Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (48 page)

The idea [of consciousness] is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self,
deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.

And for Carl Sagan, who argued that consciousness is closely tied to the benefit of imagining events that have not yet occurred, “The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it.”

There are also some practical problems. As a result of excessive “self-consciousness,” we are liable to trip over ourselves, whether literally when attempting to perform some physical act best done via the “flow” of unreflective automaticity or cognitively because of the infamous, chattering “monkey mind” so anathematized by Eastern traditions and that may require intense meditation or other disciplines to squelch. Even on a strictly biological basis, consciousness seems hard to justify, if only because it, like intelligence, evidently requires a large number of neurons, the elaboration and maintenance of which is energetically expensive. What is the compensating payoff?

One possibility—a biological null hypothesis—is that maybe consciousness hasn’t been selected for at all; maybe it is a nonadaptive by-product of having brains that exceed a certain size threshold, regardless of why those brains have been selected. A single molecule of water, for example, isn’t wet. Neither are two, or, presumably, a few thousand, or even a million. But put enough of them together in the same place and we get wetness—not because wetness is adaptively favored over, say, dryness or bumpiness, but simply as an unavoidable physical consequence of piling up enough H
₂
O molecules. Could consciousness be like that? Accumulate enough neurons—perhaps because they permit its possessor to integrate numerous sensory inputs and generate complex, variable behavior—wire them up, and presto, they’re conscious?

Personal confession: At this point, I would dearly love to support this hypothesis, if only to demonstrate my willingness to entertain the possibility that some important human traits might in fact be nonadaptive. (After all, I have already been less than welcoming to the best-known candidate for a nonadaptive byproduct: the curious case of female orgasm.) But the argument simply isn’t persuasive, mostly because given the undeniably large costs of building and maintaining complex brains, it is almost unimaginable—to any fully conscious brain thinking about
itself—that such an elaborate organ would evolve and persist unless it offered distinct reproductive benefits. It is so easy to become unconscious that one could readily imagine that any characteristic that is so specific, detailed, and vulnerable as well as expensive must be the result of positive selection—or else we would likely have big brains and thus elaborate sensory input, motor control, and so forth, but without consciousness.

Alternatively, it seems far more likely that consciousness really
is
adaptive. If so, then at minimum, at some time in the past, those who were conscious had to have been more fit than those who weren’t. More precisely, genes that contribute to consciousness must somehow have been more successful than alternative alleles in getting themselves projected into the future. One possible avenue toward this end would be if consciousness endowed its possessors with the capacity to play “what if” games, to engage in trial and error in one’s head. The Germans speak of so-called
gedanken
(thought) experiments, which involve running through various scenarios in one’s imagination without actually having to undergo the risk of doing so in real life. As philosopher Karl Popper put it, this “permits our hypotheses to die in our stead.” It is difficult to see how anyone could perform such calculations without sufficient conscious awareness of self to allow imaginative projection into the future.

Alternatively, consciousness could also benefit us by operating in the opposite domain, that of immediate sensations instead of imagination. It could, in short, enable its possessor to overrule the tyranny of pleasure and pain. Not that pleasure and pain are inherently disadvantageous. Indeed, both are imbued with considerable adaptive significance: The former is a proximate mechanism encouraging us to engage in activities that are fitness enhancing, and the latter, to refrain from those that are fitness reducing. But what about things that are fitness enhancing in the long run, but unavoidably painful in the short? Or vice versa?

Overeating, for example, might feel good but be nonetheless detrimental. In this case, perhaps a conscious individual can say to himself, “I want to gnaw a bit more on this gazelle leg, but I’d better not.” Or vice versa, something that feels acutely bad might be ultimately beneficial, requiring a conscious override of the usual rule of thumb that induces us to avoid pain: “I don’t want the
highly unpleasant sensation of having my infected tooth pulled out, but if I do it, I’ll be better off.” Once an individual starts mulling things over, essentially talking to herself about herself, she may be en route to consciousness, and with powerful adaptive momentum.

Part of this adaptive momentum might emerge directly from what is otherwise a likely downside of consciousness, as reflected in the earlier quotation from Ernest Becker. Thus, let’s grant that an important aspect of consciousness is explicit awareness of one’s own mortality. Numerous thinkers have already suggested, moreover, that one result of such awareness is a widespread, concerted effort to “live forever,” typically through various attempts at symbolic immortality: commissioning or constructing literal images of oneself, monuments, or other indications of continued presence in an otherwise transitory world, or in other ways striving to achieve something by which one’s name, reputation, influence, etc., will live … if not forever, at least longer than one’s own perishable flesh.

The next possible step (which I had conceived by myself but recently discovered had earlier been proposed by evolutionary biologist Lonnie W. Aarssen) is an easy step to imagine—at least for evolutionists: Maybe awareness of mortality isn’t merely a tangential consequence of consciousness but its primary adaptive value, if it has the effect of inducing people to seek yet another way of rebelling against mortality: by reproducing.
²⁷
If so, then consciousness as we normally recognize it (of self, others, of one’s perception of a rainbow, and so forth) may be a complex side effect of the real biological significance of consciousness: of our mortality and the prospect of having children—and grandchildren, etc.—in response. If so, then people endowed with such conscious awareness would presumably give rise to more children, grandchildren, etc., thereby selecting for the underlying cause.

