New research examines why consciousness evolved by comparing humans with birds.
What evolutionary purpose does consciousness serve, and what insights can birds offer about its origins? These questions are at the heart of two new studies from researchers at Ruhr University Bochum.
Over the past twenty years, interest in the science of consciousness has grown rapidly, yet a key issue remains unresolved: What is consciousness actually for? Why did it appear in the first place? Finding answers is essential for understanding why certain species (such as our own) developed conscious awareness, while others (such as oak trees) did not. Research on bird brains adds another important perspective, showing that evolution can produce similar functional outcomes for consciousness even when the underlying brain structures differ. The teams led by Professors Albert Newen and Onur Güntürkün at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany recently published their findings in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Purposes of pleasure and pain?
Our conscious experience shapes every part of our lives through moments of enjoyment as well as discomfort. We might notice the warmth of sunlight on our skin or listen to birdsong and feel a sense of ease.
At other times, we become aware of pain, such as a knee that aches after a fall, or we struggle with persistent feelings of pessimism. This raises a fundamental question: why would living beings evolve a capacity that includes both pleasurable sensations and experiences that can be deeply unpleasant or even overwhelming?
Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor describe consciousness as consisting of three forms, each serving a distinct purpose: 1. basic arousal, 2. general alertness, and 3. reflexive (self-)consciousness.
Stage One: Basic Arousal
“Evolutionarily, basic arousal developed first, with the base function of putting the body in a state of ALARM in life-threatening situations so that the organism can stay alive,” explains Newen. “Pain is an extremely efficient means for perceiving damage to the body and to indicate the associated threat to its continued life. This often triggers a survival response, such as fleeing or freezing.”
Stage Two: General Alertness
A second step in evolution is the development of general alertness. This allows us to focus on one item in a simultaneous flow of different information. When we see smoke while someone is speaking to us, we can only focus on the smoke and search for its source.
“This makes it possible to learn about new correlations: first the simple, causal correlation that smoke comes from fire and shows where a fire is located. But targeted alertness also lets us identify complex, scientific correlations,” says Carlos Montemayor.
Stage Three: Reflexive (Self-)Consciousness
Humans and some animals then develop a reflexive (self-)consciousness. In its complex form, it means that we are able to reflect on ourselves as well as our past and future. We can form an image of ourselves and incorporate it into our actions and plans.
“Reflexive consciousness, in its simple forms, developed parallel to the two basic forms of consciousness,” explains Newen. “In such cases, conscious experience focuses not on perceiving the environment, but rather on the conscious registration of aspects of oneself.”
This includes the state of one’s own body, as well as one’s perception, sensations, thoughts, and actions. To use one simple example, recognizing oneself in the mirror is a form of reflexive consciousness. Children develop this skill at 18 months, and some animals have been shown to do this as well, such as chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies. Reflexive conscious experiences – as its core function – makes it possible for us to better integrate into society and coordinate with others.
What Birds Perceive
Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün show in their article that birds may possess fundamental forms of conscious perception. The researchers highlight three central areas in which birds show remarkable parallels to conscious experience in mammals: sensory consciousness, neurobiological foundations, and accounts of self-consciousness.
Firstly, studies of sensory consciousness indicate that birds not only automatically process stimuli, but subjectively experience them. When pigeons are presented with ambiguous visual stimuli, they shift between various interpretations, similar to humans. Crows have also been shown to possess nerve signals that do not reflect the physical presence of a stimulus, but rather the animal’s subjective perception. When a crow sometimes consciously perceives a stimulus and does not at other times, certain nerve cells react precisely according to this internal experience.
Secondly, birds’ brains contain functional structures that meet the theoretical requirements of conscious processing, despite their different brain structure. “The avian equivalent to the prefrontal cortex, the NCL, is immensely connected and allows the brain to integrate and flexibly process information,” says Güntürkün. “The connectome of the avian forebrain, which presents the entirety of the flows of information between the regions of the brain, shares many similarities with mammals. Birds thus meet many criteria of established theories of consciousness, such as the Global Neuronal Workspace theory.”
Thirdly, more recent experiments show that birds may have different types of self-perception. Even though some species of corvids pass the traditional mirror test, other ecologically significant versions of the tests have shown further types of self-consciousness in other bird species. “Experiments indicate that pigeons and chickens differentiate between their reflection in a mirror and a real fellow member of their species, and react to these according to context. This is a sign of situational, basic self-consciousness,” says Güntürkün.
