Consciousness and the Social Brain

spandrel, or an exaptation. 13 One of the most important proposals in this literature is Barrett’s 3 suggestion that people have a hyperactive agency detection device (HADD). In this hypothesis the human brain contains machinery fordetecting agency, such as detecting a predator that might be sneaking up on you. It is advantageous to tune that detector to a state of hyperactivity. It is better to be jumpy, to detect agency where it does not exist and remain safe than to make the opposite error and get eaten. Because of the hyperactivity of this device, humans are prone to believe in spirits and ghosts. The cost is smaller than the benefit.
    While I appreciate the idea of the HADD, I suggest that the advantage of our human hypersociality goes way beyond the detection of predators. Our greatest survival advantage lies in our incredible social networking, our ability to instantly intuit other people’s mind states, our ability to construct rich and complex models of each other, to construct a web of communication that proceeds under the surface of language and that gives each word in spoken language a halo of extra meaning. Think of the power of the Internet and the power of social media. Think of how each advance in group communication fundamentally alters our world. Human social intelligence was evolution’s invention of the equivalent of the Internet. If one consequence of this incredible skill set is a little superstition on the side, so be it. The benefit far outweighs the cost. Tuning down the intensity of human social perception, making us less hypersocial in order to reduce our spiritual misattributions, would be an extremely counteradaptive adjustment.
    It is a bit like the cost–benefit ratio of wearing clothes. On the up side, clothes protect us from the elements. On the down side, they add a small amount of weight that we must carry around, thereby wasting energy. The cost is rather absurdly negligible compared to the enormous benefit. Just so, I would suggest that the cost to humans of being hypersocial, of having social machinery so constantly active, so tuned to a hair trigger, so revved, that we tend to see mind all around us, even in things that don’t have brains—the cost of that condition is actually quite small compared to the enormous, fundamental, humanity-defining benefit. We would be nothing without our sociality.
    To me personally, the most reasonable approach to spirituality is to accept two simultaneous truths. One, literally and objectively, there is no spirit world. Minds do not float independently of bodies and brains. Two, perceptually, there is a spirit world. We live in a perceptual world, a world simulated by the brain, in which consciousness inhabits many things around us, including sometimes empty space. In the same way, most of us are comfortable knowing that, literally and objectively, white is a muddy mixture of all wavelengths and has no purity whatsoever, whereas perceptually, white is pure luminance without any color. We do not mind the contradiction because we understand where it comes from. The perceptual world and the objective world do not always match. We sometimes must live with both sets of knowledge. Neither side can be ignored. We cannot help living in the world that our perceptual machinery constructs for us, but it is also useful to know as much as we can about the literal, objective world.
The Consciousness of Nonhuman Animals

    Are nonhuman animals aware? Once again, I do not know the answer to this question. But I can apply the attention schema theory and see what answer the theory gives.
    We can certainly construct models of conscious minds and attribute them to nonhuman animals. People are generally quite certain that their pets are conscious. Just look at them. See how they act. Look at the expression on Fifi’s face. Isn’t it obvious? This certainty is the result of informational models of consciousness constructed in the human brain and attributed to the pets. Animals have consciousness type B, to use the terminology of the previous sections. We attribute consciousness to them.
    But one can ask a deeper question: do nonhuman animals have the neuronal machinery to construct informational models of consciousness and attribute them to others? Can a cat attributeconsciousness to me? Can a dog attribute consciousness to another dog? Can a horse attribute consciousness to itself? Do animals have consciousness type A?
    At least some level of social