Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem - UCI Cognitive ...

112 Hoffmancreatures that thrived long before the first hominoid appeared and willprobably endure long after the last expires. Perceptual systems arisewithout justification from random mutations and, for 99 percent of allspecies that have sojourned the earth, without justification they havedisappeared in extinction. The perceptual icons of a creature must quicklyand successfully guide its behavior in its niche, but they need not givetruth. The race is to the swift, not to the correct. As Pinker (1997,p. 561) puts it:We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelinesto the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problemsthat were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to communewith correctness. . .Shepard (2001, p. 601) hopes otherwise:Possibly we can aspire to a science of mind that, by virtue of theevolutionary internalization of universal regularities in the world,partakes of some of the mathematical elegance and generality oftheories of that world.It is, one must admit, logically possible that the perceptual icons of Homosapiens, shaped by natural selection to permit survival in a niche, mightalso just happen to faithfully represent some true objects and propertiesof the objective world. But this would be a probabilistic miracle, a cosmicjackpot against odds dwarfing those of the state lottery. The smart moneyis on humble icons with no pretense to objectivity.But this last response might not go far enough, for it grants that naturalselection, understood within a physicalist framework, can shape consciousexperience. Perhaps it cannot. Natural selection prunes functionalpropensities of an organism relevant to its reproductive success. But thescrambling theorem proves that conscious experiences are not identicalwith functional propensities (Hoffman 2006). Thus natural selection actingon functional propensities does not, ipso facto, act as well on consciousexperiences. A non-reductive functionalist might counter that, althoughconscious experiences are not identical to functional properties, neverthelessconscious experiences are caused by functional properties, and thusare subject to shaping by natural selection. The problem with this, aswe have discussed, is that no one has turned the idea of non-reductivefunctionalism into a genuine scientific theory, and the failure appears tobe principled. Thus the burden of proof is clearly on those who wishto claim that natural selection, understood within a physicalist framework,can shape conscious experience. Understood within the frameworkof conscious realism, natural selection has no such obstructions to shapingconscious experiences.A second evolutionary objection raised against MUI theory and consciousrealism finds it strange that criteria of efficiency should control the