There is a wonderful description of the emergence of mind in Steve Grand's "Creation: life and how to make it", which I would like to quote here...

" … I happen to believe that our ability to reason consciously is grounded in our ability to build mental models of the world, and that this in turn is founded upon a biological mechanism for constructing predictive models of body movement and simple sensory hypotheses (such as the automatic ability to 'fill in' the missing details from a partially obscured image of a face). Perhaps this mechanism originated to handle the more rapid and complex (but not necessarily very intelligent) movements required by animals as they evolved from living in the sea to living on land, and our own higher mental faculties are an emergent consequence of a system that grew upon and made use of this more primitive foundation. Similarly, our emotions are products of the basic drive mechanisms that evolved to control the behaviour of relatively primitive organisms such as fish and amphibians, and now form a crucial part of the value system that motivates our actions and with which we measure our experiences. Fear and anger are probably relatively simple, built-in mechanisms, while grief and embarrassment are perhaps more subtle shades mixed from these primary colours.
   "So imagine a situation in which someone rushes out into the street to save a child from oncoming traffic. They are certainly employing intelligence. But their action is based on a prediction of what might happen next that probably evolved for handling rather low-level plans and forecasts, plus an emotional response to the situation derived from the mechanism that evolved to modulate feeding and fleeing behaviour. Their visual pattern recognition enabled them to see the car and the child; their memory threw up images of car accidents and reminded them of how it feels to be struck by something heavy. Their planning and navigation circuits assembled a plan of action, and their motor sequencing system carried it out. No single part of their brains did the thinking - it was an emergent consequence of the interaction between all these parts."   (pp. 170-171)