Despite their reputation as mindless automatons, insects have three blobs of neural tissue that, taken together, form a brain. What insects don’t have is a cortex — nothing that even resembles one. To Hill, this means they can’t have consciousness. Without this dense, gray lid of neurons, consciousness is just not possible.
Other researchers aren’t so sure. They have begun to question whether consciousness originates from a place at all, spurring a rethinking of why it exists in the first place. However overgrown it might be in humans, the cerebral cortex didn’t emerge fully formed out of nowhere. It evolved over time, as did other neural structures. And if consciousness also evolved, then maybe the cortex isn’t the be-all, end-all of consciousness. Maybe consciousness is far more primitive.1