Even more intriguing, perhaps, than consciousness as a facilitator of impulse control or override, or as a means of enhancing our ancestors’ fitness by inducing them to transcend their own impending death, is the possibility that it evolved in the context of our social lives, which, as we have seen, privileges a kind of Machiavellian intelligence whereby success in competition and cooperation is a function of intellectual capacity. Consciousness and intelligence
are closely allied, such that consciousness may itself be a key part of Machiavellian intelligence. If intelligence has been serviceable in part as a way of helping our ancestors successfully navigate the twists and turns of complex social life, the same could have been true of consciousness. Thus, if intelligence provided the raw horsepower needed to perform difficult social calculations, consciousness could have yielded the information necessary to direct all that energy by enabling early human beings to imagine another’s situation almost as well as our own.

The more accurate our perception of where others are “coming from,” the better able we are to act benevolently in their interest or—more likely—to serve our own.

Consciousness is not only an unfolding story that we tell ourselves, moment by moment, about what we are doing, feeling, and thinking. It also includes our efforts to interpret what other individuals are doing, feeling, and thinking, as well as how those others are likely to perceive oneself. Call it the Burns benefit, from the last stanza of the Scottish poet’s celebrated meditation
To a Louse
: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!/It wad frae monie a blunder free us/An’ foolish notion … .”

If, as sometimes suggested, character is what we do when no one is looking, maybe consciousness is precisely a Robert Burnsian evolutionary gift, our anticipation of how we seem to others who
are
looking. And maybe it evolved, accordingly, because it helped free us from many a blunder and foolish notion by enabling our consciously endowed ancestors to realize (in proportion as they were conscious) that, for example, seeming too selfish, or insufficiently altruistic, or too cowardly, too uninformed, too ambitious, too sexually voracious, and so forth would ill serve their ends. The more conscious our ancestors were, according to this argument, the more able they were to modify—to their own benefit—others’ impressions of them, and thereby to enhance their own evolutionary success. If so, then genes “for” consciousness would have enjoyed an advantage over alternative genes “for” social obtuseness.

Twice earlier, first when speculating about the possible adaptive significance of art—specifically, storytelling—and again when considering the evolution of religion, we briefly examined Theory of Mind (ToM), which is something of a “hot topic” among cognitive psychologists. Essentially, ToM is a sophisticated cognitive
mechanism whereby its possessors infer the mental attributes of others. After all, the minds of others are especially interesting to people, just as flowers are interesting to hummingbirds and rivers are interesting to otters: Our survival and reproduction depend upon them.

Achieving a ToM—that is, a valid notion about the minds of other people—is to succeed in a kind of mind reading, not literally, of course, but rather to have gained the benefit of insights into what is going on inside another’s head, so as better to predict his or her behavior. It might be possible to make accurate inferences of this sort without consciousness, but it seems likely that the greater the consciousness by individual A, the more successful she will be in constructing a valid model of the inner workings and thus the eventual behavior of individual B. It is one thing to conclude, without reflection, “That fellow is angry and hence, dangerous” because of his recent behavior. It is likely to be more fruitful, however, to say—to oneself—something like, “He seems angry, just as I was when something similar happened to me. Since I responded in such-and-such a way at that time, I bet he’ll respond similarly.”

In short, those who possess an accurate Theory of Mind can model the intentions of others and profit thereby. And it is at least possible that the more conscious you are, the more accurate is your Theory of Mind, since cognitive modelers should be more effective if they know, cognitively and self-consciously, not only what they are modeling but also
that
they are doing so. It is also worth noting that an accurate ToM can be useful in ways beyond the self-serving Machiavellian model. Thus, most people in most societies value “considerate” behavior on the part of themselves and others, and being considerate typically involves literally considering the interests, needs, and inclinations of other people. (Of course, a persistently cynical outlook would also suggest that even considerate behavior is itself fundamentally self-serving and thus, in a sense, manipulative and Machiavellian in its own way, but that’s another matter.)

Earlier, we considered the hypothesis that the human fondness for stories may be a consequence of the adaptive value of experiencing various social scenarios but without the risks of actually living through them. It is hard to imagine that anyone could read,
hear, or watch a story without being conscious that he or she is doing so, and that what is being attended to is in fact a story. It is equally hard to imagine that there haven’t been adaptive benefits to our ancestors who took such stories seriously, all the while knowing that they were doing so.

Just as consciousness doubtless derives at the proximate (“how”) level from material events occurring among neurons, the “why” of consciousness is unquestionably a matter of its evolutionary significance, occurring at the level of organisms, ecology, and natural selection. Nonetheless, many are convinced that consciousness (even more than intelligence) can only have come to us as a gift from God, an endowment enabling His chosen species to glorify the divine and do so with full, aware—that is, conscious—commitment to the saving of their souls. Similarly, there are those who maintain a mystical conception of the power of “cosmic consciousness” to move mountains, or at least, as the Yippies attempted in 1967, to levitate the Pentagon via concentrated psychic energy (an effort that, as I recall, never got off the ground), and/or an unshakeable confidence that we are surrounded by disembodied “morphogenetic fields” or other ineffable manifestations of some cerebral happening of which the merely material is only a pale semblance.

“But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears,” wrote Darwin, at the end of
The Descent of Man
,

only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. … [W]e must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

To this I would add that we also bear this stamp—of biology—not just in our bodily frame but also in our minds (including our consciousness), and not just when it comes to “how” but also “why.”