The antecedents of consciousness: Evolving the "intelligent" ability to simulate situations and contemplate the consequences of novel courses of action.

Abstract

Offline trial and error is probably the basic way of solving novel problems and, where fancier procedures such as algorithms are used, trial-and-error was probably the main way of evolving them. We need to know how humans evolved such simulation abilities. And it would be nice to know some alternative paths that an extraterrestrial intelligence might have followed. I'm going to give an example of the neural machinery that intelligence might require, a brief description of how it might have evolved, then discuss hominid evolution more generally and speculate about what might happen in the next century as we better understand the machinery underlying our own higher intellectual functions.