Consciousness and the Social Brain

consciousness, of perceiving it in others and perceiving it in oneself, has more to do with being human and relating to other humans, with being part of a community, with enhancing human effectiveness through cohesion, than it does with the specific task of predicting attentional state.
    The idea that consciousness plays a role in social cohesion has been suggested by others. 16 – 18 I believe the idea is plausible and fully consistent with the attention schema theory. The attention schema theory explains the possible starting point, the specific mechanism, the pragmatic, first-order survival advantage to awareness—a predictive model of attention. But a trait that has such a pervasive effect on behavior surely must serve many uses. If something as mechanical and straight-forward as a foot can have half a dozen common uses beyond the obvious use in locomotion, then awareness must surely be put to a range of uses beyond tracking and predicting attentional state.
    Fins evolved to help fish swim. Yet they can also be used to drag a body across the ground. Hence, incrementally, the legs of tetra-pods evolved during the Devonian period. Legs evolved to help animals walk. Yet the front legs, when spread out with sufficient surface area, can catch the air. Hence wings evolved. Perhaps, as proposed in this book, awareness evolved as a predictive model of attention—specific, useful, limited. Here I suggest that a predictive model of attention is unlikely to be the only functional use of this trait of awareness. Instead, in humans, awareness may have evolved into our social and humanistic wings. We are the most social of all species on earth, in the sense that we have the most complex social universe. We spend our lives embedded in a social matrix. One recent suggestion, for example, is that awareness serves the adaptive function of making life emotionally lovely and therefore worth living. 19
    Consider human spirituality—the tendency to see spirits everywhere, to see mind not only in ourselves and in each other, not only in pets and other animals, but also in cars that we get mad at when they don’t start; in house plants that we talk to as we water them; in the favorite stuffed animals of children, like Hobbes of Calvin and Hobbes; in storms that seem like the products of angry spirits; in the empty spaces at night when you get the creepy irrational feeling that someone is in your house uninvited. It is really only a small step from the universal perception of mind everywhere to the moreformalized notions of ghosts, angels, devils, and deities. However much the nonsuperstitious may smile at the superstitious, we are all engaged in more or less the same habit: actively constructing a perceptual world suffused with spirit. We are all spiritual. Let me make sure the statement is unambiguous: even the atheistic scientists among us, such as myself, cannot help being spiritual. It is built into our social machinery. It is what people are.
    One might ask, what could possibly be the adaptive advantage of so much misapplied social perception? Granted, perceiving mind in ourselves, and perceiving mind in other people and in animals, has its uses. It is good for behavioral prediction. But really, what is the adaptive advantage of perceiving mind in things that have no brains? Why so much irrationality?
    Why spirituality? This question is the target of an enormous amount of theorizing. 1 – 5 One common proposal is that spirituality must have some definite benefit to people. Since we humans have it, and have it like crazy in every culture, it must somehow be good for us, otherwise the trait would have died out. Perhaps religious mythology binds together a community. Group cohesion can help the individuals in the group survive. Hence spirituality offers a survival advantage. Or perhaps spirituality helps people feel more socially connected and thus helps in psychological health. In 2001, reviewing the large literature on religion and health, Koenig and Cohen 20 reported that seventy-nine percent of the studies obtained a positive link. Religiosity was linked to better health. This type of finding makes headlines and is all too easy to politicize. The argument has been made that merely being in a social group of any type, religious or not, provides the health benefit. 21
    Another hypothesis to explain spirituality suggests that it does not itself benefit us but is a side product of something else beneficial. It is an evolutionary