- seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
This, Humphrey argues, is how sensations came about. The
response circuits were then privatised and internalised, and per-
ceptions developed in a separate stream, but sensations still bear
the hallmark of their origins in bodily expression. This changes
the problem of consciousness by putting sensation on the side of
agency rather than reception, and this is how Humphrey (2000)
wants to solve the mind–body problem. Whether or not you
agree that turning sensations into actions really does solve the
mind–body problem, such enactive or sensorimotor theories do
not need to ask how or why consciousness evolved in its own right
because consciousness is not something separate from action.
This is also true of predictive-processing theories of conscious-
ness (e.g. Seth et al., 2012), which treat consciousness as the
result of top-down predictions generated throughout the course of our brain–
body–world interactions. These probability-based predictions are shaped by
prior knowledge accumulated over the lifespan. They take the form of interocep-
tive signals that, when they successfully match sensory inputs, yield conscious
experience. In these respects, predictive processing can be seen as extending and
adapting Humphrey’s ideas by introducing the concept of Bayesian probability in
a widely distributed system.
Humphrey goes on to explain why consciousness seems to matter to us so much:
‘it is its function to matter’ and to seem mysterious and other-worldly (2006, p.
131). Ancestors who believed in a mysterious consciousness and an unworldly
self would have taken themselves more seriously and placed more value on their
own and others’ lives. This is why belief in mind–body duality evolved.
So, on his ‘reductionist theory of what phenomenal consciousness is – it is a magic
show that you stage for yourself inside your own head’ (2011, pp. 198–199). This
sounds very much as though Humphrey is calling consciousness an illusion. He
likens our ‘magical mystery show’ to such visual illusions as the impossible tri-
angle or the Penrose stairs made famous by M.C. Escher’s paintings of impossi-
ble stairways, calling it an ‘ipsundrum’: an ‘illusion generating inner creation in
response to sensory stimulation’.
Yet, in the end, Humphrey (2016) denies illusionism, and his denial keeps his the-
ory firmly in this section. If ‘sensations are representations of something we do’
(2016, p. 117), internalising responses to incoming stimulation and making sense
of them, then sensations have real effects in the world. Natural selection would
operate on these effects and eventually lead to the kinds of minds we have today.
Consciousness may be a magic show, but its effects are real enough.THE EVOLUTION OF ILLUSION
Others disagree. Our last possibility is that phenomenal consciousness, as usu-
ally conceived, is illusory (Chapter 3). Illusions themselves may have effects, but
experiences do not have phenomenal or ‘what-it’s-like-to-be’ properties, and ‘con-
sciousness itself ’ does not exist. So natural selection has nothing to work on. Just
as Frankish (2016b) has argued for replacing the hard problem with the illusion
problem, so we should be replacing the question ‘how did consciousness evolve?’
with ‘how did the illusion of consciousness evolve?’‘it is our capacity to tell
others of the contents of
our consciousness that
confers the evolutionary
advantage’
(Halligan and Oakley, 2015,
p. 27)
‘[Consciousness] is a
magic show that you
stage for yourself inside
your own head’
(Humphrey, 2011, p. 199)
‘illusionism [. . .] should
be considered the front
runner’
(Dennett, 2016, p. 65)
FIGURE 11.9 • Humphrey (2011) likens
consciousness to visual illusions
such as these Penrose stairs.