The findings suggest that consciousness is an older and more widespread evolutionary phenomenon than had previously been assumed. Birds demonstrate that conscious processing is also possible without a cerebral cortex and that different brain structures can achieve similar functional solutions.
References: “Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness” by Albert Newen and Carlos Montemayor, 12 November 2025, Philosophical Transactions B.
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0314
“Conscious birds” by Gianmarco Maldarelli and Onur Güntürkün, 12 November 2025, Philosophical Transactions B.
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0308
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62 Comments
Such nonsense, go study what the hindu sages revealed thousands of years ago. This is pathetic.
Agreed 100%. They can’t define life let alone conscioussness. Yet they believe they can conceptualize anything and everything and the nonconceptual doesn’t exist.
He needs some Eckhart Tolle or Sadhguru.
Im wonder what is the evolutionary purpose when I sense a need to scratch my behind?
They define consciousness, but what has life to do with that? In biology life is defined as a population genetic process among populations of organisms.
Nope. Not true. This is absolute BS. Total bull. And the next time they tell you something is 450 million years old say “Prove it”
😶😶😶
Life is not biology. Biology is a machine. You are not a machine with life, you are the life that is anchored in the physical realm to your machine.
Plant, animal or planet no matter.
Also, there are many, many, many machines, like blades of grass each are their own biological machine.
But there is only one life and one conscioussness.
What is nonsense here? While I’m Hindu, I’m ashamed to admit that I do not know what the Hindu sages have said about this. Can you kindly illuminate me with couple of academic points?
Complete nonsense indeed.
Why do we listen to these self important morons.
Interesting
I can’t help but agree with most people here. This article isn’t profound, or even somewhat explanatory of consciousness or its purpose. Some information about consciousness is provided, the article meanders from one bit of onformation to another. Next thing you know, the article is over. Nothing was revealed.
Yes, why DO you listen to yourself? 🤔🥱🤡
It is indeed pathetic. We are still don’t even know what consciousness is. What a joke. I wonder what their definition is. Probably paper is about awareness, but that is not as catchy.
I believe you can find consciousness in all life. I mean they have proven that a tree will remember a person that harmed them and go into shock when that person returns (buy voice or sight). So even plants have consciousness. I think science always find a contradiction with everything they prove. Just like everything we create. there is always an i before e, except after C, not to mention anything else we want to add later. In other words 1+1 =2 except when jit doesn’t. So, we will never solve anything, because what we know today may very well not be true anymore tomatrow. The insanity of trying to figure out something that we will never figure out. More than likely you may know more once you die than you will ever know why alive. And why would anyone really want to exist in this fallen world forever. 4 real. Just live each day to the best you can. And experience what you can while your here. Even with perfect health and medicine to extend your life, you can still fall off a cliff and die.
Yes, believers in Monkey and Elephant gods should be looked up to 🙄Now that’s truly pathetic 💩🤣
Don’t forget the cows!
Trying to get a rise out of innocent readers by pointing at old myths, *that* is pathetic.
Can you please make a summary for such informative subject?! Bullets type of a summary would be very helpful.
Thank you.
Science can only describe “what” and “how”
Not “why”
A lot of the reasons why we can never find the true answer to things is because we define things. Why do you think they can never really know how long ago anything was here. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds. Calendars where only made international collaborated when leisure aviation came into existence. Before that there was no agreed upon way to delineate time. In space there is no time. Time only exists because we invented it. We invented definitions so we could communicate our thoughts in some sort of scene. So we have limited things by definition. Imagine if time had no constructs. unravel the tethers that bind us to one way of thinking. only then will the answers be found.
Why did consciousness evolve? Because you would be a rock otherwise!
The missing item is memory. Learning from past experiences, learning from others and developing language.
For me consciousness is about self awareness. Its the ability to be aware of a beginning and an ending for self and in all things. The miracle of being aware of nothingness or space and there value. If nothing is the absent of things then that means the absent of information yet we can identify and extract information from nothing. It should be logically impossible. I do have a theory but working on how to simplify it. The working title and core evidence for my theory is “Black Hole: The Missing Piece”. Black holes cannot be seen but proven by there presence and reaction to the things around it. I believe the discovery and science of the Super massive black hole along with past scientific discoveries has given us enough evidence to prove the reasoning behind consciousness through thought experiments.
What’s wrong with science, especially the western sciences: people keep thinking what they have thought in their ignorant pasts are who they are, they don’t imagine there is more than they have conceived, even though they, generally speaking, simply add to the hearsay as a life-style – contributed by other half-developed and utterly stopped lives. Stopped intellectually.
