(Pages 295-309)

The c o m p u t e r program Deep Thought is widely regarded as a magnificent achievement of human technological ingenuity. The result of half a century of unremitting effort, and the application of the sharpest minds in the computer business,Deep Thought has scaled the heights to the grand master level in chess. True, the world champion Gary Kasparov beat Deep Thought convincingly-two games to nil-in a minitournament in October 1989. But the program's creators are confident that,with further refinement, Deep Thought will soon lay claim to the world's number one spot, certainly by the end of the century.

If a computer can successfully tackle the myriad maneuverings and deep strategies of what may be the world's toughest intellectual game, what of the game of social chess? Deep Thought has achieved its grand master status by brute force or,rather, speed. Aided by a special chip developed by the system's creator, Feng-hsiung Hsu, Deep Thought can run through 700,000 possible moves every second. In five minutes it can examine more than two hundred million possible moves, which, incidentally, are only a tiny fraction of all possible chess moves. Eventually it picks the best one, working about half a dozen in moves ahead. Hsu expects Deep Thought to prevail over the world champion when the new chip he is working on runs computation at ten times this speed, looking at seven million moves every second. In the end, brute computing force will triumph over the human brain-on the chess board, at least.

But neither Kasparov's brain nor Yeroen's brain works like Deep Thought's chip. No brain does. That kind of computation would consume too much space and, more significantly, too much time in the slower acting nerve tissue that makes up the soggy gray mass in our head. Exactly how the human brain or the ape brain or the monkey brain works is, of course, largely a mystery. But it is clear that the human brain employs a lot of clever tricks to reach reasonably good solutions to complex problems without examining every possibility. One of those tricks, developed especially for the challenge of dealing with social interactions, is, I believe, consciousness.

The best way to understand and, more important, to predict the behavior of others under certain circumstances is to know what you would do under the same circumstances. Almost three and a half centuries ago the philosopher Thomas Hobbes made the following prescient statement "Given the similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man to the thoughts and passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself and consider what he doth when he does think, opine, reason, hope, fear, and upon what grounds, he shall thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men upon the like occasions." It is the use of intuition based on experience.

Inevitably, inexorably, the Inner Eye, as Nick Humphrey calls this mental model, must also generate a sense of self, the phenomenon we know as consciousness: the Inner "1". "In evolutionary terms it must have been a major breakthrough," observes Nick. "Imagine the biological benefits to the first of our ancestors who developed the ability to make realistic guesses about the inner life of his rivals; to be able to picture what another was thinking about and planning to do next; to be able to read the minds of others by reading his own."

If the mental model produced by the Inner Eye bestows an advantage on individuals in the complex of social interactions, the ultimate goal of which is reproductive success, then it will be favored by evolution. Once established, there is no going back,for individuals less well endowed would be at a disadvantage. Similarly, those with a slight edge would be further favored. "An evolutionary ratchet would be set up," says Nick, "acting like a self-winding watch to increase the general intellectual standing of the species. In principle the process might be expected to continue until either the physiological mainspring is fully wound or intelligence itself becomes a burden."

As humans, we experience the ultimate expression of this dimension of intelligence the skills of foresight and manipulation, the facility of imagination, the sense of self. We also extend it to raw feelings, of course, to sympathy and empathy, to attribution and affect. This dimension of feeling is what makes consciousness so keenly subjective an experience. An observer may wince in virtual pain on seeing or even hearing ofan injury to another. A real sense of grief can swell in the emotions of someone who hears of, for instance, a parent losing a child. Empathy with the emotions of others through the experience of one's own emotions is very much part of human consciousness. It also drives the widespread tendency to anthropomorphize, to attribute human feelings to nonhuman animals. The dog "misses"its absent master. The monkey is "jealous" of its rival. The cat is a"selfish" animal. Endowed with this deep sense of self, and living lives awash with emotions, we find it virtually impossible to imagine other livesany kind of lifewithout feelings similar to ours.

