A recent Debrief article (below) on consciousness, did not come as a surprise to me. This topic is finally heading in the right direction: probably everything is conscious. Hence, life, nature, and the universe. Perhaps, even Energy & Matter are conscious. This 2024 quote may explain my reasoning:
Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems—Simple Cells Can Do It. Tiny clumps of cells show basic cognitive abilities, and some animals can remember things after losing their head
Source: title + subtitle of a 2024 Scientific American article
My thoughts on consciousness are still evolving. Please see my 2023 and 2025 diagrams below:
Essentially, nobody knows what consciousness is (eg, NOEMA magazine).
“The total number of minds in the universe is one,” Schrödinger wrote in his essay “Mind and Matter.” “In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings … consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental.”
A 2024 quote from NOEMA magazine article: Who Knows What Consciousness Is?
A similar quote:
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
A quote by Max Planck (1858-1947), a German theoretical physicist and winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics
In my view, consciousness = Light.
Or, in the words of a Medium-2025 article: Light is consciousness.
The Debrief: Scientists say consciousness is far older – and more widespread – than we ever realized
Author: Tim McMillan
Date: 26 November 2025
“For decades, scientists assumed that consciousness—the subjective feeling of being aware—was the crowning achievement of the human brain. Other animals, such as birds, lacking a cerebral cortex, were thought to operate on instinct rather than introspection.
Yet, in a pair of new studies published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, researchers at Ruhr University Bochum argue that consciousness is older than we once believed and also far more widespread across the animal kingdom.
Together, the papers argue that consciousness evolved for specific survival functions and that, despite their drastically different brain architecture, birds show measurable signs of sensory awareness and even rudimentary self-perception.
“Consciousness is not the ultimate triumph of human evolution,” the researchers write, “but rather represents a more basic cognitive process, possibly shared with other animal phyla.”
A New Framework for the Consciousness Problem
One of the enduring mysteries of modern neuroscience is not simply how consciousness arises, but why it evolved at all.
If natural selection shapes traits that help organisms survive, what advantage does subjective experience provide? And why did humans and some other living species develop these capacities when others—like oak trees—did not?
That is the central question explored by philosophers Dr. Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor in a study, which introduces a refined version of the “ALARM theory” of consciousness.
They argue that consciousness did not spring into existence fully formed. Instead, it unfolded across evolutionary time in three functional stages—basic arousal, general alertness, and reflexive consciousness—each with a distinct survival role.
Dr. Newen and Montemayor begin their paper with a blunt observation about how theories of consciousness have overlooked evolution from the start. “The evolution of consciousness is a neglected topic that plays a surprisingly insignificant role in all major theories of consciousness,” the researchers write.
Major frameworks such as the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) attempt to explain the mechanics of consciousness but rarely address why it emerged in the first place.
According to Dr. Newen and Montemayor, the earliest form—basic arousal—is essentially an internal emergency alarm system. As they put it, “Basic arousal has the function to alarm the body and secure survival by intervening in the slow updating of homeostatic processes.”
Pain, fear, hunger, and other so-called “primordial emotions” belong here. This is the level at which an organism learns not simply to react to a threat, but to avoid it in the future.
The second stage, general alertness, allows organisms to focus attention on specific features of their environment—fire, food, predators—and learn correlations that shape behavior.
“The most important improvement is that it involves selective and goal-directed attention such that the biological agent can now select and focus much more on aspects of a situation, e.g., in a standard situation, a biological agent often has auditory and visual inputs, sometimes also further sensory inputs,” the researchers explain. “This enables the agent to learn much more specific regularities about the environment.”
Finally, some species—including humans, magpies, dolphins, and possibly other birds—develop reflexive consciousness, the capacity to reflect on one’s own experiences. This is the stage of consciousness that allows for long-term planning, self-evaluation, and social coordination.
“Reflexive consciousness is consciousness involving metacognition about oneself or another person as an agent, while the content of the metacognition is a cluster of the agent’s states and processes, especially its mental states involving emotions, desires, beliefs, etc.,” Dr. Newen and Montemayor argue.