The hearsay herd is wrong, was wrong, yet they all want make it work, I presume for group hugs. Then there are those who are perfectly content learning dogma and teaching.
I had a bunnie, who after seeing me run out to chase away predators, realized I was watching her through the security cameras with the red lights. She’d hide in the blind spots. She knew which of the five cameras I tried to spy on her through, as she’d jump up to scold me.
Now tell me how smart you are comparing your grand self to birds. Birds who can fly straight through branching trees at 20 miles and hour – with ease.
Robert: Keep spouting textual diarrhoea, I’m sure *someone* somewhere finds it interesting 🤣
There is nothing wrong with economically (and knowledge) productive science, which is why all societies invest in it.
Consciousness evolved for the purpose of learning. When learning a new skil,, like riding a bike, your attention is focused on the task an making realtime adjustments to improve until you’ve mastered the skill which is when you no longer need to focus your attention on it. The task is relegated to subconscious processes consciously aware of the task being performed.
You can’t just declare that oak trees don’t have consciousness just because it wouldn’t fit your narrow definitions and classes if they did. Some cursory research into tree behavior shows that they actually do act as if they have some sort of consciousness.
Deep… 🌳
was going to say the same…
The Hindu sages were in agreement with these objective findings. Consciousness is simply awareness of awareness and without sufficient brain structures to support it, you don’t have it. Liberation is found in direct perception of the spontaneous present moment blooming of awareness. Ramana Maharshi understood. Zen as well.
Science is the study of the clockworks of the divine, and refuse to give credit to the clock maker. They say most of the universe is missing or dark matter, where I say what they think is missing is all there as consciousness. They say all this is a random chance, a fluke there is anything at all, but I see total geometric layout, ruled by the deliberate, and carried out with precision engineering. They claim to understand our universe like petulant children with only the 5 senses of a hunter/gatherer. They argue order of 4 dimensions ruled by their religion of matter, when we are far more spirit, unbound by 118 elements, and free to rise above and exist in dimensions unbound by matter. They order the very colors of the Infinite by 7 distinctions, where there are thousands of unseen colors in the radio spectrum alone. The very science they use to debunk the ethereal is the same science they use to disprove themselves, as it highlights the hubris of their peer reviewed papers. Science tries to see and observe the universe as if it’s outside us, when I see the universe exists because WE are here to observe it. There’s a story, when the Spanish landed in South America, before they came off the boats, people told the Shaman that the water in the bay was forming large hull shaped distortions. So the Shaman watched them for a while….it wasn’t until he realized they were caused by ships, than suddenly the whole tribe saw the Galleons. Space is no different to us. Some things are so beyond our comprehension that our minds see nothing, when in reality there’s hull shaped distortions everywhere. Keep an open mind, or it will close
I like what u said have u ever heard of cosmic allurement
Trying to get a rise out of innocent readers by pointing at old myths is pathetic.
True
Lol. This is the dumbest thing I’ve read in a while.
Everything is inside of consciousness, the brain is just a tool for survival, in our heart is pure awareness, but all things can be aware for their very fabric is the holographic nothing/all that is. Awareness is limitless and science brains will never be able to grasp it because they are inside of it, one can only be it, because one already is
Better question: What conscious purpose does evolution serve?
Evolution is 277 Bird species die off but the one with big beaks. All at the same, no slow slough. Happens right now, or rather right then. Do and done.
Consciousness and life are synergestic attributes gained by the fortunately right combination of molecules to appeare as LUCA (last universal common ancestor).
In recent phylogenies LUCA show up as “half alive”, not able to move (at least far) from the geology the split to biology happened in as that had to wait for the later split between Archaea and Bacteria. The split, in a mere 100 Myrs (to compare with the average 20 Myrs between modern prokaryote splits), had already evolved complexity without fortunate “combinations”.
Half alive LUCA: Weiss, M., Sousa, F., Mrnjavac, N. et al. The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor. Nat Microbiol 1, 16116 (2016).
