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The discoveries reported in this chapter can’t fully prepare you for how wrong introspection is. Nothing really can. Ultimately, science and scientism are going to make us give up as illusory the very thing conscious experience screams out at us loudest and longest: the notion that when we think, our thoughts are about anything at all, inside or outside of our minds. I know this sounds absurd, but we’ll see why this must be so in the next chapter. The physical facts fix all the facts. It’s because they do that thinking about stuff is impossible. What is more, neuroscience has already made it plain how the brain thinks without its thoughts being about anything at all. Thinking about things is an overwhelmingly powerful illusion. Once we learn how this profound illusion is produced, we’ll understand why it’s hard to cast the illusions of consciousness aside for the real answers to the relentless questions about self, mind, soul, free will, and the meaning of life. But we will also see why we must do so.

Chapter 8

THE BRAIN

DOES EVERYTHING

WITHOUT THINKING

ABOUT ANYTHING

AT ALL

NOW WE ARE MORE THAN HALFWAY THROUGH this tour of how science answers the persistent questions. So far, science’s challenges to common sense and to ordinary beliefs have not been difficult to accept. But the going is going to get much harder. In this chapter and the next two, we will see that several of the most fundamental things that ordinary experience teaches us about ourselves are completely illusory. Some of these illusions are useful for creatures like us, or at least they have been selected for by the environmental filters that our ancestors passed through. But other illusions have just been carried along piggyback on the locally adaptive traits that conferred increased fitness on our ancestors in the Pleistocene. These fellow travelers are the ones we need to stop taking seriously because they prevent us from recognizing the right answers to our unavoidable questions. What is more, in the environment we humans are creating that will filter our own future evolution, they may turn out to be maladaptive traits. As nihilists, we can’t condemn maladaptive traits as morally bad ones. But we certainly can figure out whether or not these maladaptations are ones that we or our successors would want.

Some of the conclusions to which science commits us sound so bizarre that many people, including scientists and philosophers, have gone to great lengths to avoid them, deny them, or search for a way of taking the sting out of them. Among the seemingly unquestionable truths science makes us deny is the idea that we have any purposes at all, that we ever make plans—for today, tomorrow, or next year. Science must even deny the basic notion that we ever really think about the past and the future or even that our conscious thoughts ever give any meaning to the actions that express them. I don’t expect you to accept these outrageous claims without compelling arguments for them. Moreover, once you are convinced to accept them, you won’t have to deny that we think accurately and act intelligently in the world. You will just have to deny that we do it in anything like the way almost everyone thinks we do. Your answers to the relentless questions keeping us and other people up nights will have to be definitively different from most people’s answers. What’s more, your views about the importance of history and the social sciences, literature and the humanities, will have to be decidedly deflationary. I am not going to ask you to take my word for all this quite yet.

You can see why many who seek to make science accepted by everyone would be unhappy with these counterintuitive conclusions. These unwelcome conclusions have not escaped the notice of scientists and philosophers, and they have sought to avoid or mitigate them. Ever since science became central to our culture, there has been a veritable industry devoted to harmonizing science’s findings with the prescientific worldview.