moral decision, and/or that any power of consciousness is illusory and he only felt
as though he consciously decided because of the way his brain functions.
These answers to the morality question all have very different implications for
understanding the evolution of consciousness and why we are conscious at all.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to
know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see
both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one
and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality.
You’re always better off looking at more than one side of anything.
Go on, try. Defocus. It’s the next logical step.
(Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006, p. 302)
There are many people in the world who deny that consciousness did evolve. For
example, some religious believers reject the very idea that humans evolved at all,
despite the overwhelming evidence. Some Christians and Muslims believe that
even if our bodies evolved like those of other animals, we alone have God-given
souls and God alone can give us consciousness. Such souls are not dependent on
the evolved body, so these ideas are thoroughly dualist.
A non-dualist can also deny that consciousness evolved by proposing that con-
sciousness is fundamental to the universe and always existed, or that it is the
power which drives evolution along, rather than being an evolved product itself.
Yet few scientists, even those who believe in God, would want to ‘throw away the
idea that consciousness evolved by natural selection’. So let us accept the idea
that consciousness evolved. Does this mean it must have a function?
At first sight, Humphrey’s statements seem unexceptionable, and even look like
a useful prescription for finding out why we are conscious. First, we find out what
consciousness does, then we find out how that would have been useful for our
ancestors’ survival and reproduction. Then, hey presto, we have found out why
consciousness evolved. But things are not so simple. Lurking within this appar-
ently obvious statement are two, closely related, problems.
The first is this. When we asked ‘What does consciousness do?’ (Chapter 8), we
found no easy answer. Indeed, a good case can be made for the idea that con-
sciousness does nothing, or at least that it does nothing in its own right, separate
from all the underlying processes that determine our behaviour. If consciousness
does nothing, how can it have a function?
The second problem is related to the first. When we think about the evolution of
consciousness, it seems easy to imagine that if things had turned out differently
we might not have been conscious. The logic goes something like this.
I can see why intelligence has evolved because it is obviously useful.
I can see why memory, imagination, problem-solving, and thinking have
evolved because they are all useful. So why didn’t we evolve all these
abilities ‘in the dark’? There must have been some extra reason why we
got consciousness as well.
