The Four Billion Year Old Story of Consciousness

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We tend to think of humans as special because of our superior intelligence, a story that runs from spotting poisonous berries to Descartes’ I think, therefore I am, and now, to the machines we worry will out-think us. This conversation asks a different question: was cognition ever really what made us human, or is that just the story intelligence tells about itself?

The deeper question addressed is not how we came to think, but rather how we came to cooperate. In ancient times, capabilities were shared across a group: one read the stars, another tracked prey. Cognition was…