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• 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

• author: Joseph LeDoux
• date: Jan. 2023

• 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
• question
  • @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
• Also interesting to see how this materialistic outlook of consciousness
  • 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
• relates to nonmaterial ideas about consciousness