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History, biography, the “interpretative” social sciences, all the literary arts and humanities are the result of conscious introspection’s commitment to explaining human affairs in terms of purposes, plans, designs—thoughts about the way the world is and the way it might be. We love Homer’s Iliad, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Churchill’s History of the Second World War, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Shakespeare’s Henry V. We love them because they are so good at exploiting the brain’s taste for stories with plots. We mistakenly think—or rather feel—that only plots can convey understanding of human affairs. Our literature, too—from epic poems to stream of consciousness—is the search for motives and meanings in thoughts about things. Once it becomes evident that such thoughts are poor guides to the neural causes of what we do, much of the mystification and frustration of the humanities becomes clear.

The thoughts about human actions that are supposed to give them meaning and purpose have no reality in the brain. Our own apparent thoughts about things are crude indicators of the real causes of our own behavior. We guess at the thoughts of others from their behavior, their actions, their statements and speeches, their letters and diaries. But the results of our guessing are equally unreliable indicators of what actually moves people. How people behave, including what they say and write, does place some constraints on how we perceive their thoughts. Behavior limits what thoughts about the world we put in people’s heads. But the constraints aren’t strong enough ever to narrow down our guesses to just one set of sentences that fits all the physical facts about anyone’s behavior and circumstances. Even if the constraints did permit us to narrow down our guesses about which markers are currently playing across a subject’s consciousness, the result still would not improve our understanding, our explanations, our predictions of behavior, for those same markers could be the results of any number of quite different packages of neural circuits, and each package would have a different effect on behavior.

Once you recognize that there is no way to take seriously both what neuroscience tells us about the springs of human action in the brain and what introspection tells us about it, you have to choose. Take one fork and seek interpretation of human affairs in the plans, purposes, designs, ideologies, myths, or meanings that consciousness claims actually move us. Take the other fork, the one that scientism signposts, and you must treat all the humanities as the endlessly entertaining elaborations of an illusion. They are all enterprises with no right answers, not even coming closer to approximating our understanding of anything. You cannot treat the interpretation of behavior in terms of purposes and meaning as conveying real understanding. It often allays the intermittent feeling of curiosity, of course. The ability stories have to allay that feeling is what natural selection exploited to solve the design problem of getting us from the Pleistocene to the present.

It’s obvious why most people have chosen the interpretative culture of the humanities, the path of embroidering on illusion, even after science hit its stride. To begin with, there was selection for the theory-of-mind ability, which carried along conscious thoughts that seem to be about the conspiracies behind people’s behavior. The ability still works, up to limits that social and behavioral science has discovered. Like any by-product of a local adaptation, interpreting people’s behavior in terms of motives is hard to shake, even when the brain’s predictions go wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong. We won’t give up relying on interpretation until long after the ability that carries it along has ceased to be adaptive. Why? Because interpreting other people’s lives by figuring out what their