The Four Billion Year Old Story of Consciousness
Cooperation, Consciousness and What Makes Us Human
RSVP here
Speakers
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 distributed, and cooperation was mutually beneficial. This discussion argues that perhaps, intelligence did not come first. Perhaps, consciousness evolved less to help us think, and more to help us stay together.
In collaboration with:
Speakers
Ramanan Laxminarayan
Ramanan Laxminarayan is an engineer, economist, and epidemiologist whose work focuses on the management of shared global resources, including antimicrobial effectiveness, pandemic preparedness, and vaccine access. He is president of the One Health Trust, a global research organization based in Washington, D.C., and Bangalore, and a Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University.
Rohini Nilekani
Rohini Nilekani is an author and philanthropist who has strongly influenced the Indian social sector over three decades. She is Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and Co-founder and Director of EkStep, a nonprofit education platform; she founded Arghyam, a water and sanitation foundation, and co-founded Pratham Books, a nonprofit children’s publisher. A former journalist, she has written for publications including The Times of India, India Today and Mint. Penguin Books India published her books Stillborn and Uncommon Ground, and she self-published Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar, alongside ninteen children’s books, including the Sringeri Srinivas series.
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