On Minds, Imperfection & the Role of Science
(1st of a 2-part series)
[2025/03/28: clarified free will & AI implications]
It seems to me that there is an enormous deficit in understanding the purpose and criticality of the scientific method as it applies to so many aspects of day to day life, rooted in both the imperfection of minds as well as in general understanding of what minds and consciousness actually are.
With this first of two related posts, I aim to lay out the core principles of minds, consciousness, and science, as well as how they each function to provide enhanced reproductive fitness in living beings (specifically but not exclusively humans) .
Part 2 will delve into the topic of what the absence of widespread understanding of these concepts means for humans: both individually and as small groups (family and small social networks similar to those within which we evolved individually and as a species), and societally (larger groups within which individuals and groups behave in ways that evolution never pruned for fitness).
Part 1: Purpose
Minds
Human minds are imperfect generators of a Reality Construct that presumably provides benefits in terms of our individual and family survival. There is, IMO, no chance that this Reality Construct is a spandrel of evolution: clearly a living being’s ability to integrate relevant information provides it with opportunities to more effectively interact with its environment and achieve gene-driven survival-oriented goals. If it didn’t, our energy-hungry brains would have ceased their march toward greater intellectual capacity long ago.
But what is a mind? In effect, a “mind” is at root a tool (or set of tools) that supplements “simple” cause-and-effect reactive behaviours with more complex, integrated, but ultimately still deterministic proactive behaviours - such distinctions being a function of position on a gradient of scale and degree of complexity involved, rather than an effect of two distinct capabilities. In both extremes, the entity is interacting with its environment in ways that affect the reproductive success of the genes which produce the observable morphology and behaviours of the being.
In evolutionary terms, that is, all behaviours are real-world tests of the direct links between genetic programming and reproductive success; proactive behaviours are merely more complicated, and if complexly coordinated, we tend to think of these capabilities as minds. Successful instances of a novel behaviour are rewarded with greater genetic spread; failed instances lead to evolutionary dead ends.
For example, plants exhibit incredibly coordinated behaviour, from directing the flow of nutrients around their bodies, to influencing the health of microrhizal networks in order to support reproductive success of their genetic relatives. Most of us don’t consider such behaviours as a product of “minds”, but rather “simply” a result of complex chemical interactions. Single-celled organisms, fungi, and even some such as slime molds are to me clearly in this same category: complex but mindless.
On the other hand, most would agree that “higher animals” possess some kind of mind analogous to what we ourselves possess: pets for example seem to be able to interact in meaningful ways with us, and vice versa.
Somewhere in the middle, though the lines are ultimately unimportant, lie creatures such as mollusks*, arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, and birds** - though anyone who studies such animals closely inevitably seems to identify more complex mind-like behaviours.
* many cephalopods are prime exhibitors of mind-like capabilities
** many are familiar with the complex behaviours of corvids and parrots
Minds are thus an “emergent property” of (or rather a handy label to describe) the widespread capacity of myriad species to differentiate between objects which lack or possess some level of agency (i.e., unpredictable independent behaviours). At the same time, an emergent property such as the mind is not a necessary product of a complex entity to which we would ascribe agency.
In the end, our identification of “minds” in others (human or animals) seems to me to be a result of our own species’ “theory of mind”, and our species’ ability to recognize that many (or most?) other animals possess analogous, coordinated, and complex mental representations of the worlds that they each perceive and with which they interact, all in the service of an individual’s and a species’ reproductive success:
In psychology and philosophy, theory of mind (often abbreviated to ToM) refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them.
We even have concepts to describe such behaviours among groups of individual animals: hive mind (predominantly used for more easily-studied and -modelled insects, maybe even those interesting slime molds), and groupthink (predominantly used for human groups, but also apt for flocking birds, schooling fish, herds of prey, and packs of predators among the creatures which exhibit such relatively complex group behaviours)
But if we didn’t have minds as humans, I don’t believe that we would be able to take the next step: recognizing and altering our own behaviours based on the presence of other minds.
The concept of a philosophical zombie has crucial relevance here: such a mindless being might not be able to replicate all of our evolved behaviours, but it is clearly an apt description at some point along the mind gradient outlined above.
Consciousness
On the other hand, and with this perspective, consciousness may well be an evolutionary spandrel:
In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection.
That is, consciousness may simply be a byproduct of the evolution of minds, in particular of our own complex Reality Constructs being extended and unsurprisingly repurposed to support fitness at some point along our social evolutionary history.
To me, the existence of consciousness more than adequately explains and is explained by our own “Theory of Mind”: a conscious being is simply one that has become aware of the existence of its own mind, while we can easily imagine that many minds as outlined above lack such a self-awareness.
It is my strongly held belief that at some point during the process of evolving as a complex-minded social animal, humans (at least!) first found direct survival value in being able to identify and ascribe independent agency to the behaviours of other complex beings. Of course, this isn’t unique to humans, or to social animals, but again I think that we can identify some minds that lack the cognitive complexity and capacity to create useful Reality Constructs that include independent agents. The fitness-enhancing value of such a cognitive ability, if effective in better “predicting” the behaviours of others, and differentiating between such agency and the wide range of objects that lack agency (e.g., air, water, fire, and earth, as per one simplistic human-created categorization), is obvious.
