihilism’ is used as a derogatory synonym associated with immorality and selfishness, but such a defamatory usage of the label is...

Meta-learning offers a promising framework to make sense of some parts of decision-making that have eluded satisfactory explanation. Here, we connect this research to work in animal behaviour and cognition in order to shed light on how and whether meta-learning could help us to understand the evolution of cognition.

The axiom of transitivity has been challenged in economic theorizing for over seventy years. Yet, there does not seem to be any movement in economics towards removing classical rational choice models from introductory microeconomics books. The concept of rationality has similarly been employed in the cognitive sciences and biology, and yet, transit...

In their target article, John et al. make a convincing case that there is a unified phenomenon behind the common finding that measures become worse targets over time. Here, we will apply their framework to the domain of animal welfare science and present a pragmatic solution to reduce its impact that might also be applicable in other domains.

In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, i...

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and expla...

There is a puzzle in reconciling the widespread presence of puritanical norms condemning harmless pleasures with the theory that morality evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation. Here, we draw on the work of several philosophers to support the argument by Fitouchi et al. that these norms evolved to facilitate and scaffold self-control for the s...

Despite the once-common idea that a universal ideography would have numerous advantages, attempts to develop such ideographies have failed. Here, we make use of the biological idea of fitness landscapes to help us understand the nonevolution of such a universal ideographic code as well as how we might reach this potential global fitness peak in the...

This chapter makes the case for (re-)introducing memes into economics. While many scholars have (prematurely) rejected the notion of memes, we argue that by taking memes more seriously, economists could establish links between fragmented approaches and overcome an apparent bias towards mostly intentional and “adaptive” processes of innovation and t...

The study of introspection has, up until now, been predominantly human-centric, with regrettably little attention devoted to the question of whether introspection might exist in non-humans, such as animals and artificial intelligence (AI), and what distinct forms it might take. In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) aim to addr...

Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how "clean meat" can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiot...

This paper aims to articulate an anarchist challenge to a widespread assumption in the rapidly growing philosophical literature on models, modeling-practices, and model-based science. I argue that the various entities and practices called “models” and “modeling-practices” are too heterogeneous, too context-sensitive, and serve too many scientific p...

Interdisciplinary research is becoming more and more popular. Many funding bodies encourage interdisciplinarity, as a criterion that promises scientific progress. Traditionally this has been linked to the idea of integrating or unifying disciplines. Using evolutionary game theory as a case study, Till Grüne-Yanoff (2016) argued that there is no suc...

One of the most urgent challenges arising in bioethics has been the ethical assessment of the use of brain organoids, largely because of the possibility of sentience and the potential that if they can feel, then they might suffer. But while there is a growing literature on the possibility of sentience in brain organoids and why we should take a pre...

With increasing attention given to wild animal welfare and ethics, it has become common to depict animals outside of captivity as existing in a state of predominantly suffering. This assumption is now taken on board by many and frames much of the current discussion; but needs a more critical assessment, both theoretically and empirically. In this p...

In this article, I respond to commentaries by Eva Jablonka, Simona Ginsburg, and David Spurrett on my target article ‘Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness’, in which I have offered the first extended articulation of my pathological complexity thesis as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins and function of consciousness. My reply is s...

Despite the once-common idea that a universal ideography would have numerous advantages, attempts to develop such ideographies have failed. Here, we make use of the biological idea of fitness landscapes to help us understand the non-evolution of such a universal ideographic code as well as how we might reach this potential global fitness peak in th...

The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behav...

In this commentary, we advance Jagiello et al.’s (2022) proposal by zooming in on the possible evolutionary origins of the ‘bifocal stance’ that may have enabled a major transition in human cultural evolution, arguing that the evolution of the bifocal stance was driven by an explosion in cultural complexity arising from cooperative foraging, that l...

I applaud Crump et al. (2022) for improving upon previous guidelines for the assessment of pain in non-human species and the application of their framework towards decapod crustaceans. Rather than constituting a mere intermediate solution between the scientific difficulty of settling questions of animal consciousness and the need for a framework fo...

