The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [93]
Back to the evolutionary process. The environment persistently filtered for variations that fine-tuned coordination of noises and actions into proto-language, pidgins, and eventually full-fledged language. In each individual, the process carried along conscious markers that silently reproduced the grunts and shrieks that hominins made when collaborating. When the behaviors and the noises and their silent copies in consciousness became finely tuned enough to their environment, the result was the illusion that the grunts and the thoughts were about stuff.
Let’s consider how the illusion of aboutness emerges ontogenetically, in the infant and child. Here there is already a fair amount of experimental evidence that sheds light on the process. Just after birth, babies can discriminate about 600 sounds. There are hardwired neural connections in the newborn brain that respond distinctively to that many sounds. No aboutness there, just different hardwired input/output circuits. Exposure to English noises from its parents pares down the number of sounds the baby can discriminate to about 45. The winnowing from 600 noises to 45 can’t have produced any aboutness either. But now appropriate responses to these 45 sound stimuli have become adaptive—they pay off in milk, comfort, attention. Still no aboutness in the baby’s consciousness, but already the illusion has kicked in for the parents: they start treating the baby’s thoughts as being about stuff—food, warmth, companionship.
Experiments comparing children under 2 and adult chimps show that both have about the same factual understanding about space and time, objects and causation. But unlike chimps, the kids are already spontaneously collaborating with others. Unlike chimps, and without training or reward, they are willing to coordinate their behavior to mesh with different behavior by other people. The differences between humans and chimps in this regard is a window on the evolutionary history of language and on its emergence in the individual.
The proclivity to collaborate spontaneously, recognizably, and without reward powerfully strengthens other peoples’ illusion that the baby has thoughts about stuff. Meanwhile, the illusion of aboutness in the child’s introspection emerges during the very same period when the baby finds itself consciously running through the noises it has heard and made. It is a gradual process that begins when the silent sound markers in consciousness—“ma” or “milk”—begin repeatedly to match events in the baby’s immediate environment. The introspective illusion builds as the child’s brain becomes sophisticated enough to respond to other people’s pointing gestures, sometimes paired with sounds. The process of illusion-building finishes off when the neural circuits in the child’s brain have been trained by operant conditioning to respond appropriately to noises other people make that coordinates their behavior with the child’s. At this point, the neural circuits are also generating silent versions of these speech markers in consciousness. The child is well on the way to absorbing the illusion that conscious markers like “ma” and “milk” are about specific features of their circumstances.
The cognitive capacities that create both illusions—the observer’s illusion that the baby’s thoughts are about stuff and the baby’s introspective illusion that its thoughts are about stuff—have been selected for over evolutionary time. Elemental versions of the same process must have occurred among our hominin ancestors at all ages. Throughout life, not just in early childhood, packages of noises and coordinated actions were shaped by processes of selection operating on behaviors. At the same time, there was very strong selection for neural capacities that preserve,