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Our conscious thoughts are very crude indicators of what is going on in our brain. We fool ourselves into treating these conscious markers as thoughts about what we want and about how to achieve it, about plans and purposes. We are even tricked into thinking they somehow bring about behavior. We are mistaken about all of these things. Meanwhile, our brain’s input/output circuits are working, behind the curtain so to speak, creating these illusions by playing markers out in a (quasi-)grammatical or syntactical order though consciousness. Whatever neural arrangements these conscious markers consist of, they are almost certainly not sufficient in number or organization by themselves to drive the behavior that is supposed to result from conscious thoughts about stuff. When it comes to causing and guiding our actions, the stream of consciousness is pretty much just along for the ride, like the conscious feeling of choosing in Libet’s experiments. This is just another reason to treat conscious thoughts as crude indicators, not rough approximations of anything the brain is actually doing.

This is not to deny that consciousness does some important things in our psychology. It’s probably too big a deal not to have been organized by natural selection to solve some design problem or other, perhaps several. Exactly what its functions are, what design problem it solves, neuroscience has not yet figured out. It’s tempting to suspect that among its functions—one of the adaptations it confers—is the illusion that thought is about stuff. After all, that illusion is one that Mother Nature seems to have pounced on to ensure our survival.

If propounding the illusion that thought is about stuff were really one of the adaptations consciousness conferred on us, it was a very dirty solution. Because our conscious thoughts are poor indicators of the neural causes of our behavior, the predictions we make in ordinary life, based on them, about our own behavior are pretty weak. Our predictions of other people’s behavior, based on guesses that they, too, have thoughts about stuff, are even worse.

Given how bad folk psychology is at predicting and explaining our own and other people’s actions, it’s a wonder that it was good enough to provide a quick and dirty solution to the design problem our species faced when it left the rain forest for the savanna and its megafaunal predators. If Mother Nature had had world enough and time enough, she might have crafted a more elegant solution to the problem of getting us to cooperate, coordinate, and collaborate well enough to survive on the savanna. A more elegant solution might have limited our assignment of purposes or thoughts to animals more complicated than frogs. It certainly would not have gone in for the panpsychism that treats everything as if it were the manifestation of some mind’s purposes. But the only way it could make the love of stories innate was by overshooting and projecting our thoughts onto the rest of nature, seeing conspiracies everywhere. It’s natural selection overshooting that produces religion. Perhaps scientism is an incipient response to strong natural selection for improvements to our ability to predict human behavior. Such an improvement will be needed if our species is to survive in the environment we have created for ourselves since the Holocene began 10,000 years ago.

Nature exploited the folk psychology theory that introspection imposed on our ancestors. It made use of the fiction to produce enough cooperation, coordination, and collaboration to get us to the top of the African food chain and then through a couple of ice ages to the top of the food chain everywhere. Once we got into the Holocene, the obstacles to a scientific understanding created by introspection’s illusions began to really make their mark on human culture. They generated our partiality to stories and our resistance to science. They will probably continue to do so for most people, even after neuroscience succeeds