Powerful though our subjective experience of consciousness is, paradoxically it is extremely difficult to prove that it exists at all. As individuals, how can we know others feel as we do? How do I know for sure that my neighbor is conscious in the way I am? For philosophers and psychologists, it is a tough challenge, although conversation and a resulting empathy may move some distance toward resolving it. But what of nonhuman primates? How can we test whether they too experience a degree of consciousness?

Two decades ago the psychologist Gordon Gallup, now at the State University of New York at Albany, devised a simple, if controversial, test of the sense of self the mirror test. As many pet owners know, a mirror may be a novelty to a cat or a dog fora while, but once the animal comes to realize that the reflection is at best a boring playmate, it gives up mirror watching pretty quickly. The goal of Gallup's mirror test is to determine whether an animal is able to recognize the reflection as "self" instead of just another individual.

The test is simplicity itself. It involves first familiarizing the animal with the mirror, then marking the animal's head with a red spot. If the animal touches the spot after looking at its reflection anew, then, argues Gallup, the animal does indeed recognize the image as its own. "The first time we tried it with chimps, it worked," recalls Gallup. "These data would seem to qualify as the first experimental demonstration of self-concept in a subhuman form," he wrote in Science in January 1970. In the same paper he reported that neither the stump-tailed macaque nor the rhesus monkey "passed" the mirror test.

Since that time many higher primates have been given the test, and so far only two have shown positive results the chimpanzee, as in the original study, and the orangutan. The gorilla, the third of the great apes, apparently fails, a result that many observers find puzzling. Moreover, some observers claim to have seen self directed behavior by gorillas in front of mirrors, which they take to indicate the presence of a sense of self in these animals.

Suppose, for a moment, that gorillas do have a sense of self, which, for some reason, the mirror test fails to elicit. In this case there would be a clean line drawn between the great apes and the rest of the higher primates above the line, a sense of self; below the line, nothing. Such a rigid demarcation has unsettled primatologists for a long time, especially because they see complex social behavior in their nonape subjects, particularly monkeys. What other criterion can be tried? One has emerged recently deception.

Half a dozen years ago when Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten were studying chacma baboons in East Africa, they observed the following incident. "Paul, a young baboon, approached and watched an adult female, Mel, who was digging in hard dry earth for a large rhizome to eat. Paul looked around in the undulating grassland habitat no baboons were in sight, although they could not be far off. Then he screamed loudly, which baboons do not usually do unless threatened. Within seconds Paul's mother, who was dominant to Mel, rushed to the scene and chased her, both going right out of sight. Paul walked forward and began to eat the rhizome."

The two psychologists, intrigued, thought they might have witnessed an instance of true deception. Paul "knew" that if he screamed, his mother would come; she would "assume" that Mel had attacked Paul and would chase her off. He "knew" that he would be left in peace to eat the rhizome Mel had so laboriously unearthed. "There were other interpretations, of course," say Byrne and Whiten. "It may have been sheer coincidence, with the attack by Paul's mother unrelated to his scream. Or Paul may have been genuinely threatened by an adult female not seen by us." But the idea of deception beckoned, particularly as the two psychologists witnessed other occasions where baboons were apparently being "economical with the truth."

On their return from the field Byrne and Whiten did a quick literature search and turned up several reports of "tactical deception," as they call it. Most often, the putative deceivers were chimpanzees. "With their much greater reputation for intelligence, using deception to gain their own ends seemed more in keeping with chimpanzees than it did in a mere monkey," Byrne and Whiten report. "Yet when we excitedly described our precocious animals to other primatologists, for the most part they showed little surprise. Instead, they replied with anecdotes of deception from their own study of animals."

Anecdotes are not generally the stuff of science, and in this case the stories were often open to interpretation. For deception to work in a social setting, it must be close enough to the edge of truth to make detection difficult. It also will not be common, because one can't "cry wolf" often without being caught out. Nevertheless, when Byrne and Whiten canvassed their colleagues' observations, they came up with many instances of putative deception, including such tactics as concealment, distraction, the creation of misleading indications of intent, and manipulation of innocent bystanders. Not only apes, but various species of Old World monkeys (mostly baboons) were cited as accomplished deceivers.