Complexity but independence had to wait for the Archaea/Bacteria split: Mrnjavac, N.; Hoffmann, N. K.; Schlikker, M. L.; Burmeister, M.; Schwander, L.; Garcia, C. G.; Brabender, M.; Steel, M.; Huson, D. H.; Metzger, S. et al.: Gradual assembly of metabolism at a phosphorylating hydrothermal vent. arXiv, (2025)
100 Myrs to split: Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago—perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought. Science. (2024)
20 Myrs on average: Marin, J. et al. (2017) “The Timetree of Prokaryotes”, Mol. Biol. And Evol. 34.
Science is the study of the clockworks of the divine, and refuse to give credit to the clock maker. They say most of the universe is missing or dark matter, where I say what they think is missing is all there as consciousness. They say all this is a random chance, a fluke there is anything at all, but I see total geometric layout, ruled by the deliberate, and carried out with precision engineering. They claim to understand our universe like petulant children with only the 5 senses of a hunter/gatherer. They argue order of 4 dimensions ruled by their religion of matter, when we are far more spirit, unbound by 118 elements, and free to rise above and exist in dimensions unbound by matter. They order the very colors of the Infinite by 7 distinctions, where there are thousands of unseen colors in the radio spectrum alone. The very science they use to debunk the ethereal is the same science they use to disprove themselves, as it highlights the hubris of their peer reviewed papers. Science tries to see and observe the universe as if it’s outside us, when I see the universe exists because WE are here to observe it. There’s a story, when the Spanish landed in South America, before they came off the boats, people told the Shaman that the water in the bay was forming large hull shaped distortions. So the Shaman watched them for a while….it wasn’t until he realized they were caused by ships, than suddenly the whole tribe saw the Galleons. Space is no different to us. Some things are so beyond our comprehension that our minds see nothing, when in reality there’s hull shaped distortions everywhere. Keep an open mind, or it will close
Yes, we are biochemical machines, but it is the entirely natural process of evolution that produced us.
Everything that humans & other creatures do could be done without consciousness being involved. For an organism to retreat from a situation that causes damage does not require consciousness obviously.
Without duality
What is
I got it, I got it: One
See? :-}
Consciousness, or what we call “consciousness” is far more ancient than “human” evolución. Far older than anything “human.” In fact, consciousness is eternal in the past, as it is present and is infinite and eternal. As an aside, “time” itself does not really exist, not really. “Time” is merely one of many tools upon which “humans” depend to navigate this finite, but important, natural experience. Translation, chill! It ain’t that serious. And it is absolutely spiritually critical. 😉🙏🏿
Lmao what a joke.. a disgrace to human beings
The universe isn’t infinite, and claiming that something is ancient but also that time doesn’t exist goes nowhere.
The universe isn’t infinitely old (but it may be infinite in volume).
You state an oak tree isn’t conscious. But we know that trees are aware of their external environment, alert to danger and respond for their own benefit and the benefit of other trees. Man’s arrogance in assuming only we have certain attributes has held science back and continues to
100%
Lol how very banal , he has no idea what consciousness is for at all..we aren’t just animals.. and animals are mote than they seem.. science is completely backwards here.. what a joke
Who is “he”!? There are several scientists behind the works.
Conciousness is nowhere to be found in the body. Just simple awareness that surrounds us all. We are the universe experiencing itself as Alan Watts said
Consciousness is a bodily state, not a “surrounding”.
I wrote Alan Watts once, telling him to imagine himself as a squash plant, growing from a seed, wiggling its vines about, flowering and fruiting only to rot back into the soil as fertilizer for the next generation – BUT THEN to imagine 300 such generations, one after the next – growing flowering, rotting back away.
Then to imagine there is no beginning and no ending.
They’re explaining a complex neural feedback mechanism. But it’s still not consciousness itself.
Consciousness – is experienced by the brain – it is an aspect of brain function, entirely – I know, you all think you are so important – but all of those hopes and that of the religions are attempts to place humans (and therefore the individual conceiving them) as the most important part of the Universe, in fact the whole point of the Universe. Which is, utterly insipid, is it not? The answer is yes.
The part of you, experienced as being “on” the observer – are your constantly firing nets, the controllers (hence “on”) and its job is re-stabilizing the de-stabilization nets by averting their signal flows. Because that’s what the always firing nets do in the brain.
Welcome to the real world.
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Well (grab your desk), it took about six months of deep and continuing thought but I figured out how consciousness functions in the brain in 1967. The model does everything, birth and learning, ‘feelings,’ sexuality, ‘psychology,’ concentration, conceptioning and memory, short-term, long-term.
It is a thing of neural-nets not computer like, memories are not stored – they are experienced as impressions that are revisited, re-thought – but the whole is not what people would recognize as ‘experience’ or conscious experience – it is neural states through time. Seemingly foreign for most people. In an odd way, consciousness is a happenstanial by-product.
Some students at Stanford were interested at the time – but time, like youth, is so fleeting – you’ll find. They were trying to get me in touch with Ettinger – who wrote similar things in their text.
The construct of reality and the engineering of such is all in the Bible.
Believing in evolution in this day and age is absolutely absurd.
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