for: evolutionary biology, big history, DH, Deep Humanity, theories of consciousness, ESP project, Earth Species Project, Michael Levin, animal communication, symbiocene

title: The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

doi: 0.1080/09515089.2022.2160311

ABSTRACT

• The essence of who we are depends on our brains.
• They enable us to think, to
  • feel joy and sorrow,
  • communicate through speech,
  • reflect on the moments of our lives, and to
    • anticipate,
    • plan for, and
    • worry about our imagined futures.
• Although some of our abilities are comparatively new, key features of our behavior have deep roots that can be traced to the beginning of life.
• By following the story of behavior, step-by-step, over its roughly four-billion-year trajectory,
  • we come to understand both
    • how similar we are to all organisms that have ever lived, and
    • how different we are from even our closest animal relatives.
• We care about our differences because they are ours. But differences do not make us superior; they simply make us different.

comment

• good article to contribute to a narrative of the symbiocene and a shift of humanity to belonging to nature as one species, instead of dominating nature as the apex species

• @Gyuri, Could indranet search algorithm have made the connection between this article and the symbiocene artilces in my mindplex had I not explicitly made the associations manually through my tags? It needs to be able to do this

• which is similiar to the Earth Species Project work and Michael Levin's work on synthesizing new laboratory life forms to answer evolutionary questions about intelligence