The significance of deception goes beyond its being just another social tool. The agent of the deception must have an idea of what response its action will provoke in the target. The agent must be able to put itself in the mind of the target. In other words, in order to practice deception, an individual must have a clearly developed sense of self. During one of the many maneuverings between the male chimps at the Arnhem zoo, Frans de Waal noticed one day that Nikkie was in a tree while Luit was sitting below. There had been confrontations between the two earlier in the day, and "Nikkie seemed ready for a new display," recalls de Waal. "I noticed that Luit was baring his teeth in a fear-grin. Then I saw Luit pull his lips over his teeth, wiping out the fear-grin. He did it several times. In mutual intimidation between males, it makes sense to hide signs of nervousness. That's what Luit seemed to be doing." The significance here is that Luit seemed able to put himself in Nikkie's head, knowing what Nikkie would think if he saw himself, Luit, wearing a fear-grin.

Research on nonhuman primate deception is by no means clear-cut. The message from Byrne and Whiten's survey, however, is that the facility for tactical deception can be seen in chimpanzees and to a much lesser extent in gorillas. None has yet been detected in orangutans or gibbons, which are much more difficult to study in the wild. Baboons are skilled deceivers. There the line begins to be drawn. Not a single instance of tactical deception was reported in bush babies and their cousins, the prosimians, so it looks as if the phenomenon is real, and that it correlates to some extent with brain size and the complexity of social life.

We are surely seeing here the cognitive foundations of consciousness in our primate cousins, including Old World monkeys. I find it interesting that the foundation appears to be neither deep nor wide, though one would have to say that chimpanzees experience a real elevation in consciousness over Old World monkeys.

How much more conscious are humans than chimpanzees? It is difficult if not impossible to determine. Objectively, we can say that the chimpanzee level of consciousness includes a sense of self sufficiently developed to permit intricate political maneuverings. It allows an individual to place itself in the mind of another so that social chess can be played with considerable skill, including intentional deception. Chimpanzees build models of others' behavior based on their own experience, no doubt. They understand what actions may provoke an angry response, what may elicit fear, and what may elicit friendship. But we might be gliding toward the boundaries of chimpanzee consciousness here, because it is not clear to what degree they experience their raw emotions.

Throwing a temper tantrum is not the same as feeling burning anger. Giving or receiving friendly attention, such as grooming or "kissing," is not the same as feeling happy or feeling in love. Submitting or fear-grinning in the face of threat is not the same as feeling fearful. All animals manifest what we describe as basic emotions, but probably few actually subjectively experience them. The animals would have to be conscious in a way that humans are, to generate sympathy for one's fellows. As far as can be discerned, sympathy the vicarious experience of emotionsis not well developed in chimpanzees and is even less so in lower primates.

The ultimate vicarious experience, of course, is the fear of death, or simply death awareness. In all human societies, the awareness of death has played a large part in the construction of mythology and religion. There seems, however, to be no awareness of death among chimpanzees. Females have been known to carry around the corpse of an infant for a few days after its death, but they seem to be experiencing bewilderment rather than what we call grief. More important, other mature individuals appear to offer no condolence or sympathy to the bereaved mother. The emotional experience seems to go unappreciated by others, and unshared. So far, no observer has seen reliable indications that chimpanzees have any awareness of the inevitability of their own death, the extinction of self.

What can we say about the direct ancestors of hominids, the ancestors common to us and the African apes? The modern chimpanzee is the product of five or so million years of evolution since that time, of course, so we must beware of equating chimpanzee cognitive capacities with those of all African apes, including the ones of five million years ago. Cautiously, however, I suggest that we can say that large-brained apes that live socially complex lives are likely to develop a chimpanzee level of consciousness. The common ancestor of African apes and hominids falls into or close to this category.

With a starting point of a chimpanzee level of consciousness at the threshold of the human lineage, we can begin to think about the trajectory of its development through human history. The challenge is similar to that of inferring language abilities in our ancestors, only more difficult. The signs of consciousness in the archeological record are even less tangible than those of language. Much of what we can say is only informed speculation.

