In Ferris Jabr’s telling, sea creatures evolved to perceive time very differently than we do:
Five hundred million years ago, every animal in existence made its permanent home in the ocean. We can safely assume that many such animals experienced time as one moment following the next and, if they were like many modern finned and tentacled denizens of the deep, formed memories. Indeed, the octopus, one of the ocean’s greatest geniuses, seems to have evolved the means to use tools, solve problems, and possess foresight completely independently of land animals. But mental time travel—the ability to consciously relive past experiences and imagine the future—may have really taken off at the water’s edge.
This notion forms part of the buena vista hypothesis, which Malcolm MacIver, of Northwestern University, conceived to explain the origins of consciousness:
In deep or murky water, animals can see only a few meters ahead of themselves at any moment. There is not much opportunity to make long-term plans if you cannot even glimpse where you will be in a few minutes. Around three hundred and fifty million years ago, however, when pseudo-limbed fish first crawled ashore and brought their eyes into the open air, they could suddenly see much farther into the distance than ever before. With such grand views, they could learn much more about the world from a single glance and construct more intricate mental maps of the surrounding landscape, which in turn permitted more sophisticated thought and behavior. …
In other words, our evolutionary ancestors may have been limited in their ability to mentally travel through time until they got to the right place.
Previous Dish on the experiences of animals here and here. Update from a reader, who ties in yesterday’s post on Dawkins’ dismissive attitude toward fairy tells:
Yesterday, my teenage daughter (a self-defining atheist) described a book she liked: “It’s historically accurate, except for the magic.” Then she laughed, and joked that she would use that as a title for her autobiography. Your post discusses the development of time-consciousness and “the ability to consciously relive past experiences and imagine the future.” One should not assume that Dawkins speaks for all atheists, or for anyone other than himself. Memory and imagination – including the ability to imagine those things not empirically provable, and to invent memory – has nothing whatsoever to do with supernaturalism, and neither do memory and imagination inherently enact enchantment and mystery, visions and miracles, as Olmstead suggests. My ability to imagine frogs and princes (or sub-atomic particles and global commodity flows), and to use such narrative constructs to make sense of experience, has nothing to do with the discourse of belief.
The Dish 