As soon as a scuba diver dives into the sea, he encounters life forms that seem extremely alien: here are sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose bizarre bodies, intricate structure and flower-like processes are more reminiscent of plants or even architectural forms, rather than something animal. And yet, all these creatures are our relatives. As equal representatives of the animal kingdom - metazoa, they can tell a lot about the evolutionary origin of not only the human body, but also his consciousness. Trying to get used to their experience and understand what it is like to perceive the world and interact with it as other living beings do. , Peter Godfrey-Smith shows that the characteristic animal body, which emerged more than half a billion years ago, was the very innovation that set life on a fundamentally different path. Tracing the emergence through natural selection of sponges, corals, shrimp, octopuses and fish, and then moving onto land into the world of insects, birds and primates, Metazoa bridges the gap between mind and matter, bringing us closer to resolving one of the deepest philosophical problems - problems of consciousness.