“I think therefore I am.” Consciousness is the most private of private things. Yet arguably we develop consciousness primarily in interaction with other people, and the intensely human nature of our consciousness evolved in response to a striking rise in complexity of primate social life.

There’s strong support from science and philosophy that social evolution favored three expanding levels of our being: a basic conscious self-model, its extension into a lifelong sense of self, and the self’s anchoring of social commitments into a personal identity.

Conscious Biology

Long ago I studied primate psychobiology because I wanted to know: what is unique about…

There’s been a rise in belief in unfounded conspiracy theories. At the end of 2020 some claim that these elaborate fictions are dangerously increasing our American political schism. Multiple causes have been suggested, including triggers from social stress and the amplifying effect of social media.

We’ll look at some aspects of human nature that leave us susceptible. And there’s a theory that these factors, working together, might even change the nature of consciousness.

The Conspiracy Complex

• What humans take to be reality is actually socially constructed. …

When human endeavors so often go wrongly, we blame people for making bad decisions, whether from a moral, or political, or scientific point of view. This only raises our emotional temperature without fixing problems or heading off future catastrophes. However, there are recent theories that explain that many failures stem from general dynamical patterns. Let’s look at two of these patterns. They might someday be part of a science of how to get things done, a kind of moral philosophy of the practical.

How the Deck Is Stacked

First, let’s consider what we’re up against. As in, what are the given background conditions for any…

Brains are not just for eating

Until 9/11 I thought that the days were over when people could be immolated for having the wrong ideas about the soul. People have long been controlled by a fear that their immortal essence could suffer for eternity if they did not obey certain spiritual authorities.

“One of these mornings, the chain is gonna break.” — Aretha Franklin, Chain of Fools

Brains, Not Chains

While those chains have now crumbled for a lot of us, belief in a soul is still pretty common. …

American individualism is ingrained and goes way back. Social media are just an amplifier.

The Emigrants

Once there was a planet with people on it. It was on the verge of that stage where kingdoms would disappear, so that any tyrants remaining would need an ideology to get and hold their power.

But, in these turbulent times, there was a land where the rulers of North and South fought again and again. The people who lived on the lowlands between these two kingdoms (call them the Borderers) were accustomed to being tormented and slaughtered by the contending armies, and so developed a…

We should learn from the tension between mind and machine

Every human bliss and kindness, every suspicion, cruelty, and torment ultimately comes from the whirring 3-pound “enchanted loom” that is our brain and its other side, the cloud of knowing that is our mind.

It’s an odd coincidence that serious study of the mind and the brain bloomed in the late 20th century when we also started to make machines that had some mind-like qualities.

Now, with information technology we have applied an untested amplifier to our minds, and cranked it up to eleven, running it around the clock, year after year. Because we have become a culture of crisis…

Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
And sow the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused).

— J.R.R. Tolkein, Mythopeia

Do you like Loki? Are you enamored of elves? Scared of Satan?

We careen into a techno-materialist future, clinging to avatars of our primitive past while busily inventing new ones. We are friends with Frodo and besotted with Batman.

Our collective catalog of supernatural beings is vast and still growing, probably because of basic brain abilities that…

“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” — Anaïs Nin

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is, infinite.” — William Blake

The above quotes are often on dormitory posters. They also represent two opposed explanations of the Hard Problem of Consciousness: how can a lump of meat have subjective experience?

One camp says that the brain creates consciousness as a model or simulation of its own activity. …