Books

Affective Survival Theory: A Darwinian Framework for Consciousness as Emotionally Guided Adaptation

The origin and function of consciousness remain central challenges in cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. While mechanistic models, such as Integrated Information Theory (Tononi, 2004), and quantum-level approaches, like Orch OR (Hameroff & Penrose, 2014), explore the architecture of conscious processes, they often overlook the evolutionary question: Why did consciousness evolve at all? Affective Survival Theory (AST) offers an answer grounded in Darwinian logic, proposing that consciousness emerged as an adaptation for prioritising survival-relevant behaviour through emotionally felt experience.