How do I tell them? How do I tell them? How do I be the bills? How do I pay the bills?

I know what goes through your head when you're living with cancer. The questions, the fears,

the need to know. How do I know? Because I'm living with cancer too.

That's why I joined the Macmillan online community. And we can help people like you,

whatever you need to ask. To join us, search Macmillan online community.

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Tron Carroll.

If you're interested in thinking about life, the very idea about biology, right, that there

exist living organisms, how they function, how they go around and do their stuff, then if your

cast of mind is that of a physicist or philosopher, like myself, you are struck with difficulty that

in some loose sense, there is only one data point, right? Of course, there is a wide variety of

kinds of living creatures here on earth, but they all share a common ancestor, all life on earth.

As far as we know, stems from a single kind of origin. It's very possible that life began multiple

times here on earth, and either one kind of strategy won out, or maybe it destroyed all the others,

or maybe life only just began once. But life began and then it evolved and it's all here on

the same planet. We haven't yet discovered life elsewhere in the universe. And this is quite a

handicap if the questions we're asking are, what are the general features of life? What is life,

and on the level of thinking and consciousness and so forth, what is thinking? What is the biological

activity that we think of as cognition, the subconscious, you know, system one, system two, whatever

you want to think about? We are handicapped absolutely by the fact that we have one very big example

in front of us, and not a lot of ones on other planets or even parallel with us here on earth.

Happily, if you're specifically interested in the question of cognition and consciousness and

sentience, then we do have more than one example. Now, we only have one tree of life, but as we talk

...