The Human Instinct by Kenneth R. Miller

Author:Kenneth R. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 6

Consciousness

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To steal a line from philosopher David Chalmers,1 right now there’s a movie playing in my head, and there’s one in your head, too. It’s a super-high-definition 3-D movie, complete with surround sound as well as hyper-realistic scents, touch-and-feel breezes, and even the sensation of sunlight on my skin. In addition, my movie has running commentary. I look at the wispy clouds overhead and wonder whether they are stratus or cirrus. A bird soars overhead, and when I spot the splash of color on its trailing feathers, a voice whispers, “red-tailed hawk.” I turn to the pickup truck in my driveway, and the voice says, “Time for that oil change. And, oh yeah, we need some milk. Remember to get that on the way back.” I’m immersed in the movie from morning till night. The movie is inside of me, of course, but it’s outside of me, too. That’s because the movie is not only from the outside world, for me it is the outside world. In fact, it seems so real that at times I forget it’s a movie. What I’m describing, of course, is consciousness, mine and yours.

Many philosophers, and even a few biologists, see those movies as a problem. They doubt that the properties of ordinary matter can account for the power and subtlety of human conscious experience without reducing it to a set of chemical reactions lacking meaning or value.

Going further, they point out that evolution is a physical process, based on a purely material understanding of nature. Since everything human is supposedly accounted for by evolution, that means consciousness itself is a problem for evolution. Thoughts like these have led a prominent American philosopher to proclaim that the “neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.” Is this so? Or is there a way to understand the phenomenon of consciousness as a byproduct of evolution that in fact emphasizes the meaning and value of human thought?

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