The problem is that the animal world isn’t really an animal world—it’s a world of trillions of strands of genetic information, each one hell-bent on immortality. And in a universe that wants to turn order into chaos whenever possible, the immortality of anything—let alone a delicate and complex genetic code—is a constant uphill battle. Most of Eart... See more

The difficulty with two minds is that there’s only one brain—leaving the two minds in an ongoing power struggle. When the Higher Mind is empowered, his staff lights up the room with self-awareness, offering a clear view of the Primitive Mind in all its silliness, which makes it hard for the Primitive Mind to do anything sneaky.

A few million years ago, the genes that inhabit a particular population of great ape started innovating in an unusual way, trying out an animal container upgrade that had never quite worked before: super-high intelligence. All previous genes had passed up extra high intelligence in their housing because it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to ... See more

And that’s great for genes. But it’s stressful for animals.

Genes are like gravity—they don’t care. They want to stay immortal, and they’ll pursue that goal as relentlessly as gravity fuses atoms inside stars. Just as there’s finite space in the center of a star, there are finite resources in the animal world—finite land, finite shelter, finite food, finite mates—which makes gene endeavors a zero-sum game. ... See more

Over the years, the Higher Mind has come to see the Primitive Mind as a not-very-smart pet. But he also understands that it’s important to the whole system to let the Primitive Mind get what it needs from its little pet life—to an extent. The Primitive Mind is endlessly greedy, completely untrainable, and the Higher Mind has learned the hard way th... See more

When he thinks about it—and he does think about it, sometimes—he wonders whether this is all a mistake and he ended up in the wrong head. Because he can’t help but notice that next to him at all times is a hectic ball of orange fuzz that was living here when he moved in.

In simple animals, the software is an automated program that runs the animal on instinct. In more complex animals, the software also includes a number of feelings—higher-level behavior-manipulation tools like pain punishments, pleasure treats, and emotion manipulations.

Not only could this mind within a mind think its own thoughts, it could actually overrule the will of the genes, override the software’s commands, and drive human behavior.