Exploring Animal Consciousness and the Evolution of Minds

You exist in a truly secret place nobody but you can enter: Your mind. When we say mind we mean the place where you, whatever you are, exist. It's the totality of your inner world, the location of your consciousness and memories, the toolset of your intelligence. It's the place where all of your wants, thoughts and emotions happen, where you think, learn, dream and imagine things - consciously and unconsciously.

Your mind is truly your own, a universe only directly accessible and inhabited by you - and inaccessible to anyone else in the universe. And your mind is probably unique to you. Probably, because how would we know if two minds are the same? What do you see when you imagine an apple? A detailed scenery, a crisp image with clear details and colour? Is the apple hanging in a void? Can you rotate it? Is it a 2D shape? Is it colorless or transparent or very vague? Or don't you see anything at all but feel what an apple feels like to you?

Maybe a weird mix? Do you have an internal voice that narrates your life? Do you have an inner monologue? Is there silence inside your mind? Do you only hear voices when you read? Or do you process thoughts nonverbally or even just feel the world around you? It is a bit stunning how many variations of inner universes humans have and how different our minds must be. Humans have arguably the most complex minds on earth but today it is widely accepted that minds are not exclusive to us.

There are trillions of animal minds out in the world, uncountable little secret universes, forever locked to us. And by looking at them and their evolution we may be able to learn why our minds are as stunning as they are today. A pretty wild idea is that minds might have originally evolved to control your movements. To create a gap between all of your sensory input, and your motor output, how you react to information by moving your body. A Tool To Deal with the World When life emerged it was without any minds but just cells, able to eat, poop and reproduce.

They already had to navigate a complex and dangerous world and to process sensory input - but they were extremely inflexible. If a cell had the inner state "hungry" and sensed "food" it automatically moved in that direction - or it flapped around randomly until it ran into a meal by accident. This worked well enough for billions of years and still does. But as life exploded in complexity and became multicellular, cells began to dedicate themselves to processing information. The first very simple "minds" emerged: little more than tiny gaps.

Virtual spaces in which sensory information could be processed for a short moment before these early animals had to react. Roundworms only have 302 neurons in total, yet they are already able to learn things like "this thing is bad" and retain a memory that changes behavior for a few hours before they forget again. Minds on this level most likely don't reason or think, but use simple rules that work well in their environments. Scientists still debate whether this counts as mind or are still just preprogrammed automated reflexes.

With more neurons, animals can "freeze" before they act. Process and interpret information and make decisions for what is the best option at that moment. This is arguably where a true inner space, a mind begins to emerge. And some insects may have something like it, like our buddy the bee. With a brain smaller than a sesame seed and about one million neurons, a bee has a much larger mind gap. And it is filled with information about the world. It builds and remembers a huge mental map of flowers over square kilometers of terrain, cross referencing it with the position of the sun to find its way.

Bees can take shortcuts, so they can't be simply following reflexes but are actually navigating their internal maps. In extreme cases when resources are scarce, bees can move up to 10km from their hives to collect food - the equivalent of going from Paris to Rome for groceries. And they teach the location of the food by dancing. Minds have emerged a few times in evolutionary history and evolved in different directions, so while we are telling this story by increasing complexity, in reality minds are

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Mind complexity probably increases dramatically as we add more neurons, like the octopus that has about 500 million of them. Only 40% of their neurons are in their central brain, while each of their arms has their own mini nerve centers that taste, process information locally at the same time and act on their own. The central brain does still coordinate them for complex behavior, like catching prey, because imagine 8 arms doing their own thing all the time. But different arms are specialized and used primarily for different tasks, like exploring or movement.

And we know their arms can make decisions independently to some degree and have some autonomy. Octopuses are very intelligent animals, able to do loads of complex things, so their minds should be somewhat complex. But how does their mind experience things? Is it distributed over their whole body? Does an Octopus feel like multiple smaller minds interacting as one thing? If octopuses show how strange minds can be, birds show how sophisticated they can become if it develops in a different direction. Some bird species with billions of neurons probably have surprisingly sophisticated minds, where they can go one step further: While minds may have started as a gap to delay action, bird minds are able to simulate a map of reality, including other players.

Scrub Jays are hoarders that catch and hide all sorts of food in different places, from worms to nuts. Inside their mind they keep track of time and are aware that fresh food goes bad. So after a few days have passed they will ignore the hiding places of dead worms and instead go for the nuts that are still good. Probably more impressive, they might be able to simulate the minds of other birds - If a scrub jay is hiding food and notices another jay watching, they will return later and re-hide their stash so it doesn't get stolen. Which is a perfect transition to what makes the minds of humans so special: While we are probably not the only animals that can simulate other minds inside our

mind - humans with our 86 billion neurons have taken it to extraordinary depths. The Internal Universe When humans are born they are cute but selfish blobs of meat, solely focused on their own needs. But around 18-24 months a baby becomes able to recognise itself in a mirror. It realizes that something that seems to be "other" is actually itself - which is usually a delightful experience for the human larvae. But it is also the first step of a powerful realization: You are not just an observer in the world - there are also others that can observe you.

You see and you are seen. And if you are seen… well then you can't just behave egoistically all the time - because you need the goodwill of others to stay alive. We humans are not just simulating other minds in our minds. We simulate minds, simulating minds. We think about what others think. We think about what they think about us thinking about what they think. And so on. There are a lot of layers. This awareness of the minds of others may be one of the origins of our moral conscience and a huge

reason why we are able to live in large societies, with other humans we are not related to. And may have spawned one of our most charming obsessions: storytelling. We don't just remember that an event happened, we imagine what the people that were part of it were thinking, what we think they should have been thinking, what might have happened if they acted and thought differently. Combined with our ability to create fictional universes to plan ahead we have created countless fictional worlds, with people that don't exist but that we deeply relate to. That are real to us.

Every movie, novel or comic is humans sharing their internal simulations with each other. Whether you see a photorealistic apple in your mind or feel the concept of an apple, in the storytelling space we are all able to come together and understand each other. This is how we transport information about morality and our values, about what we think is good or bad. So maybe the most amazing thing about human minds is that they're fundamentally social - filled with voices, ideas, and perspectives from countless others. Your thoughts and feelings have been shaped by stories that never happened but that you've absorbed and simulated in your mind in a way that is unique to you. In a very real sense, your secret mind isn't just yours,

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