 Given this complexity in the operations of our organs of inner sense, there should be some plausible story to tell about the evolutionary pressures that led to their construction (Pinker 1994, 1997). But there would seem to be no such stories on the market. The most plausible suggestion is that inner-sense might have evolved to subserve our capacity to think about the mental states of conspecifics, thus enabling us to predict their actions and manipulate their responses. (This is the so-called ‘Machiavellian hypothesis’ to explain the evolution of intelligence in the great-ape lineage. See Byrne and Whiten 1988, 1998; and see Goldman 2006, for a view of inner sense of this sort.) But this suggestion presupposes that the organism must already have some capacity for higher-order thought, since it is such thoughts that inner sense is supposed to subserve. And yet as we shall see shortly (in section 5), some higher-order theories can claim all of the advantages of inner-sense theory as an explanation of phenomenal consciousness, but without the need to postulate any ‘inner scanners’. 