ArticleNeuroscience of consciousness2021
A possible evolutionary function of phenomenal conscious experience of pain.
Article in Neuroscience of consciousness, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- On the topical issue of assisted dying: the insurmountable challenges of human existence, and the right to exit.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- The value of consciousness: experiences worth having.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The Consciousness of Pain: A Thalamocortical Perspective.NeuroSci · 2022Article
- Consciousness in active inference: Deep self-models, other minds, and the challenge of psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2021Review
- The Conscious Nematode: Exploring Hallmarks of Minimal Phenomenal Consciousness inInternational journal of psychological researchArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evolutionary accounts of feelings, and in particular of negative affect and of pain, assume that creatures that feel and care about the outcomes of their behavior outperform those that do not in terms of their evolutionary fitness. Such accounts, however, can only work if feelings can be shown to contribute to fitness-influencing outcomes. Simply assuming that a learner that feels and cares about outcomes is more strongly motivated than one that does is not enough, if only because motivation can be tied directly to outcomes by incorporating an appropriate reward function, without leaving any apparent role to feelings (as it is done in state-of-the-art engineered systems based on reinforcement learning). Here, we propose a possible mechanism whereby pain contributes to fitness: an actor-critic functional architecture for reinforcement learning, in which pain reflects the costs imposed on actors in their bidding for control, so as to promote honest signaling and ultimately help the system optimize learning and future behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.