The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [94]
These cognitive resources made possible early and accurate learning of any human language at all by any normal human infant at all. Ever since the earliest work of Noam Chomsky, there has been a research program in cognitive linguistics that aims to identify these distinct human capacities and even to locate them in the human brain. There is no doubt that they were being shaped and selected for by the factors that selected for the theory of mind and the proclivity to cooperation that our ancestors needed to survive. The hardwired capacities were needed to learn language early and accurately. But they weren’t enough. As most cognitive linguists will acknowledge, the innate brain structures can’t do much more than detect something like grammar or syntax. They had little role in determining which shrieks and grunts would go with which behaviors. Otherwise we would not all be able to learn every language from birth equally well.
Since every component of the conscious and unconscious states of the brain involved in all these processes—both the evolutionary ones and the ontogenetic ones—are just clumps of matter, there can’t be any aboutness anywhere in the process, just the overpowering illusion of it.
The complex behavior of people is beautifully suited to their circumstances, even more beautifully suited than a frog’s flicking at a fly. That’s why humans think their brains just have to be carrying around thoughts about those circumstances, thoughts about their own wants and needs, and thoughts about how to exploit those circumstances to meeting their wants and needs. Introspection of our own consciousness strengthens this conviction even more. We assume that other people are like us, that they have minds that carry around thoughts about their circumstances and their needs. Combined, introspection of ourselves and observation of others drive us to the inescapable conclusion that we and everyone else have thoughts about other people’s minds. Our thoughts about their thoughts plus the theory of mind lead us to conclude that many of their thoughts take the form of purposes, plans, designs, aims, and objectives. These purposes and designs, aims and objectives drive behavior in the appropriate direction—the future, right?
Once it emerged in human evolutionary history, the illusion that thought is about stuff took hold firmly. Why? Because we began talking “about” it, especially in the context of plans, purposes, and designs. Plans, purposes, and designs are illusions, too. But they enabled us to begin telling stories to ourselves and others. The stories were just by-products of the solution to the number one design problem that faced Homo sapiens in the Pleistocene: ganging up on the megafauna.
Having thoughts about the future is necessary for having plans, purposes, or designs. In fact, all you need to have a plan is to think about something you want in the future and about how to go about getting it. That much is obvious. But if your brain can’t think about anything, it can’t have thoughts about the future. To have a design for how you want things to be arranged, you have to have thoughts about how to arrange them. To act on your plans, your designs for how things should be in the future, you have to have thoughts now about how to bring about your plans, some thoughts about what tools and resources you will need. Purposes, plans, recipes, and designs in the head have to be thoughts about stuff in the world—thoughts about how you want it to be arranged in the future and thoughts about how it’s arranged now. All this is obvious. Less obvious is the fact that the brain has no trouble taking steps that will be rewarded (or punished), depending on how things turn out in the future. But it doesn’t do this by having thoughts about the future or anything else