Consciousness and Selfhood

What is it like to be a human? It is about having experiences, and having those experiences be like something for me.

Dan Zahavi, of the University of Copenhagen, has written this:

Consciousness and (minimal) selfhood.

It has been posted on the web, and will soon see hardcover existence in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness.

Zahavi revisits a by now familiar thought experiment in philosophy, asking himself what it is like to be a bat?

He stipulates that to be a bat is for phenomena to have a "what is it like FOR ME" aspect to the bat as a "me."

The bat never experiences a blue sky. Does the bat experience the dampness of the cave? It he aware of the relative dryness of certain corners of his cave versus the extra dampness of others? And is that a for-me experience for a bat to have? What about anguish?

My guess: a bat probably does have a subjective sense of relative dryness. Probably not an experience of anguish. The former would seem to give an edge in terms of natural selecvtion the latter would not.

But this leaves us with the question of when in the human evolutionary record (if ever) the sense of anguish suddenly started to bestow some sort of advantage. If it didn't and still doesn't, then anguish can come about without being advantageous., Which sends us back, perhaps, to the bat,

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