Dr. Eric Haseltine

And it has a point of view that it...

as the cellular clusters there individually have, and it's talking to the brain through who knows what.

And so I think that what is fascinating to me about this very practical clinical idea that she came up with is that there might be some literal scientific truth to what she's saying that goes far beyond the metaphorical.

It's literal.

Absolutely.

Well, one comment about different from our book, yes and no, the main kind of anti-character in The Shadow of Time has cognition in its body distributed very differently than a human.

And that turns out to be really important to the story and how this is different.

So some of that did make its way.

And the biology of this particular class of organism, as far as we understand it, is so radically different than humans.

And that's why we made this character the way we made it.

But some of the listen to your body is in there, in that we constructed this creature from our understanding of how consciousness can be distributed in different parts of the body.

Oh yes, we know about him.

Well, you know, it's interesting to think about the evolution and how we came to have these bodies that we have and the mind that we have.

And if you think about those first leaps between single cell and multicellular organisms, which clearly we made in evolution, you start to understand what she's saying even deeper.

Look at a pond scum or a slime mold.

What you find is that's a collection of individuals.

that start to behave in concert.

Like you have certain ones that are used for digestion, certain ones that move the slime mold around towards new food or away from threats.

And so you also have gene swapping among individual single cell organisms so that a multicellular organism might form from multiple, what used to be different species that became one.

So if you now fast forward that process over 4 billion years, you end up with us.