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army1987 comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
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Why? Having dabbled a bit in evolutionary simulations, I find that, once you have unicellular organisms, the emergence of cooperation between them is only a matter of time, and from there multicellulars form and cell specialization based on division of labor begins. Once you have a dedicated organism-wide communication subsystem, why would it be unlikely for a centralized command structure to evolve?
My personal guess would be that the great filter isn't a filter at all, but a great scatterer, where different types of optimizers do not recognize each other as such, because their goals and appearances are so widely different, and they are sparse in the vast space of possibilities.
On Earth multicellularity arose independently several dozen times but AFAIK only animals have anything like a central nervous system.
If animal-complexity CNS is your criteria, then humans + octopuses would be a counterexample, as urbilaterals wouldn't be expected to have such a system, and the octopus intelligence has formed separately.
The last common ancestor of humans and octopuses probably didn't have a very complicated nervous system, but it probably did have a nervous system: most likely a simple lateral cord with ganglia, like some modern wormlike animals. That seems to meet the criteria for shminux's "dedicated organism-wide communication subsystem".