The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [95]
Since there are no thoughts about things, notions of purpose, plan, or design in the mind are illusory. Farewell to the purpose-driven life. Whatever is in our brain driving our lives from cradle to grave, it is not purposes. But it does produce the powerful illusion of purposes, just like all the other purposeless adaptations in the biological realm.
Scientism could have reached the conclusion that there are no purposes or designs in the brain without any help from neurolinguistics, behavioral biology, or evolutionary anthropology. There are no purposes or designs in nature. Newtonian physics banished them from reality. Darwinian biology explained away their appearance everywhere. That has to go for our brain as much as for any other physical thing in the universe. Scientism is already committed to a purpose-free mind. It’s the job of the neurosciences to explain how the brain works without purposes and how the brain produces such a beautiful appearance of purpose without its reality.
Neuroscience has already started on this task in its demonstration of how neurons deliver the behavior that looks overwhelmingly like it’s purpose driven. Neuroscience has not yet done much to explain why some of this neural activity is conscious introspection or how consciousness works to help produce the illusion of aboutness.
Purpose and its parent, aboutness, are illusions created by introspection. The noises and the marks we “address” to one another were long ago hit on by Mother Nature as quick and dirty solutions to survival problems. These noises and marks were jumped on by natural selection to solve the problem humans faced coming out of the rain forest into the savanna. During this process, the illusions emerged that these noises and marks are about stuff, have meanings, and that the meanings and aboutness are in our heads, in our conscious minds. All there really was and is are these markers, ones that come out of our mouths and are heard by others, and silent ones that move around in introspection. The noises, and eventually writing, along with the silent markers in conscious thought, are what eventually produced the beginnings of culture—storytelling. Then rudimentary culture selected for further elaboration of these markers in speech, in introspection, and in writing. It also fostered, reinforced, and elaborated the illusion that they meant stuff. So deeply did the illusion become embedded that no one noticed it until science had been underway for several hundred years. With a pedigree that stretches back into the Pleistocene, no wonder the illusions that thoughts and words are about stuff are the hardest ones to give up.
Scientism enables us to stop worrying about these meanings along with meanings of our lives—and the meaning of human life in general. As we’ll see, it helps us see through the snake oil sold to those of us who seek meaning, and science shows why none of their nostrums really work for most people. It’s because the nostrums are built on illusion—usually self-inflicted illusion. Do we need a substitute, a replacement, an alternative to meaning to make us go on living? The short answer is no, and the details are given in Chapter 12.
MOTHER NATURE MADE US CRUDE
CONSPIRACY THEORISTS
Natural selection made us crude conspiracy theorists, using the introspective markers we mistake for our own plans and designs to cause behavior, and using other people’s noises and inscriptions to figure out their behavior. This sort of conspiracy theorizing to predict other people’s behavior has limited but long-standing adaptive value. That’s why Mother Nature found a way of addicting us to it. We use other people’s behavior, including the noises they make (their talk) and the inscriptions they scratch out (their writing), along with our own silent markers and mental images, to guide our expectations about other people’s behavior. When we get it right, there’s the relief from curiosity and the psychological satisfaction that makes us keep doing it. Do enough of that sort of thing and you get stories with plots: