What is "Mind?"

Suzana Herculano-Houzel and her team at Vanderbilt University discovered that avian brains contain more neurons per square inch than mammalian brains.... Scientists have long wondered how birds — with their teeny-tiny brains — are capable of exhibiting many complex behaviors, some of which were thought to the be exclusive domain of larger primates. Birds can manufacture tools, cache food, plan for the future, pass the mirror test, use insight to solve problems, and understand cause-and-effect....

Eurasian Magpies
The Eurasian magpie is the first non-mammalian species to pass the mirror test.10 When contrasting colored stickers were placed on their feathers, the magpies reacted to their reflections by trying to remove the mark. Birds who were marked with invisible stickers showed no altered behavior.

Prior to this experiment, scientists believed that self-recognition abilities came from the neocortex, a part of the brain found only in mammals. Since magpies are birds, they do not have this part of the brain. Their passing of the mirror test shows that self-recognition ability can arise from other brain parts in other types of brains. Such a thing is a case of “convergent evolution”. This happens when similar abilities, behaviors, and traits independently evolve in species that are not closely related.

Evolution of the brain: from behavior to consciousness in 3.4 billion years.

Neurosurgery. 2004 Jun;54(6):1287-96.

Author information: Oró JJ, Division of Neurosurgery, University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine.

Abstract

Once life began as single-cell organisms, evolution favored those able to seek nutrients and avoid risks. Receptors sensed the environment, memory traces were laid, and adaptive responses were made. Environmental stress, at times as dramatic as the collision of an asteroid, resulted in extinctions that favored small predators with dorsal nerve cords and cranially positioned brains. Myelination, and later thermoregulation, led to increasingly efficient neural processing. As somatosensory, visual, and auditory input increased, a neocortex developed containing both sensory and motor neural maps. Hominids, with their free hands, pushed cortical development further and began to make simple stone tools. Tools and increasing cognition allowed procurement of a richer diet that led to a smaller gut, thus freeing more energy for brain expansion. Multimodal association areas, initially developed for processing incoming sensory information, blossomed and began to provide the organism with an awareness of self and environment. Advancements in memory storage and retrieval gave the organism a sense of continuity through time. This developing consciousness eventually left visible traces, which today are dramatically evident on cave walls in France and Spain. We will take this journey from the single cell to human consciousness.

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-insects-consciousness.html
Are Insects Conscious?
...
But a recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rejects this model. Macquarie University’s Andrew Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, argue that subjective experience could be more widespread in the animal kingdom – and older, in evolutionary terms – than we realize.

Subjective experience is the most basic form of consciousness. If a being is capable of having subjective experiences, then there is something that it is like to be that being, and this “something” could include having pleasant or painful experiences. In contrast, a driverless car has detectors capable of sensing obstacles that could collide with it, and of taking action to avoid such collisions, but there is nothing that it is like to be that car.

In humans, subjective experience is distinguishable from higher levels of consciousness, such as self-awareness, which requires a functioning cortex. Subjective experience involves the midbrain rather than the cortex and can continue even after massive damage to the cortex.

Insects have a central ganglion that, like a mammalian midbrain, is involved in processing sensory information, selecting targets, and directing action. It may also provide a capacity for subjective experience.
...

Birds can manufacture tools, cache food, plan for the future, pass the mirror test, use insight to solve problems, and understand cause-and-effect....

Healyje: you're basing the legitimacy of the concept and line of reasoning on how many citations that paper has? Seriously?