As soon as a scuba diver plunges into the sea, he encounters life forms that seem prohibitively alien: here are sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose bizarre bodies, intricate structure and flower-like processes resemble plants or even architectural forms, rather than something animal. Nevertheless, 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 its consciousness. Trying to get used to their experience and understand what it is like to perceive the world and interact with it the way other living things do, Peter Godfrey-Smith shows that the body characteristic of animals, which appeared more than half a billion years ago, became the very innovation that directed life along a fundamentally different path. By tracing the emergence of sponges, corals, shrimp, octopuses and fish during natural selection, and then moving to land, to the world of insects, birds and primates, Metazoa bridges the gap between mind and matter, bringing us closer to solving one of the deepest philosophical problems - the problem of consciousness.