Interesting ideas, I'm glad you had the extra coffee :-) I wonder though if "A fly can anticipate" is accurate? As you question, does the fly run a simulation

Interesting ideas, I'm glad you had the extra coffee :-) I wonder though if "A fly can anticipate" is accurate? As you question, does the fly run a simulation -- or more generally, does it have a mental model of the world. Given the size of fly brains, my guess would be no -- that it's more of a "when I see this, I do that" sort of a thing, honed by millions of generations of ancestors into an unthinking, but effective, state machine. One thing I double-checked: our last common ancestor with insects is something like 500 million years ago -- much more recent than with octopuses. So even if there is some similarity with insects, that's no guarantee that it exists in octopuses as well. As an aside, it's weird to think that I have more in common with a fly than an octopus (genetically at least).