The speaker suggests that the transition to multicellular life may have taken a long time because the morphogenesis algorithm that creates organism-level coherence is difficult to discover.

“And maybe we don't know how long nature took to discover it. Maybe consciousness is indeed discovered in every individual brain. But maybe it's not. Maybe the, um, switch from single-cellular life to multicellular life took so long because morphogenesis, this algorithm that allows organisms to become coherent at scale, is so difficult to discover.”