There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston’s free energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free energy minimiz...

Imagine a world where everyone is healthy, intelligent, long living and happy. Intuitively this seems wonderful albeit unrealistic. However, recent scientific breakthroughs in genetic engineering, namely CRISPR/Cas bring the question into public discourse, how the genetic enhancement of humans should be evaluated morally. In 2001, when preimplantat...

In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the centre of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a ‘cognitive ethology’. In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a,c,b) to show that we can fi...

The goal of this synthetic paper is to break down the dimensions of consciousness, attempt to reverse-engineer their evolutionary function, and make sense of the origins of consciousness by breaking off those dimensions that are more likely to have arisen later. A Darwinian approach will allow us to revise the philosopher’s concept of consciousness...

Benenson et al. provide a compelling case for treating greater investment into self-protection among females as an adaptive strategy. Here, we wish to expand their proposed adaptive explanation by placing it squarely in modern state-based and behavioral life-history theory, drawing on Veit’s pathological complexity framework. This allows us to make...

One of the primary concerns in animal research is to ensure the welfare of laboratory animals. Modern views on animal welfare emphasise the role of animal sentience, i.e. the capacity of animals to experience subjective states such as pleasure or suffering, as a central component of welfare. The increasing official recognition of animal sentience h...

Eliminativism is a position most readily associated with the eliminative materialism of the Churchlands, denying that there are such things as propositional states. This position has created much controversy, despite the fact that intentionality has long been seen as perhaps the core problem for naturalistic philosophy. There is a more radical inte...

Katz (2022) provides arguments drawn from the environmental philosophy literature to criticize the conceptualisation and practice of de-extinction with a focus on the ontological and epistemological issues - the human dimension of de-extinction, using concepts relevant only to us and our understanding of the world. In this commentary we wish to dra...

One of the major challenges to the welfare of animals in agriculture is the conditions of transport and slaughter. Worldwide, over 70 billion animals are slaughtered for agriculture each year, which places this as a particularly significant ethical issue. In this paper we argue that these harms should be paid special attention over other equivalent...

Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case both for externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying, as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative to the extent that they can become self-fulfilling pro...

Climate change (CC) has become a paradigm case for externalities in general and for the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) model by Hardin in particular. This is worrying as we have reasons to suspect that models like ToC are performative, such that they might become self-fulfilling prophecies. In this paper, we aim to enhance a strategy proposed by Matt...

Heintz and Scott-Phillips provide a useful synthesis for constructing a bridge between work by both cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists studying the diversity of human communication. Here, we aim to strengthen their bridge from the side of evolutionary biology, to argue that we can best understand ostensive communication as a scaffold...

Few philosophers have pushed more forcefully in favour of a strongly gradualist, phylogenetic, and ecological approach to consciousness than the Australian philosopher of biology and mind, Peter Godfrey-Smith. Nothing emphasizes this more elegantly than his new 2020 book Metazoa, which forms the ambitious sequel to his critically acclaimed and comm...

Why is it that people simultaneously treat social robots as mere designed artifacts, yet show willingness to interact with them as if they were real agents? Here, we argue that Dennett’s distinction between the intentional stance and the design stance can help us to resolve this puzzle, allowing us to further our understanding of social robots as i...

In order to develop a true biological science of consciousness, we have to remove humans from the center of reference and develop a bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, as Donald Griffin intended with his call for a “cognitive ethology.” In this article, I make use of the pathological complexity thesis (Veit 2022a, b, c) to show that we can...

The goal of this article is to break down the dimensions of consciousness, attempt to reverse engineer their evolutionary function, and make sense of the origins of consciousness by breaking off those dimensions that are more likely to have arisen later. A Darwinian approach will allow us to revise the philosopher’s concept of consciousness away fr...

