Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

 … It is quite true that, to the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it follows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata …¹⁶

A Twentieth-Century View: James L. and Carol G. Gould:

In considering the issue of mental experiences in animals, we have begun to wonder if the implicit assumption that humans are almost wholly conscious and aware (and hence fully competent to evaluate our cognitively less sophisticated animal brethren) is correct. Could it be that the degree to which conscious thinking is involved in the everyday lives of most people is greatly overestimated? We know already that much of our learned behavior becomes hardwired: despite the painfully difficult process of learning the task originally, who has to concentrate consciously as an adult on how to walk or swim, tie a shoe, write words, or even drive a car along a familiar route? Certain linguistic behavior, too, falls into such patterns. Michael Gazzaniga, for instance, tells the story of a former physician who suffered from a left (linguistic) hemisphere lesion so serious that he could not form even simple three-word sentences. And yet, when a certain highly touted but ineffective patent medicine was mentioned, he would launch into a well-worn and perfectly grammatical five-minute tirade on its evils. This set piece had been stored on the undamaged right side (along with the usual collection of songs, poetry, and epigrams) as a motor tape requiring no conscious linguistic manipulation to deliver.

 … Indeed, what evidence is there that those sublime intellectual events known as “inspiration” involve any conscious thought? Most often our best ideas are served up to us out of our unconscious while we are thinking or doing something perfectly irrelevant. Inspiration probably depends on some sort of repetitive and time-consuming pattern-matching program which runs imperceptibly below the level of consciousness searching for plausible matches.

It strikes us that a skeptical and dispassionate extraterrestrial ethologist studying our unendearing species might reasonably conclude that Homo sapiens are, for the most part, automatons with overactive and highly verbal public relations departments to apologize for and cover up our foibles.

¹⁷

* It’s not the taste of the blood that attracts her, but the warmth If she drops onto a butyric acid-scented toy balloon filled with warm water, she will readily puncture it and, an inept Dracula, gorge herself on tap water* One promising finding in artificial intelligence is the discovery that distributed data processing—many small computers working in parallel without much of a central processing unit—does very well, by some standards better than the largest and fastest lone computer Many little minds working in tandem may be superior to one big mind working alone

Chapter 10

THE NEXT-TO-LAST REMEDY

When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants,

then the last remedy of all is war …

THOMAS HOBBES,

Leviathan, II, 30¹

Once organisms get really good at sex, once they evolve the plumbing and the passion for it, there gets to be a danger: So many competent, DNA-exchanging beings may be born that they will improvidently gobble up all the food or nutrients or prey, and then almost everyone, including their close relatives, will die. This must have occurred innumerable times in the history of life.

Take a being as modest as a bacterium, weighing in at a trillionth of a gram, and let it reproduce with no impediments. In the second generation there will be two bacteria; in the third generation, four; in the fourth generation, eight; and so on. If we imagine that none of those offspring die, then in 100 generations they will collectively weigh as much as a mountain; in 135 generations, as much as the Earth; in 150 generations, as much as the Sun; and in 185 generations, as much as the Milky Way galaxy.