The following is a subsection from the current early draft introduction to an evolving essay tentatively labeled “Tertium Quid,” exploring a middle-ground worldview that lies between the dominant Western narratives of reductive materialism or scientism, and theism or supernaturlism. The full text of the current draft of the introduction can be found here.
The neurobiologist H.J. Jerison developed what may be our best tool for comparing intelligence across species: the concept of encephalization, or brains that are larger than expected for a given body size. Jerison argued that enlarged brains correspond to increased “neural information processing capacity” and, ultimately, to “the complexity of the reality created by the brain.”1 H.J. Jerison, “Animal intelligence as encephalization.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1985 In his framework, highly encephalized species don’t just process more information—they construct richer, more complex experiential worlds. As Jerison understood it, reality is what brains create.
This approach offers a bridge between Nagel’s subjective perspective and objective measurement. While we may never fully access the “what it is like” of another species’ experience, we can study the neural complexity that makes rich subjective experience possible. What we might call complex cognition—the sophisticated information processing that emerges from highly encephalized brains—may be the observable correlate of the inner depths that Nagel described.
Viewed through this lens, Earth has hosted at least two major evolutionary experiments in complex cognition, separated by millions of years and occurring in radically different environments. Jerison himself conceived of encephalization as an adaptive evolutionary “experiment,” noting that Earth’s first such experiment was a species of shark some 250 million years ago. Following this metaphor, the first major experiment in what we might call complex cognition began millions of years ago with the odontocetes—the toothed whales that include dolphins, orcas, sperm whales, and dozens of other species. These marine mammals achieved and sustained levels of encephalization that rival our own, representing what Jerison called “the highest grade of encephalization”—a level they reached 3-5 million years ago, compared to humans’ emergence around 300,000 years ago.
Yet these cetacean minds evolved without hands to grasp tools, without fire to transform materials, without any of the technological markers that would eventually characterize human cognition. Instead, they inhabited a three-dimensional acoustic world where sound travels efficiently across vast distances, where social bonds span generations, and where complex cognition appears oriented primarily toward navigating rich experiential and relational realities that we can barely begin to comprehend. Long before the first hominids walked the plains of Africa, dozens of species of toothed whales had already achieved neural architectures that were energetically expensive, neurologically intricate, and evolutionarily stable across geological timescales.
What makes this oceanic experiment even more remarkable is its sustainability. Many odontocete species have maintained essentially the same brain and body morphology for millions of years, adapting successfully to different marine environments without destroying the ecosystems that sustain them. They represent a form of intelligence that achieved complexity without ecological destruction—a feat that continues to elude our own species.
Only in the last geological instant—perhaps 300,000 years ago—did a second experiment in complex cognition emerge with Homo sapiens. Human intelligence developed through our ancestors’ interaction with tools, fire, and increasingly complex social structures. We are creatures of manipulation and analysis, builders of technologies that extend our reach across space and time. Human consciousness, while rich in its own right, has become intimately bound to our capacity to reshape the external world.
The terrestrial experiment with human consciousness produced unprecedented technological power in mere millennia—but simultaneously triggered what many scientists now believe will become the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. The contrast with cetacean sustainability raises profound questions about the relationship between cognitive complexity and ecological wisdom.
If we apply Nagel’s test to these oceanic beings, the questions become even more profound: What is it like to navigate the world through three-dimensional sound? What is it like to live in societies where acoustic bonds can span hundreds of miles? What is it like to possess a brain as large and complex as our own, but oriented toward experiences we can barely imagine rather than technologies we can build?
The enduring presence of such neural complexity in two radically divergent lineages raises questions that strike at the heart of our understanding of reality itself: Why does the universe build such minds? The convergence of massive neural investment in such different environments suggests we may be approaching consciousness backwards. Instead of asking how consciousness accidentally emerged in humans, perhaps we should ask: Why does reality repeatedly experiment with complex cognition and subjective experience?
What if the drive toward complex, inner life is not a mere accident of recent human evolution, but represents something more fundamental—a principle woven into the very fabric of existence? The story we present here explores this possibility through the lens of an idea that consciousness, mind, or awareness is not something that emerged on Earth only recently, but rather represents an inherent aspect of reality itself—one that has been experimenting with different forms of expression across millions of years and radically different environments.
Our reframing may seem audacious to those working within a materialist framework where consciousness is treated as a recent accident. But the evidence suggests that humans are neither the first nor the only species to have evolved what we recognize as complex cognition. When we consider the experiential states of other large-brained animals, we are not facing “alternative” forms of consciousness, but rather far older and perhaps far different forms of the same fundamental phenomenon. Humans may be only the most recent participants in the universe’s ongoing exploration of what it means to be aware.