Metazoa. The Birth of Mind in the Animal World

As soon as a scuba diver immerses in the sea, he encounters forms of life that seem extraordinarily alien: here are sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulids, whose bizarre bodies, intricate structure, and flower-like appendages resemble plants or even architectural... forms more than anything animal. And yet, all these beings are our relatives. As equal representatives of the animal kingdom—metazoa—they can tell us a lot about the evolutionary origin not only of the human body but also of its consciousness. By trying to immerse ourselves in their experience and understand what it is like to perceive the world and interact with it as other living beings do, Peter Godfrey-Smith shows that the characteristic animal body, which emerged more than half a billion years ago, became the very innovation that directed life along a fundamentally different path. Tracing the emergence of sponges, corals, shrimp, octopuses, and fish through natural selection, and then moving on to land, into the world of insects, birds, and primates, "Metazoa" overcomes the divide between mind and matter, bringing us closer to resolving one of the deepest philosophical problems—the problem of consciousness. By trying to immerse ourselves in their experience and understand what it is like to perceive the world and interact with it as other living beings do, Peter Godfrey-Smith shows that the characteristic animal body, which emerged more than half a billion years ago, became the very innovation that directed life along a fundamentally different path. Tracing the emergence of sponges, corals, shrimp, octopuses, and fish through natural selection, and then moving on to land, into the world of insects, birds, and primates, "Metazoa" overcomes the divide between mind and matter, bringing us closer to resolving one of the deepest philosophical problems—the problem of consciousness.