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February 6, 2026
from The Dawn of Mind
by James Cooke
“I sat bolt upright. Was that it? Was that the moment consciousness came into existence.”
—James Cooke
The Dawn of Mind is not a collection of personal essays, but a scientific and philosophical enquiry into the nature of life’s greatest wonder: consciousness. It is clear and well-written, challenging, yes, but completely accessible to the nonscientific mind, and James Cooke supports his most important insights with brief personal accounts of his discovery process in clarifying descriptions of how his theories formed that read like personal essays.
Dr. Cooke has three degrees in experimental psychology and neuroscience from Oxford University and has taught at Oxford, Berkeley, and the University College of London. The paragraph of the week describes thoughts he had lying on a narrow sofa in his houseboat moored along the canals of London’s Little Venice. For a decade he had been studying the brain as a neuroscientist in the hope of unravelling the “hard problem” of how consciousness could emerge from matter. Closing his eyes he imagined himself to be “the evolving universe, developing from its origins to us.”
Paragraph of the Week
I started with the bits with which we are all familiar: the big bang, planets forming, and the occurrence of the first life-forms on earth. My imagination struggled at first, trying to grasp what it would feel like to be the expanding lifeless cosmos. Then I got to the origin of life. I felt the web of matter that makes up the universe fold in on itself to create a little, enclosed bubble: the first single-celled organism. I felt how, in order to keep itself together, this organism needed to consistently interface with the world around it in a way that reached beyond its boundaries to anticipate what was going on outside itself to successfully navigate in the world. I sat bolt upright. Was that it? Was that the moment consciousness came into existence, when orderly living things attempted to separate from the disorderly world around them? Could the focus on the human brain have been a distraction created by our own hubris?
—James Cooke
Commentary
Before this moment of insight, James Cooke devoted his life to studying the brain as the seat of all conscious awareness. He was not alone. “The mainstream of consciousness science generally takes it as a given that the brain, or at least the nervous system, is responsible for bringing experience into existence.” After the epiphany on his houseboat, though, Cooke began to see that consciousness originated with the first living creatures as a way to “interface with the world” outside themselves and successfully navigate their environments. It came about long before any brain made the scene. Consciousness is a simulation of the outside world, a “living mirror,” that allows organisms to anticipate threats and create scenarios to avoid them. Unlike other matter that is subject to entropy, the law of thermodynamics that all things dissolve into disorder and randomness, living matter uses consciousness as a way to fight back and maintain its integrity for a lifetime. Born of the world, the light of awareness which is the seat of consciousness serves as a reminder that unlike, say, computers, we are embedded in experience: “that we are not truly separate from the world around us and that we are in fact deeply at home in existence.”
—THE
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The Humble Essayist Book Club
A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
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The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