Further, it seems clear that if and when such a fitness-enhancing capacity has evolved, there exists a fairly straightforward path to that capacity being repurposed or extended to enrich the complex Reality Contruct with an internal representation its own existence and agency.
Put more glibly, it’s not “I think, therefore I am”, but rather “I think you are, therefore I think I am as well”: consciousness is merely that additional recognition that the internal “self” includes agency analogous to what is observed externally - another potentially* fitness-supporting capability, but not a necessary one to unlock basic “mind-centred” fitness advantages.
Like minds, then, consciousnesses are an emergent but unnecessary property of increasingly complex abilities to generate realistic and useful models of the world with which the being interacts.
Also like minds, consciousnesses can be & is often mistaken. A mind might cause reactive behaviours in its host that in no way reflect the actual motivations, intentions, and behaviours of other agents, but which are still evolutionarily valuable; if seriously flawed however, such reactions will usually lead to evolutionary pruning. Similarly, a consciousness may cause reactive behaviours that mistakenly reflect its own genetically-driven motivations, intentions, and behaviours. A pair of clear examples of such mistaken consciousness are the “rubber hand illusion” and the often bizarre phenomena associated with “split brains”, which together demonstrate that human consciousness is simply our mind telling a story about itself and its own behaviours, in the very same way that it tells stories about other entities. Les obviously is the reality that consciousness makes us feel as though we have free will, when in fact we do not.
As a brief aside, this perspective provides a grounding for a great number (possibly all?) of human spiritual beliefs, from the understandable identification of “spirits” or “gods” with inanimate objects that seem (or from a more modern perspective, seemed) to possess agency - back to those 4 “elements” and similar categorizations of change within or because of the inanimate world (earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, wildfires, bonfires, winds, storms, etc.). Ants don’t have “gods”, as they don’t have minds that can ascribe minds to other beings or objects, but wild mammals might.
As a second brief aside, this perspective also underpins my strong belief that “Artificial Intelligence” will never attain consciousness until & unless it is provided a means to both interact richly with the real world, and evolve its fitness to interact through some evolutionary selection process. That is, any information-only AI lacks the real-world fitness selection to enable anything close to consciousness or intelligence, and this won’t change with current approaches to AI development Yes, there are & will continue to be excellent niche “AI” applications, but generalized conscious AI is a pipe dream (or an unconcerning dystopian idea, if you prefer).
To summarize: minds and consciousnesses are nothing more than evolutionarily useful emergent capabilities which enable a living being to interact with its environment in increasingly sophisticated and genetically useful (i.e reproductively successful) ways.
But they are flawed, and not necessarily capable of identifying and improving upon those flaws, as they are limited by their own evolution-driven capabilities.
Science
Science, or more properly the scientific method, is a product of the ability for (at least!) human consciousnesses to recognize that its own Reality Construct is flawed. That is, it is a product of the consciousness’ ability to recognize its own deficiencies, or rather opportunities to enhance the fidelity (and the associated reproductive advantage) of the Reality Construct within which the consciousness exists.
In this regard, a spandrel consciousness provides the first “self-directed” cognitive capability: while such capabilities can only emerge and evolve through natural selection processes, they represent a springboard from which the complex mind can rapidly adapt itself to enhance fitness, rather than waiting generations for evolution to (hopefully) randomly arrive at the same functionality.
And having made (serendipitously) made such a model of itself, including the presence of some flaws and limitations, the foundations of science can emerge: a conscious being can undertake trial and error processes to adjust the conscious Reality Construct within which it exists with the “goal” (evolutionarily selected outcome) of increasing its own evolutionary fitness. Better models are those that increase fitness.
While such activities are ubiquitous within, and in my view defining characteristics of, our human species (and likely many of our ancestral and related species both extant and extinct), they are also demonstrated by other animals, most easily seen in species which have been observed to have “tool using cultures” of their own.
New Caledonian crows, and chimpanzees, as examples of two widely separated species, have been shown to learn from others’ novel use of tools to better access food sources.
This capacity for self-adjusted fitness enhancements can be further supplemented by the refinement of repeatable source-independent methods, that is human cultural artifacts which others can adopt and test for fitness themselves via our rich communication capabilities. The most powerful of these methods is the scientific method, founded on the principles of using repeated observation of such trial-and-error conscious adjustments and their association with fitness-related outcomes. The source of such adjustments themselves may be completely random, or deterministic, but the ability to observe and react to them is ultimately driven by the evolutionarily central goal of enhancing reproductive fitness.
I believe that we as a species are unique in having had the opportunity for science as such a method to emerge, through a combination of random factors including: our evolution as bipedal land animals (with attendant abilities to observe and manipulate objects and ubiquitous oxidizing chemical processes); language as a product of our small-group social evolution; and writing as a product of the success of such small groups’ original capacity for language being (unnecessarily?) capable of adaptation into written language. (To this last point, the history of writing is illuminating: its rapid emergence and “evolution” shows utility driving further complexity built on the same linguistic capabilities, rather than based on new genetically-determined cognitive capabilities.)
