Life threatening situations as urgent as defending against a predator precludes the use of slow trial and error strategies. Natural selection has led to the evolution of a behavioral system that has three critical elements. (1) When it is activated it limits the behaviors available to the organism to a set of prewired responses that have proven over phylogeny to be effective at defense. (2) A rapid learning system, called Pavlovian fear conditioning, that has the ability to immediately identify threats and promote prewired defensive behaviors. (3) That learning system has the ability to integrate several informational dimensions to determine threat imminence and this allows the organism to match the most effective defensive behavior to the current situation. The adaptive significance of conscious experiential states is also considered.

危及生命的情况与防御捕食者一样紧急，无法使用缓慢的试错策略。自然选择导致了具有三个关键要素的行为系统的进化。(1) 当它被激活时，它会将生物体可用的行为限制为一组预先设定的反应，这些反应已被系统发育证明可以有效防御。(2) 一种称为巴甫洛夫恐惧调节的快速学习系统，能够立即识别威胁并促进预先设定的防御行为。(3)该学习系统能够整合多个信息维度来确定威胁的紧迫性，这使得有机体能够将最有效的防御行为与当前情况相匹配。还考虑了意识体验状态的适应性意义。