In this framework, consciousness is not mysterious—it’s practical. It is a tool evolution built for survival, learning, and integration into the social world.
Birds as a Test Case in Evolution’s Reuse of Ideas
If consciousness is tied to survival and learning, then evolution should be able to produce it through multiple anatomical routes—not only through the mammalian cortex. That’s where a companion study by cognitive neuroscientists Dr. Gianmarco Maldarelli and Dr. Onur Güntürkün comes into play.
Dr. Maldarelli and Dr. Güntürkün turned to birds—whose evolutionary lineage split from that of mammals more than 300 million years ago—to test whether consciousness requires a mammalian-style cortex at all. By probing their perceptual abilities and social behaviors, the team sought to determine whether avian species exhibit genuine signs of sensory awareness or even self-recognition.
Their findings point in one direction. As the authors write, “There is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) they also have the neural architecture that may be necessary for this.”
Unlike humans, birds lack a layered neocortex. Instead, they use an area called the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), a highly connected brain region that appears to perform functions similar to our prefrontal cortex. In recent experiments, the NCL has displayed neural activity linked to subjective perception.
In their review, the researchers highlight two landmark experiments on crows that together offer some of the strongest evidence yet for avian subjective perception.
In both studies, crows performed a delayed stimulus-detection task in which faint or near-threshold visual cues were sometimes presented and sometimes omitted. When the signals were ambiguous, the birds only reported “seeing” them about half the time—exactly what researchers expect when probing subjective perception.
What makes these experiments so significant is what happened in the brain. In both cases, neural activity in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) tracked the crows’ subjective reports rather than the physical stimulus itself. When a crow claimed to perceive a stimulus, NCL neurons fired even if nothing had actually been shown. And when the crow reported “not seen,” those neurons stayed silent, even when the stimulus had been physically present.
These findings suggest that sensory consciousness—the “feeling” of seeing—is present in birds.
Clues of Consciousness in Feathers
If sensory consciousness exists in birds, what about self-awareness?
Traditional mirror self-recognition tests have long been the gold standard for detecting self-consciousness in animals. Only a few species pass outright: chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, and—controversially—magpies. Many birds fail the final test, but not for lack of ability. Instead, the researchers argue, the test may simply not be suited to their ecological context.
More ecologically relevant experiments are revealing something new. Chickens, for example, do not peck at a mark on their body, but they do appear to differentiate between their reflection and another bird during predator-threat tests.
“Pigeons and chickens do not treat their image as a typical conspecific… they show strong signs of knowing that their mirror image is not another individual of their species,” researchers write.
In other words, self-awareness in birds may exist, but it may manifest differently—and may require the right context to activate.
Consciousness Without a Cortex?
Perhaps the most striking implication from both studies is that consciousness does not require a layered cortex at all. If birds possess subjective sensory experience, task-relevant awareness, and ecology-dependent forms of self-recognition, then consciousness may be more flexible—and more ancient—than previously assumed.
Both studies suggest that the roots of consciousness run deeper in vertebrate evolution than neuroscientists once thought.
If true, the debate is no longer whether birds are conscious, but what forms of consciousness evolution can produce using radically different neural blueprints.
Their findings echo the ALARM theory’s evolutionary framing, which holds that consciousness did not evolve once and for all. It emerged in layers—alarm, attention, and self-reflection—each carrying its own survival function.
Ultimately, the fact that birds exhibit early versions of these layers suggests that consciousness may not be the fragile exception of human evolution, but one of nature’s most enduring inventions.
“Consciousness should not be deemed as an ‘all-or-nothing’ cognitive function but rather as a graded and multi-dimensional process,” Dr. Maldarelli and Dr. Güntürkün write. “The presented results add to the growing body of evidence that consciousness may be present in many parts of the animal kingdom, across species that are phylogenetically distant from each other and have remarkably different brain structures.” “
Note by The Debrief:
“Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com “
Source:
- The Debrief, 26 November 2025: Scientists say consciousness is far older – and more widespread – than we ever realized
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