Consciousness and the Social Brain

trouble. The reason is that, by talking about consciousness, I am often led through question-and-answer to the topic of spirituality. Spirituality is, literally, about spirits. We humans see spirit in ourselves, in other people, in our pets, and sometimes, depending on who you are talking to, in the inanimate objects around us, or in the spaces around us, or in the universe as a whole. The spirit world is the world of perceived consciousness. How many times have you gotten mad at your car because it won’t start? How many children perceive a soul in a stuffed animal? How many people believe in a deistic mind, an omnipotent awareness? Consciousness, especially our human tendency to attribute consciousness to the things around us, provides the stuff of the spirit world. Talk about consciousness and you soon begin to talk about spiritual belief.
    Yet the scientific study of spirituality and religiosity is not as widely recognized as it ought to be. To talk about spirituality or religion to a roomful of scientists, you are expected to start with a disclaimer, a clear statement of allegiance. The audience expects you to announce, either in words or tone of voice, “I don’t believe in the silliness, religion is the cause of most social ills, and I am about to denigrate it.” Having communicated your loyalties and reassured theaudience, you are then accepted into the group and the audience is willing to listen to your scientific story.
    My difficulty is that I do not have so negative a view of human spiritual or religious behavior. I am an atheist in the literal sense—I do not believe that an actual deity created the universe (or created anything at all). I do not believe in spirits that are separate from the machinery of the brain. Like many scientists I think consciousness is a construction of the human brain. Disembodied spirits therefore do not exist, and no minds of any kind existed before the evolution of the brain. However, an intensively human phenomenon exists—spirituality. It reminds me of music, another complex and intensively human phenomenon, also completely irrational, that is an important part of my own life. The amount of mental calories I’ve burnt on playing and composing music over the course of my life is incredible. If I can have my music then I don’t begrudge people their religion. I would rather study it as a fascinating part of the natural world than preach against it.
    I think it is easy for the atheistic side to point to an extreme segment of religion, that fifteen or twenty percent that are so dogmatic, so shrill, and so afraid of intellectual enlightenment that they harm the rest of us. Religion can be terribly destructive. But the vast majority of people belong to a different religious mindset. The moderate religious are too often forgotten in the culture-war debates. They compose the bulk of the human population. Most people that I’ve talked to are curious about the world around them. They want to know. They welcome insight into the deep questions. Who are we, where did we come from, what happens when we die, what is a mind, can it exist independently of a physical body, is there a higher intelligence that governs it all or are we the highest intelligence in the neighborhood?
    When moderate people look to the more extreme religious leaders, the answers are not satisfactory. Too much certainty. Too much blind trust required. And somehow the blind trust ends up benefitting the leaders themselves, usually financially. So people turn toscience. I believe most people are fascinated by what science might tell us about the deep philosophical questions. The difficulty is that science has some of the same bad habits. Too much outward certainty. Too little consideration for people’s cultural choices. The attitude needlessly turns people away.
    For all these reasons I would like to say here that I do not claim to have the answers to the deep questions. Scientific certainty is not possible. Moreover, by explaining consciousness in a mechanistic fashion, I am not attempting to do away with spirituality. In the theory described in this book, spirit is information in the brain and therefore literally exists. I accept the usefulness—the cultural usefulness, the humanistic usefulness, the personal usefulness—of considering spiritual questions.
    Having a specific theory of consciousness, of what a spirit actually
is
, brings with it a certain advantage. I can apply the theory to many of the