This what we now encompass as the “scientific method”: a refined set of such repeatable trial-and-error-driven adjustments to our individual and shared Reality Constructs, which together allow us to extend our perceptions so as to identify and overcome some limitations of our evolved cognitive capacities, and ultimately to enhance our reproductive success as individuals and as a social species - something that Professor Ceiling Cat (Jerry Coyne) himself, and Carl Sagan have both observed.
In this sense, the emergence of “pure science”, or rather the ability to marshall such methods in the service of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, is another spandrel here: deeply but not totally disconnected from fitness considerations. Curiosity is surely an evolved trait that underpins the fitness-enhancing aspects of the scientific method in action, but our ability to conceive of, and increasingly understand the complex world around us in forms such as, the Theory of Evolution, the Theory of General Relativity, and the Standard Model (as a few notable examples of scientific discoveries) all seem only tenuously (at best!) related to actual reproductive fitness on evolutionary scales.
Summary
Having set out my reasoning on:
Minds and their evolutionary function
Consciousness as a byproduct of Mind, and its (potentially spandrel) evolutionary origin,
and finally
Science as a byproduct of consciousness and its evolutionary origin,
I hope through this post to have convinced the reader that the core purpose of Minds, Consciousness, and Science is to more accurately understand Reality so as to enhance evolutionary success on an individual and species level.
And as noted at the outset, Part 2 will tackle the thorny topic of what the absence of a widespread understanding of these concepts means for humanity on individual, group, and societal levels, against the backdrop of our species having nearly completed a shift from a truly ancient evolutionary determinism to our present - and largely socially- and culturally-determined - “fitness” outcomes.
Notes
I cannot in any way take credit for the concepts that I’ve presented here, as my (novel?) synthesis is a product of incredible works including, but not limited to luminary thinkers such as:
Behave (Robert Sapolsky)
Conscious (Annaka Harris)
The collected works of Jerry Coyne
The Emperor’s New Mind (Roger Penrose)
as well as the general and specific knowledge I’ve had the good fortune to absorb via a formal (though admittedly still quite limited) education in Physics and Mathematics, and a half-century’s exposure to a fraction of the collected non-scientific works of humanity, whether philosophical, artistic, historical, political, or otherwise.
I am grateful for those expansive opportunities to gain knowledge, as I recognize ways in which I am both conscious and unconscious of their influences on my perspectives, and how those together with the privilege and good fortune of living among the most wealthy and most able to access such knowledge has enabled me to assemble these ideas.
Hopefully they spark interest in others than just myself, as I am grateful for the opportunity that Substack and accessible media present to share these with others, and thereby further refine my thinking and my Reality Construct in the service of humanity and preserving the natural world which has enabled our present and heretofore unparalleled sophisticated understanding of Reality itself.
This really jolts some great line of thinking that can probably follow. I feel like this can turn into a 10-piece write-up—in a really good way, too. Love that you’re bridging seemingly unlikely topics here.
I found this fascinating—albeit a bit over my head! I have subscribed and look forward to reading future installments. While this is by association, rather than strictly logical, what you write here reminds me of Ritchie Robertson’s book, The Enlightenment,” and particularly his effort to “rescue” the Enlightenment from those who insisted it was all, and only, about reason. So, one connection I make with what you write here is that, as humans, we are inevitably imperfect seekers after the truth—and “truth” itself, in any event, is not static, but always shifting. (I come at this from the lens of history, and, for example, in Roman times and medieval times—my current, quite amateur, preoccupation—new discoveries often upend what was earlier thought, and a new paradigm for thought must be found.)
During the Enlightenment period (and prior to it), I was struck by how much that had been explained in religious terms—like a comet as an ominous sign from God—had to give way to scientific knowledge, causing the great thinkers of the time, who were largely, if not all, religious in some way, to have to rethink what religion could and could not say about the world, human and natural. They all struggled mightily to reconcile the two.
On another associative note to what you have written, in discussing Hume (I have never read Hume, or indeed any others of the thinkers of that period, so I take this solely from Robertson’s point of view), I was fascinated by this observation:
“In the next section of his Treatise, Hume discussed “the passions,” found a central role for sympathy, and “issue[d] his famous challenge to conventional views of the relation between passion and reason.” [p. 278] “It is commonly said that passion should be guided—and, whenever necessary, suppressed—by reason. The function of reason, however, is to discover abstract relations, whether between our ideas, or among the objects of our experience. Abstract relations between ideas—for example, mathematics—may enable a merchant to balance his books, but will not in themselves motivate any of his actions . . . . to do anything, I must want to do it, and wanting to do something is the product of the passions, not of reason.” [pp. 278-9]”
(If of interest, I wrote a sort of essay that includes this and other such observations here: https://prufrocksdilemma.wordpress.com/2023/12/25/hume-on-humans/#more-16620)
This is probably far aslant of what you are writing here, for which I apologize, but I do thank you for stimulating my thinking in a most enjoyable way. Keep going!