- seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
asking any ‘what is it like to be. . .?’ questions, whether of an octopus, a friend,
or myself.
In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across
the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and
evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death.
Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered
in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort,
a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across
billions upon billions of years.(Stephen Baxter, Manifold: Time, 1999/2015, p. 3)Bloom, P. (2004). Descartes’ baby: How child
development explains what makes us human. London,
Heinemann (pp. 189–227).
On our intuitive dualism, and what children think about
death, magic, the supernatural, and God.
Brandl, J. L. (2016). The puzzle of mirror self-rec-
ognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
online first.
Recognising oneself in a mirror is not an all-or-nothing
phenomenon, and the process of learning to do so
varies between species including humans.
Burghardt, G. M., and Belkoff, M. (2009). Ani-
mal consciousness. In T. Bayne, A. Cleeremans, and P.
Wilken (Eds), The Oxford companion to consciousness
(pp. 39–53). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Includes subsections on dolphins, great apes, and
ravens, plus ‘animal metacognition and consciousness’.
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