In order to address why numbers of patients suffering from anxiety and depression are seemingly exploding in WEIRD countries it is sensible to look at the evolution of human fearfulness responses. Here, we draw on Veit’s pathological complexity framework to advance Grossmann’s goal to re-characterize human fearfulness as an adaptive trait.

It is a hotly contested issue whether polygenic scores should play a major role in the social sciences. Here, we defend a methodologically pluralist stance in which sociogenomics should abandon its hype and recognize that it suffers from all the methodological difficulties of the social sciences, yet nevertheless maintain an optimistic stance towar...

I applaud Crump et al. (2022) for improving upon previous guidelines for the assessment of pain in non-human species and the application of their framework towards decapod crustaceans. Rather than constituting a mere intermediate solution between the scientific difficulty of settling questions of animal consciousness and the need for a framework fo...

The goal of this commentary is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.

In a recent article, Rowan et al. (2022) have expressed scepticism about our ability to accurately measure animal feelings. Here, we argue that evolutionary considerations about the functions of feelings might give us more reason for optimism, and outline a method for how this might be achieved.

In order to understand involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu experiences, we argue that it is important to take an evolutionary medicine perspective. Here, we propose that these memory anomalies can be understood as the outcomes of an inevitable design trade-off between type I and type II errors in memory processing.

The objective of this chapter is to offer a feminist lens on new enhancement technologies; to show that such a lens is not only useful, but necessary in order to ensure that the benefits of enhancements are provided to everyone.

There is a puzzle in reconciling the widespread presence of puritanical norms condemning harmless pleasures with the theory that morality evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation. Here, we draw on the work of several philosophers to support the argument by Fitouchi et al. (2022) that these norms evolved to facilitate and scaffold self-control fo...

Like many others, I see Crump et al. (2022) as a milestone for improving upon previous guidelines and for extending their framework to decapod crustaceans. Their proposal would benefit from a firm evolutionary foundation by adding the comparative measurement of life-history complexity as a ninth criterion for attributing sentience to nonhuman anima...

Work on longtermism has thus far primarily focused on the existence and wellbeing of future humans, without corresponding consideration of animal welfare. This omission shall be remedied here, providing reasons for and methods of extending longtermist thinking to all sentient animals. Given the sheer expected number of future animals, as well as th...

Why do we exist? What’s our purpose in life? These are some of the oldest questions in philosophy and also form the heart of Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case for both externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative such that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. F...

Alongside the rapid global advances in neuroscientific research, neuroethics has been one of the fastest growing sub-fields within bioethics. With this rapid expansion, bioethicists struggle to keep up with the continual stream of new ethical challenges raised by the neurosciences including topics such as cognitive enhancement, use of neural organo...

The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) th...

The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming , particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique set of challenges for national governments regarding how to deal with a major international pandemic of almost unprecedented scope. As the pandemic constitutes not only a medical challenge, but a moral one, it is thus not surprising that the topic has received much attention within bioethics. While the ini...

A core challenge for contemporary bioethics is how to address the tension between respecting an individual’s autonomy and promoting their wellbeing when these ideals seem to come into conflict.This tension is often reflected in discussions of the ethical status of guardianship and other surrogate decision-making regimes for individuals with differe...

Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of `circularity' for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties with...

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is frequently criticized as barbaric and inhumane. This stands in stark contrast with the booming popularity of the sport. Before now, what little philosophical work has been written on MMA depicts it as something inherently wrong (as with Dixon) or as something merely permissible (as with articles by Weimer and Kershnar an...

If one had to identify the biggest change within the philosophical tradition in the 21st century, it would certainly be the rapid rise of experimental philosophy to address differences in intuitions about concepts. Yet, it is within the philosophy of medicine that one particular conceptual debate has overshadowed all others: the long-standing dispu...

This essay offers some reflections on Samir Okasha’s new monograph Agents and Goals in Evolution, his style of doing philosophy, and the broader philosophy of nature project of trying to make sense of agency and rationality as natural phenomena.

