The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [99]
It’s a lot harder to do science than it is to spin out stories about why people do things in terms of their possible or plausible thoughts about stuff. Experimental science and abstract mathematical theorizing are difficult—boring drudgery for most people. But both are required to produce a neuroscientific explanation of human behavior. So, even many of us who endorse scientism will continue to read and watch and listen to the histories, biographies, memories, novels, films, plays, and broadcasts that employ the illusory approach of finding meaning and purpose in human affairs. It’s easier to follow and much more entertaining than science because it comes packaged as stories, and science never does. Fortunately for us, being scientistic doesn’t require we become scientists.
Now we know what’s wrong with stories. We know how we got saddled with a love of them. And alas, we also know why it’s so difficult for science to displace stories.
WHATEVER CONSCIOUSNESS DOES NOW,
IT WASN’T SELECTED FOR ITS POWER TO PLAN AHEAD
Conscious introspection is still screaming that what it says goes: thought has to be about stuff. And how can anyone deny the obvious fact that our lives are full of projects—long-term and short-term? People bake cakes following recipes, they plan their vacations and then go on them, they organize their studies to fulfill all the requirements to graduate from university, they spend years writing books, and they join together in multigenerational projects like building cathedrals or fighting a Thirty Years’ War (for religion, of course). How can anyone in their right mind deny this?
Of course people build cathedrals, write books, graduate from university, go on vacations, and bake cakes. That’s not in question. The question is what role conscious thought about the future plays in all this. Science tells us that introspection’s picture of how all this happens and the role thought about stuff plays in it can’t be right.
Why take science’s word for it? We’ve already answered that question. Nevertheless, it’s worth reminding ourselves how far introspection overreaches when it insists that no one could do anything like these things, alone or with others, unless conscious thought has most of the ideas, gives a lot of the orders, and crowns the achievement with the verbal expression of its approval.
One very obvious way to shake this conviction is to think about all the great achievements of beavers working together to build dams and lodges, wordlessly and without even training by their parents. If anyone thinks beavers do it by conscious thought and planning, consider the lowly insect. Within their highly structured, long-lasting, increasingly complex colonies, ants and wasps engage in division of labor and provide themselves and one another with the necessities of life. Some ants herd, cultivate, and feed other insects, aphids, while protecting them from predators and securing from them nourishment for themselves and their ant offspring. The farmer ants make the aphids secrete nourishment by milking them. The aphids release their honeydew when the ants stroke them with their antennae. Aphids don’t survive over cold winters, but the ants store the eggs. In fact, queen ants, the ones that reproduce to form new colonies, will carry an aphid egg along with them and start a new farm in the colony they create. Some species of aphid-cultivating ants have branched out into caterpillar cultivation; they allow a species of butterfly to lay its eggs among their aphids. The resulting caterpillar feeds on aphids. But at a certain point in caterpillar development, a couple of ants will move the caterpillar to their nest, where the caterpillar will produce honeydew in the nest. Thus, the ants are saved the trouble of carrying the honeydew into the nest from the aphids outside. Eventually, butterflies emerge and lay their eggs back in the aphid farm.