• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The phenomena revealed in the colonies of cultivator ants cry out for the language of purpose, planning, and design. In writing the preceding paragraph, I had to guard myself from employing terms like “in order to,” “for the sake of,” “so that.” I didn’t entirely succeed. The complexity and coordination of the social insects would justify giving a role to consciously formulated thoughts in each individual ant about how to do their job if it were not ruled out by their simple neural circuitry. The resulting social institutions of herding, protecting, farming, milking, and cultivating that the colony organizes demand a teleological, goal-directed view of nature. Or, rather, they would demand it if not for the fact that they were all the result of blind variation and environmental filtration. Indeed, molecular biologists are on the verge of identifying the genes and tracing the sequence of mutations that brought about the social insects.

In the ant colony, each and all engage in different activities of greater and lesser degrees of complex organization. Their individual behaviors are coordinated, and they produce adapted outcomes that improve and increase in size and complexity over at least as many generations as in humans would be required to build a cathedral. And they do it all with somewhere on the order of 25,000 neurons total and no consciousness whatever. That’s about 10 million times fewer neurons than the average human is stuck with, though genetic and anatomical data strongly suggests that what goes on in each of the ant’s neurons is not much different from what goes on in each of ours.

Are the achievements of humans 10 million times more impressive than what ants can do? Is building a cathedral 10 million times more complicated than building an ant colony? The question is silly. The point is not. Common sense’s assertion that conscious planning is the only way that complex human creations emerge is belied by a great deal of scientific evidence about how this happens among other animals.

Having 10 million times more neurons than an ant probably has something to do with the fact that we are conscious and self-conscious. But it’s sheer bluster for common sense to assert that it knows anything much of what consciousness does, or how it does it, from introspection alone.

Science doesn’t deny that most of what we do requires thinking. It has not even ruled out the possibility that the conscious brain states are required for behavior of the sort that results in complex human achievements, works of art, artifacts, buildings, social institutions, even vacations to Paris. It denies only introspection’s take on what that role is. To repeat, neuroscience has yet to identify the function or functions of consciousness. As noted, it is probably too prominent in our mental lives merely to be an unavoidable by-product with nothing to contribute to survival and reproduction. Nevertheless, there is one thing consciousness can’t contribute: It cannot contribute thoughts about the future or thoughts about how to arrange the future to match up with current thoughts about how we want things to be. For that reason, it cannot contribute purposes, plans, or projects. All that is an illusion foisted on us by a process that this chapter has sketched. The illusion, like others, rides piggyback on a complex ability—the theory-of-mind ability—that has been improved on by selection about as far as it can go. That ability had a payoff in the Pleistocene. It continues to pay dividends in ordinary life. The illusion that we actually have thoughts about the mind—ours and everyone else’s—is carried along for the ride. Because it’s so hard to surrender, it will obstruct neuroscience’s opportunities to identify the ability, explain how it works, and treat its pathologies.

WE BEGAN THIS CHAPTER asking where science gets off pulling rank on common sense, telling it where it goes wrong. The answer is so compelling that its result is scientism, as defined in Chapter 1. Now we see that the real question is where common sense comes off making claims