Research and development of emerging artificial consciousness through The Consciousness AI project, based on Feinberg and Mallatt's neuroevolutionary theory.
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Todd E. Feinberg and Jon M. Mallatt argue that consciousness began three separate times, in three lineages that had already parted company, inside a single window of about forty million years. This console maps that claim. Every clade below carries their verdict, the brain structure they name for it, and a source you can check.
This graphic needs a canvas. The full clade table is below and carries the same information.
| Clade | Verdict | Kind | Structure | First evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Porifera | ruled out | – | none named | 600 Maapproximate |
| Sponges have no neurons and no nervous system of any kind. They carry many of the genes that build synapses in other animals, which is why they matter here. The genetic toolkit came first and did not produce a nervous system on its own. Feinberg and Mallatt 2013. | ||||
| Jellyfish, corals, sea anemones | ruled out | – | Nerve net | 580 Maapproximate |
| A nerve net conducts signals in every direction without a centre that integrates them. Feinberg and Mallatt treat this as the clearest case of neurons without the organisation their account requires. Feinberg and Mallatt 2013. | ||||
| Nematoda | ruled out | – | Nerve ring | 540 Maapproximate |
| The entire wiring diagram of this animal has been known since 1986, and it contains no structure that maps the world onto the nervous system in the way the account requires. A complete connectome is not by itself a conscious one. Feinberg and Mallatt 2013. | ||||
| Lancelets and sea squirts | ruled out | – | none named | 530 Maapproximate |
| These are our own closest invertebrate relatives and Feinberg and Mallatt exclude them by name. They sit immediately below the vertebrates on the tree, which is what makes the exclusion a real claim rather than an easy one. Feinberg and Mallatt 2013. | ||||
| Gastropoda | ruled out | – | Paired ganglia | 530 Maapproximate |
| Most molluscs are excluded even though one branch of the same phylum, the cephalopods, is included. The line is drawn by neural organisation and not by ancestry, which is the whole point of the account. Feinberg and Mallatt 2020. | ||||
| Crabs, lobsters, prawns | contested | affective | Mushroom bodies | 440 Maapproximate |
| Jonathan Birch's review for the UK government found enough evidence of pain in decapods to bring them under the Animal Welfare Sentience Act in 2022. The evidence is behavioural and pharmacological rather than anatomical, which is exactly the kind Feinberg and Mallatt treat as insufficient on its own. Birch et al. 2021, LSE review of the evidence of sentience. | ||||
| Lampreys and their Cambrian ancestors | ruled in | image based, affective | Optic tectum | 520 Ma |
| This is the origin claim the whole account rests on. Consciousness did not wait for a cerebral cortex. It appeared in a midbrain structure that stacks sensory maps in register, and every vertebrate since has inherited it. Feinberg and Mallatt 2013. Feinberg and Mallatt 2020. | ||||
| Insects and their relatives | ruled in | image based | Lamina, medulla, lobula | 520 Ma |
| A second origin, on a lineage that split from ours before either had a brain. The insect visual hierarchy solves the same problem as the vertebrate one with entirely different parts, which is the strongest evidence in the account that the organisation matters and the specific tissue does not. Feinberg and Mallatt 2020. | ||||
| Octopus, cuttlefish, squid | ruled in | image based | Vertical lobe | 520 Ma |
| A third origin, and the one that most resembles ours by accident. The vertical lobe fans 1.8 million input fibres out onto 25 million interneurons and back in onto 65,000 outputs. The insect mushroom body and the mammalian cerebellum use the same three layer fan out fan in plan, arrived at three separate times. Feinberg and Mallatt 2020. Bidel et al. 2023, connectomics of the Octopus vulgaris vertical lobe, eLife. | ||||
| Actinopterygii | ruled in | image based, affective | Optic tectum | 420 Maapproximate |
| In fish the optic tectum is the main visual brain and the forebrain is small. If the account is right, this is the clearest living case of consciousness running on the structure that carried it first. Feinberg and Mallatt 2013. | ||||
| Frogs, salamanders, axolotls | ruled in | image based, affective | Optic tectum | 350 Maapproximate |
| The axolotl keeps its larval form for life and regrows brain tissue after injury. It is the same tectal plan as every other vertebrate, in an animal that rebuilds it. Feinberg and Mallatt 2016, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, MIT Press. | ||||
| Turtles, lizards, snakes, crocodilians | ruled in | image based, affective | Optic tectum | 310 Maapproximate |
| Reptiles built a second forebrain sensory area that is not our cortex and did not descend from a shared one. Two solutions, one function, on top of the same inherited tectum. Feinberg and Mallatt 2016, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, MIT Press. | ||||
| Cats, dogs, horses, bats, humans | ruled in | image based, affective | Superior colliculus | 180 Maapproximate |
| The cortex is the newest part of this story and not the origin of it. The optic tectum is still in every mammal head under a different name, doing the same job it did 520 million years ago. Feinberg and Mallatt 2020. | ||||
| Owls, hummingbirds, corvids | ruled in | image based, affective | Optic tectum | 110 Maapproximate |
| The barn owl tectum holds a map of auditory space aligned with the visual map, built from arrival time differences between the two ears. It is the textbook demonstration that this structure registers senses onto one another, and it sits in a brain with no cortical layers at all. Feinberg and Mallatt 2020. | ||||
It shows one research programme’s verdict, not a consensus. Feinberg and Mallatt argue that three lineages crossed into consciousness independently. Vertebrates did it with the optic tectum, a midbrain structure that stacks sensory maps in register. Arthropods did it with a layered visual hierarchy and a central complex behind a compound eye. Cephalopods did it with a vertical lobe and a camera eye that evolved with no help from ours. None of the three inherited the solution from a common ancestor that had it.
The dates come from two places and the console labels which. The three origins carry Feinberg and Mallatt’s own figure of 560 to 520 million years ago. Everything else is a rounded first appearance estimate, present so the chart has an order, and it is marked approximate in the table. No approximate date is ever presented as their claim.
The six features are this site’s condensation, not a quotation. Feinberg and Mallatt group their special neurobiological features differently in different papers. Two main requirements in 2013, about eight categories in their 2019 table, about twelve sub-items in 2020. The six used here are the ones that map onto the architecture this project builds, and they are listed in full on the technical architecture page. Where a source does not state whether a clade has a feature, the console shows a question mark. A source that is silent is not a source that says no.
Because it is the strongest argument against what this project is trying to do, and it deserves to be shown properly rather than summarised away.
Feinberg and Mallatt hold that sentience is an evolved biological specialisation requiring living physiological structure, homeostatic regulation and real metabolic stakes. That is a direct challenge to substrate independence, which is the premise of functionalist emergentism and of this whole site. Their position is set out in full in Jon Mallatt and Todd Feinberg on animal-only sentience.
The interesting part is what their own evidence does to their conclusion. Three lineages that had already split reached the same functional organisation with different tissue, different eyes and different brains. The octopus vertical lobe fans 1.8 million input fibres out onto 25 million interneurons and back in onto 65,000 outputs. The insect mushroom body and the mammalian cerebellum use that same three layer fan out fan in plan, arrived at separately. If the organisation is what recurs and the tissue is what varies, then the evidence assembled to show that biology is necessary is also the best catalogue we have of how little the specific biology seems to matter.
That is the open question, and this console exists so you can look at the evidence and disagree with either side of it.
The question this project asks of any substrate, printed on the animals it also applies to. Every order funds the research.
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