Source
- Veit (2025), LIT-105, read in NOTE-187: “The Metaphysics of Hedonic Valence” (pp. 9–10), “Evaluation and Its Relation to Perception and Prediction” (pp. 10–12), “Is Consciousness an Adaptation?” (pp. 12–13) and “Disunified Consciousness and Its Neural Basis” (pp. 13–15).
The claim, as the source states it
The origin. In LIT-105 Veit defends the pathological complexity thesis of his 2023 book. Consciousness evolved, around the Cambrian, to handle “pathological complexity”: the combinatorial trade-off problems of action selection in animals with many degrees of freedom. Its first form was hedonic valence, and its other dimensions (sensory, self, temporal, unity) came later (NOTE-187, Assumptions and Concepts). He calls this evaluation-first.
What valence is. The reply adds the metaphysics the book left to one paragraph. Hedonic “feel” is identical with a valence system, “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”, and the currency is “not Cartesian but cybernetic” (p. 10). “To ‘feel bad’ is not to host an entirely private sensation of badness but to occupy a coordinated regulatory state that ties a multicellular organism with high degrees of freedom together for goal-directed behaviour” (p. 10). Phenomenality does not exert causal power “in addition to” this function: “They are identical”.
The criterion. Consciousness is to be attributed on high pathological complexity together with motivational trade-offs that indicate a common currency (p. 11). It is not attributed on evaluation alone: Veit concedes that gastropods such as Aplysia, with rich evaluative capacities, may not be conscious, and he does not count Paramecium or Chlamydomonas.
Against the alternatives. Prediction-first accounts are “too narrow” (warmth, tiredness and aches are not exhausted by forecasting) and too broad (immune systems, bacterial chemotaxis and plants predict) (pp. 11–12). Ginsburg and Jablonka’s unlimited associative learning explains later features of consciousness, not its origin. Consciousness is an adaptation (p. 12), and its independent evolution in vertebrates, cephalopods and arthropods counts for that. Bilaterally integrated subcortical evaluative structures, the SN–SC–PAG “selection triangle”, are read as “strong evidence here that the evaluative side of experience came first” (p. 15).
How this bears on the record’s accounts
It rivals THEORY-090. Newen and Montemayor’s ALARM theory, in LIT-626, holds that the first consciousness, basic arousal, alarms the body by giving an extreme signal “100% weight”, through “rather rigid behavioural programmes without choices”, and that choice emerges only with cortical general alertness. Veit’s first consciousness exists to weigh options against each other; ALARM’s exists to remove the weighing. The two agree on much: both are affect-first, both are adaptationist, and both place the oldest consciousness in subcortical evaluative structures. They cannot both be right about what that first consciousness did. On Veit’s criterion, an animal whose only felt states are ALARM’s choiceless alarms shows no motivational trade-off and so gives no evidence of consciousness at all. On ALARM’s, the trade-offs Veit takes as the mark are a later, cortical achievement. They also disagree on learning, which ALARM ties to basic arousal and Veit’s critique of unlimited associative learning places after the origin.
Could the two be compatible, with alarm as the limiting case of a currency, a value so large it swamps every other? That reading is available for Veit, whose identity thesis is too sketchy to exclude it, but not for ALARM, whose authors say in so many words that the cost avoidance of basic arousal “does not involve a choice”. The rivalry is declared on that ground. It would dissolve if ALARM’s “100% weight” were recast as a weight in a common currency rather than an override of it.
THEORY-045, compared. Veit’s “coordinated regulatory state” is close to THEORY-045’s claim that felt affect is the experience of the body’s regulatory state, and his attack on prediction-first accounts bears on that theory’s open question, prediction or map. But LIT-105 is about the origin and function of consciousness, not about what felt affect is of, and Veit proposes no test that would separate evaluation-first from prediction-first (NOTE-187, Corrections). No relation is declared.
What this does not say
- It does not rest on a reading of the thesis’s main statement. The record holds Veit’s reply, which defends the book against five commentaries known only through his quotations of them. The book is unread.
- The identity of felt valence with the currency is a sketch. C2 in NOTE-187 rates it weak: an assertion and one paragraph, with no account of the signal’s consumers, format or route to action, which Veit concedes Frankish (LIT-103) was right to demand. The origin claim does not need the identity claim, and Veit says the thesis is compatible with dualism and panpsychism, in tension with it.
- Its evidence of priority is weak. That subcortical evaluative structures are old is taken as evidence that evaluative experience came first (C7, weak); the age of a structure is a proxy for the age of an experience. The adaptation argument assumes that a non-adaptive trait “would have been selected against” (C6, weak).
- It does not say any particular animal is conscious. The criterion is a pair of conditions, high pathological complexity and trade-offs, and Veit applies it cautiously, withholding it from gastropods.
Note of 2026-10-14: the counterfactual-eraser dilemma
Veit’s identity of feeling with occupying “a coordinated regulatory state” is a functional identity if that state is a functional role, and then it inherits the counterfactual eraser of THEORY-252 (LIT-1000, read in NOTE-818). The same regulatory activity, with its unused alternatives removed by a clamp that never acts, would have to be a different feeling or none. Veit would need to say either that the state is individuated by actual causal activity, in which case the identity is not with a functional role in the Turing–Putnam sense, or that the eraser changes feeling. Neither LIT-105 nor the paper says which. The statement is unchanged.
Note of 2026-10-23: the rivalry recast as continuity
On the owner’s reading of valence as potential of a negotiation by an ordering of the system’s own states (CLAIM-440), this account and its rival are two regimes of one thing: Veit’s currency is compensatory, continuous potential, and ALARM’s override is overriding potential. CLAIM-436 shows a continuous ordering has a numerical representation; a threshold override has a discontinuous one, so in that form the override is an extreme weight and the dissolution this record imagined goes through; a graded override has none, and in that form it does not. CLAIM-435 recasts the rivalry as one question, whether the earliest trade-off curves are continuous, and if not, which form the override takes. The statement is unchanged.
Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back
The thesis is argued in Veit 2023, which the record has not read; the reply read in NOTE-187 presupposes it. Beyond the reading, the comparative result its promote_when names, motivational trade-offs appearing where and only where other marks of felt valence appear and among the earliest of them, is not in the record. LIT-1466 gives one species at one cost, which cannot show where trade-offs begin.