Since Boorse (1977) published his paper "Health as a theoretical concept" one of the most lively debates within philosophy of medicine has been on the question of whether health and disease are in some sense 'objective' and 'value-free' or 'subjective' and 'value-laden'. Due to the apparent 'failure' of pure naturalist, constructivist, or normativi...

Metaphors abound in both the arts and in science. Due to the traditional division between these enterprises as one concerned with aesthetic values and the other with epistemic values there has unfortunately been very little work on the relation between metaphors in the arts and sciences. In this paper, we aim to remedy this omission by defending a...

In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR ‘eugenics’, rather than the more important question of how we should view them from...

The keeping of captive animals in zoos and aquariums has long been controversial. Many take freedom to be a crucial part of animal welfare and on these grounds criticise all forms of animal captivity as harmful to animal welfare, regardless of their provisions. Here, we analyse what it might mean for freedom to matter to welfare, distinguishing bet...

The keeping of captive animals in zoos and aquariums has long been controversial. Many take freedom to be a crucial part of animal welfare and, on these grounds, criticise all forms of animal captivity as harmful to animal welfare, regardless of their provisions. Here, we analyse what it might mean for freedom to matter to welfare, distinguishing b...

In a recent special issue dedicated to the work of Dani Rodrik, Grüne-Yanoff and Marchionni [(2018). Modeling model selection in model pluralism. Journal of Economic Methodology, 25(3), 265–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350178X.2018.1488572] raise a potentially damning problem for Rodrik's suggestion that progress in economics should be understood...

In a recent special issue dedicated to Dani Rodrik’s (2015) influential monograph Economics Rules, Grüne-Yanoff and Marchionni (2018) raise a potentially damning problem for Rodrik’s suggestion that progress in economics should be understood and measured laterally, by a continuous expansion of new models. They argue that this could lead to an “emba...

This paper addresses what we consider to be the most pressing challenge for the emerging science of consciousness: the measurement problem of consciousness. That is, by what methods can we determine the presence of and properties of consciousness? Most methods are currently developed through evaluation of the presence of consciousness in humans and...

This paper is a response to a recent paper by Bobier and Omelianchuk in which they argue that the critics of Giubilini and Minerva’s defence of infanticide fail to adequately justify a moral difference at birth. They argue that such arguments would lead to an intuitively less plausible position: that late-term abortions are permissible, thus creati...

This chapter makes the case for (re-)introducing memes into economics. While many scholars have (prematurely) rejected the notion of memes, it is argued that by taking memes more seriously, economists could establish links between fragmented approaches and overcome an apparent bias towards mostly intentional and "adaptive" processes of innovation a...

In this essay, we discuss Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul from an interdisciplinary perspective. Constituting perhaps the longest treatise on the evolution of consciousness, Ginsburg and Jablonka unite their expertise in neuroscience and biology to develop a beautifully Darwinian account of the dawning of subj...

In this essay, we discuss Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka's The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul from an interdisciplinary perspective. Constituting perhaps the longest treatise on the evolution of consciousness, Ginsburg and Jablonka unite their expertise in neuroscience and biology to develop a beautifully Darwinian account of the dawning of subj...

Mixed martial arts (MMA) is frequently criticized as barbaric and inhumane. This stands in stark contrast with the booming popularity of the sport. What little has been written depicts MMA as something inherently wrong (Dixon 2015) or at best merely permissible (Weimer 2017; Kershnar and Kelly 2019). Contrary to these foregoing analyses, this chapt...

Metaphors abound in both the arts and in science. Due to the traditional division between these enterprises as one concerned with aesthetic values and the other with epistemic values there has unfortunately been very little work on the relation between metaphors in the arts and sciences. In this paper, we aim to remedy this omission by defending a...

Historically, laws and policies to criminalize drug use or possession were rooted in explicit racism, and they continue to wreak havoc on certain racialized communities. We are a group of bioethicists, drug experts, legal scholars, criminal justice researchers, sociologists, psychologists, and other allied professionals who have come together in su...