Conscious awareness can spring up in many living things. If one strand in natural selection led to humans, another led to the octopus. There was nothing preordained in either case. Evolution is not moving towards increasingly self-aware forms of life. Appearing by chance, consciousness comes and goes in the organisms that possess it.3 Twenty-first-century transhumanists think of evolution as leading to a fully self-aware cosmic mind. Such views have precedents in nineteenth-century theosophy, occultism and spiritualism.4 None of them has any basis in Darwin’s theory. The self-awareness of
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