 Merker (2005) has proposed that consciousness originated early in vertebrate evolution, and is therefore both ancient and widespread. On this proposal, not only mammals and birds, but amphibians and all marine vertebrates are conscious. Merker begins his argument with the phenomenological observation that the contents of conscious experience are object- and goal-oriented, but exclude the fine-grained sensory and motor details represented in peripheral and low-level neural processing. Merker argues that consciousness is an integrated representational platform — what he refers to a ‘synthesized reality space’ — that, for animals with complex bodies with many degrees of freedom of movement and multiple sensory modalities, solves a cluster of critical neural logistics problems. This includes: