Somewhere between the first prokaryotic cells four billion years ago and the human brain’s ninety billion neurons entangled in a network of one hundred trillion synaptic connections, the ability emerged to think and feel, to love and hate, to fear and yearn, to sacrifice and revere, to imagine and create—newfound capacities that would ignite spectacular achievement as well as untold destruction. “Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it,”1 is how Albert Camus put it.
