Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Thinking Machines 133for the scientists and philosophers who dismiss the topic as too subjectiveor muddled to be studyable.Unfortunately, many of the things that people write about consciousnessare almost as puzzling as consciousness itself. Stephen Jay Gouldwrote, "Homo sapiens is one small twig [on the tree of life]. . . . Yet ourtwig, for better or worse, has developed the most extraordinary new qualityin all the history of multicellular life since the Cambrian explosion.We have invented consciousness with all its sequelae from Hamlet toHiroshima." Gould has denied consciousness to all nonhuman animals;other scientists grant it to some animals but not all. Many test for consciousnessby seeing whether an animal recognizes that the image in amirror is itself and not another animal. By this standard, monkeys, youngchimpanzees, old chimpanzees, elephants, and human toddlers areunconscious. The only conscious animals are gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzeesin their prime, and, according to Skinner and his student RobertEpstein, properly trained pigeons. Others are even more restrictive thanGould: not even all people are conscious. Julian Jaynes claimed that consciousnessis a recent invention. The people of early civilizations, includingthe Greeks of Homer and the Hebrews of the Old Testament, wereunconscious. Dennett is sympathetic to the claim; he believes that consciousness"is largely a product of cultural evolution that gets imparted tobrains in early training" and that it is "a huge complex of memes," memebeing Dawkins' term for a contagious feature of culture, such as a catchyjingle or the latest fashion craze.Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like theWhite Queen in Through the Looking Glass, believe six impossible thingsbefore breakfast. Could most animals really be unconscious—sleepwalkers,zombies, automata, out cold? Hath not a dog senses, affections, passions?If you prick them, do they not feel pain? And was Moses reallyunable to taste salt or see red or enjoy sex? Do children learn to becomeconscious in the same way that they learn to wear baseball caps turnedaround?People who write about consciousness are not crazy, so they musthave something different in mind when they use the word. One of thebest observations about the concept of consciousness came from WoodyAllen in his hypothetical college course catalogue:Introduction to Psychology: The theory of human behavior. ... Is therea split between mind and body, and, if so, which is better to have?