Episode 12.06: The evolutionary advantages of one bit of self-awareness and adding it to Darwinism.

The advantage accruing to the smallest conceivable degree of self-determination - even just one bit that says yes or no, left or right, this not that - may be enough to confer evolutionary advantage because “in the country of the blind …”. And if we start from our inverted ontology we need to add the role of minute capacities for self-self-determination to the explanatory architecture of Darwinism, for to exclude it even as possibility would be prejudiced. This is not metaphysical teleology but a simple acknowledgment of the ratchet principle: that we can’t go back once some new ability has emerged, albeit completely by chance.