The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became

The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became



Sources and link to book by Rupert Glasgow:

Consciousness is perhaps the biggest riddle in nature. In the first part of this three part video series, we explore the origins of consciousness and take a closer look on how unaware things became aware.

This video was made possible by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

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36 thoughts on “The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became

  1. Head over to our shop to get exclusive kurzgesagt merch and sciency products designed with love.
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  2. The oldest memory I had was total darkness and then this hole appeared , like a window to a different dimension, but it was like covered by this liquid idk, I saw my mom for a sec and then I felt a lot pain in my eyes and I started crying. And that's it I can't remember rn

  3. Consciousness is just the products of chemical reactions, therefore consciousness is no different from everything else in the universe. It only holds meaning from our perspective

  4. Basically, the cell and what it creates is considered alive, but the cell and everything around us is made up of atoms that are considered to have no life. It's kind of a paradox.
    You should make a video about the cell. It seems to be something that is too little discussed about

  5. = I am going to tell you "what a car engine is"

    — ok

    = In the beginning humans needed to go around, and there were bicycles, then we needed something more powerful, the engine moves the car around, it makes accelerate, gets it to a really very high speed, and can make move in reverse – even though not as fast as forward … The engine also …

    — dumb ass, this is what engine "does", you said you will tell me what the engine "is" ? Did you vote for Trump you dumb. F**k ?

  6. I know this is trying to explain extremely difficult concepts in a compressed cartoon form, but the video is more like 'ooo. wouldn't it be cool if this creature had some eyeballs? look how much this helps him……oooo wouldnt it be cool if he had mental mapping and memory? Look how much this provides a survival advantage". In other words, there is a lot of hand waving the hard part. of course we all realize that eyes and memory would confer advantages. This doesn't explain at all how it came about!

  7. I watched a couple of new videos that just came out within the last month and then I come back to this from 6 years ago, and there is a stark difference in the newer videos than these older videos. There's something about the new videos that is off putting and I don't quite know what it is

  8. let’s be real, if atheist are right then consciousness isn’t real nor is awareness. Just chemicals firing away, that’s why people treat autism like “they can’t help it” but neither can you, you dont have free will anymore than a “mentally disabled person”

  9. The ONLY thing AWARE of anything is AWARENESS… There isn't anything that can become AWARE !
    AWARENESS was established by the Awakening of NOTHING… NOTHING is SOMETHING or we would NOT be able to refer to it !
    It is a "PARADOX" which can NOT be broken down any further so it exists as a pair…

  10. It is fascinating to listen to this perspective — one can genuinely learn a great deal from it.
    That said, several fundamental issues require a far more critical and integrated examination.

    First, consciousness is not a single, unified phenomenon.
    It is an autoreferential network composed of self-awareness, autobiographical memory, mentalization, and empathy. Treating consciousness as a simple or linear function severely distorts our understanding of cognition and evolution.

    Second, modern science commits a serious error through excessive fragmentation.
    Specialization offers depth, but without synthesis it produces intellectual isolation. Biology, neuroscience, psychology, physics, and astrobiology are not separate realities — they are different perspectives observing the same unified system. Reality itself is not divided; our frameworks are.

    Another overlooked factor is chronic stress.
    Humans were not biologically equipped with natural weapons, physical strength, strong immunity, or reliable instincts. This placed early humans in a state of constant existential threat.

    Prolonged stress leads to sustained cortisol release. While adaptive in the short term, chronic cortisol exposure degrades neural systems — particularly the hippocampus, which is essential for memory, learning, and higher cognitive integration. A species living under continuous predatory pressure would struggle to develop stable consciousness or long-term cognitive coherence.

    This deepens the evolutionary paradox.
    Why would nature select a physically fragile species — slower, weaker, and poorly defended — yet allow it to develop extreme intelligence? Cooperation alone does not fully explain how such persistent stress would permit advanced cognitive evolution.

    More critically, if nature produces beings capable of large-scale self-destruction — nuclear weapons, industrial warfare, and planetary collapse — then what we call “intelligence” may not represent evolutionary improvement at all. It may represent a trajectory toward total self-annihilation.

    An intelligence that threatens the survival of the entire biosphere is not adaptive intelligence.
    It is unstable intelligence.

    This forces a deeper question:
    What do we actually mean by evolution?
    What is the direction — toward higher integration and consciousness, or toward total destruction?

    Humanity has never before possessed technology of this magnitude.
    For the first time, a single species holds the power to irreversibly damage or erase life on this planet. The coming years will determine whether we can psychologically and ethically survive our own technological capacity — or whether we will destroy ourselves through it.

    For this reason, sentimentality about biology is misplaced.
    What is needed is sober, holistic, and unsparing realism — one that integrates neurology, psychology, environment, ethics, and evolution into a coherent understanding of where humanity truly stands.

  11. But the question is, is this the truth? We still don't have any concrete explanation or even meaning of our consciousness. We don't know how did we get it, we also don't know if we developed it or something else gave it to us. We just don't know.

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