Consciousness may have evolved as a solution to a computational overload problem that threatened complex multicellular life after the Avalon explosion. The pathological complexity thesis argues that animals with complex bodies faced an economic trade-off problem: managing many degrees of freedom became computationally unmanageable. Sentience solved this design problem during the Cambrian explosion. By modeling this computational explosion with state-based behavioral and life history theory, a bottom-up evolutionary framework can explain subjective experience and its function across different animal ecological lifestyles.
A bottom-up comparative study of animal minds, grounded in cognitive ethology, can advance a biological science of consciousness by removing humans from the center of reference. The article uses the pathological complexity thesis to argue that state-based behavioral life history theory provides a firm foundation for such a study. Comparing the life histories of gastropods and arthropods offers insight into the possible origins and function of consciousness for organisms in their natural environments.