Jesse and Sonali,
I read your essay with great interest. Certainly the development of language and mathematics provided a tremendous boost to human learning. I like your phases of development: life, consciousness, language and high intelligence. In my essay I noted the brain development from a stimulus-reaction, to remembering past events (hence learned behaviors) and to the ability to imagine future events. If I were to rewrite it, I would include language development.
For my use of aims and intentions, the person needs to imagine future outcomes and select a path to achieve the most desirable outcome. I ignore the weak use of intentions as in "I intend to lose weight" with the hidden meaning that "I probably won't lose it".
In my essay I pose some new ideas. I raise the possibility of an information dimension where our thoughts, imagination, and emotions are stored. Think of the emotions around your first teenage love and the subsequent breakup. The brain uses its power in the physical dimension, such as its electromagnetic impulses, to access this dimension. But this information dimension does not have to follow the physical laws. We can imagine things that are not true in the physical world. For the most part, humans use this dimension that is within the brain. In some rare cases, people can access information beyond the individual brain.
While this is not part of my essay, I mention it to stimulate your thinking. In the quantum world, one experiment was to separate entangled particles by a large distance, then simultaneous measure their spin. The knowledge of the first particle's measurement was conducted faster than the speed of light to the second particle. So if this pair-wise knowledge occurs in the information dimension, then maybe the information dimension is not bounded by the speed of light, i.e. information could have different properties than in the physical world.