Art Reboot

61 10 the course of consciousness Consciousness is one of the last frontiers of science. Despite extraordinary progress in many other fields, there is still no commonly agreed definition of consciousness among scientists and philosophers, a good indication in itself of the problems that we face in grappling with its nature. This lacuna notwithstanding, we can be reasonably certain that one kind of self-awareness, the ability to separate self from environment, existed long before the evolution of Homo sapiens . Whatever the chronological or biological details, some level of self-consciousness has been a defining feature of hominids for more than 100,000 years. Even the word ‘intelligence’ is not without its problems. Many living creatures exhibit intelligence: anyone who has watched a monkey using a stick or a bird dropping a mussel from a height to break the shell will recognise intelligence at work. Trying to pick a single point in time for the advent of intelligence or self- conscious intellect with such uncertain terminology is futile. Rather than a single light-bulb moment, self-consciousness must have coalesced over millennia from an enormous global crucible of activity. Nonetheless, we can identify three very broad stages of consciousness that I think of as the Age of Primordial