Consciousness and the Social Brain

attribute awareness to a puppet, or a tree, or an imagined ghost. In that case, the awareness is misapplied. If awareness is a model of attention, and attention is a property of a brain, then attributing awareness to a thing that has no brain is a misuse of the skill. Its advantage is negated. In this view, attributing awareness to an objectwith no brain is an evolutionary mistake. It is counterproductive. No frivolous imagination allowed! Consciousness should not be attributed to puppets! Or trees! Or “angry” storms! Or ghosts! Only to actual biological beings with complex brains. Anything else is an error, a drain on the human endeavor, an evolutionary hindrance. This perspective dismisses the ghosts and the gods and the spirits with a dose of hard-nosed pragmatism. It is, I find, a common position among scientists with whom I discuss the topic.
    The difficulty with this pragmatic perspective lies in assuming that any trait has an evolutionary purpose. There really is no such thing as an evolutionary purpose. Traits evolve and once present can be used in a great variety of contexts, some that have nothing to do with the original evolutionary path. This reinvention of adaptive uses was first suggested by Darwin. 12 Steven Jay Gould elaborated on the idea. 13 , 14 He called it “cooption,” or “exaptation,” when a trait that evolved for one adaptive function is taken over at a later time by a different function. He pointed out that some traits evolve for no good adaptive advantage of their own, much as spandrels, the nonfunctional empty spaces here and there in buildings, arise because of other surrounding architectural necessities. 15 These spandrel-like traits, which have no obvious original function, can eventually take on an adaptive function. Evolution works opportunistically. There is, of course, no moral imperative and no adaptive advantage in us humans trying to stay true to what we imagine to be the evolutionary purpose of a trait.
    As an example of the multiple functions of a biological trait, take the case of the human foot. It evolved in a way that makes it good for walking and running. But is the purpose of a foot to help us walk and run? If I use my foot for some other reason, am I violating an evolutionary purpose? Am I guilty of a transgression? Hardly. People use feet in a great variety of opportunistic ways. We tap rhythms, we kick each other, we use our feet to showcase fashionable shoes, we tickle a child’s feet as a part of social interaction. These uses have nothing to do with walking or running. A foot doesn’t really have a
purpose
, inthe sense of a particular, proper, sanctioned way that it is intended to be deployed. Instead it has many uses—some more common, some less common, some for which it is better fitted, some for which it is less well fitted, some that provide an adaptive advantage, and some that might not.
    The same flexibility applies to the trait of consciousness, just as it does to any other evolved trait. Throughout this book I’ve proposed that awareness evolved as a predictive model of attention. Supposing this hypothesis is correct, it in no way implies that awareness is limited to that particular function. Awareness may have a great range of uses. Evolution may have shaped it further such that it contributes to many behavioral functions.
    Once we see consciousness as linked to social perception, once we understand that one’s own awareness and one’s perception of awareness in others are manifestations of the same underlying process, then we have a vast range of new possible adaptive uses to which consciousness can be put.
    Consciousness, for example, could be used as a tool for social cohesion. If you perceive consciousness in someone, then you empathize and you cooperate. If you perceive consciousness in an object, a talisman, then maybe you create a cultural focus, an item around which the community can bond. If you can generate a model of consciousness for a person who is described to you, who is in your imagination, who is not actually present, then maybe you can maintain social bonds across distances when messages are carried from person to person. When the members of an audience listen to a story and invest themselves in the larger-than-life fictional characters of the story, perceiving mind and soul in those characters, then the audience becomes knitted together by a common mythology. In all of these contexts, the adaptive advantage of