The Human Mind Has No History
There is no good reason to assume that human intelligence evolved from mud to mind via a long slow historyPossibly the most frustrating science discipline ever envisioned is the effort to trace the evolution of human consciousness. Apparently, we start with the flatworm’s aversion to pain and end up with Chaitin’s unknowable number. That is a large gap. Of course, it doesn’t work. Evolution might predict smarter chimpanzees (or dumber ones, depending) but it does not predict a world of ideas, of which any given theory of evolution is itself merely one of the many ideas. So what do claims like “Theories of consciousness must be firmly rooted in evolutionary biology” even mean? The neuroscience of theories of consciousness is currently degenerating into chaos. Briefly, the leading theory has been trashed as “pseudoscience.” Tellingly, so far as one can Read More ›