Luckily, the emergence of a key element of consciousness the awareness of deathsometimes does make its mark in the prehistoric record. Some kind of ritual occurs, a formalized procedure that identifies and bounds the occasion. From ethnography we know that this may vary from extensive care of the corpse over a long period, perhaps involving moving it from one special location to another after a period of a year or even more, to minimal attention to the body, all effort being devoted to spiritual issues. Sometimes the ritual involves burial, a matter for which prehistorians are intimately grateful.

The earliest evidence of deliberate burial in the archeological record occurs very late in our history. It comes with the Neanderthals, and presumably with other archaic sapiens populations, not much more than 100,000 years ago. If Neanderthals and other archaic sapiens did have an awareness of death, as I believe they did, what does it tell us about their state of mind and about the evolutionary trajectory of consciousness in human history? Do modern humans have a sharper consciousness than these earlier members of the human family? Piling inference on inference, we can say it is likely that with the origin of modern Homo sapiens, subjective consciousness was keener than in archaic sapiens, including Neanderthals. The inference is based on language, and it begins to complete the complex pattern of relations we introduced earlier, between intelligence, language, and consciousness.

Many psychologists and linguists now argue that spoken language is the loom on which some of the finer fabrics of consciousness are woven. The two qualities of the human mind are inextricably meshed with each other. If, as I believe, an enhancement in linguistic facility was a crucial component of the evolution of modern humans, then one might expect a concomitant change in the quality of consciousness.

Since death awareness appears relatively late in our mental development, what can we say of consciousness earlier in our history? What of the mind of Homo erectus and of Homo habilis? And what of the australopithecines?

First of all, I see no cogent reason for arguing that the chimpanzee level of consciousness we imagine for the beginning of hominid history would have increased significantly in the species before Homo. And I view the social structure among these species as having been no more intense than what we see among modern chimpanzees. The mental model of the world produced by the chimpanzee level of consciousness in the australopithecine brains would have been adequate. The evolutionary ratchet of consciousness was not yet far into its inexorable climb.

With the advent of Homo and the appearance of the hunting-and-gathering way of life, the game of social chess would have become more demanding. There would indeed have been reproductive advantages to the possession of a more acute mental model, one that would have been aided by a sharper consciousness. Natural selection would have worked with this, moving consciousness to higher and higher levels. This gradually unfolding consciousness not only fashioned a new kind of reality in our heads, it also changed us into a new kind of animal.

The two million year heritage of a hunting-and-gathering life, rudimentary at first but ultimately superbly refined, left its mark on our minds just as much as it did on our bodies. On top of the technical skills of planning, coordination, and technology, there was, equally important, the social skill of cooperation. A sense of common goals and values, a desire to further the common good, cooperation was more than simply individuals working together. It became a set of rules of conduct, of morals, an understanding of right and wrong in a complex social system. Without cooperation within bands, among bands, through tribal groups our technical skills would have been severely blunted. Social rules and standards of behavior emerged. The great British biologist Conrad Waddington put it best "Through evolution humans have become the ethical animal."

As we are unsure how big a gap exists between a chimpanzee level of consciousness and our own, we cannot be precise about a Homo habilis level of consciousness or a Homo erectus level of consciousness. We can only speculate that elements of consciousness the sense of self, the tendency to attribute feelings to others, the facility to know the world better, and the raw emotion of compassion all were enhanced through time as the evolutionary ratchet advanced.

I suspect that when the Turkana boy died, his parents experienced grief, had some word for death, some expression for sorrow, and perhaps received sympathy from others in the band. But I doubt whether they understood death in the way we do, as a fate awaiting us all. The apparent absence of death awareness in Homo erectus must be taken to imply only a limited facility of self awareness. I therefore doubt that the Turkana boy's parents would have puzzled over the meaninglessness of his early death or wondered about the meaning of life.

One thing we can be sure about, however, is that once consciousness passed the threshold of self-awareness and death awareness, there welled up in the human mind the Big Question Why? It is not a straight request for an answer; it is a search for meaning in the midst of uncertainty. What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of the world I find myself in? How did the universe come to be? ubiquitously, there has been the sense that the Truth is somehow unknowable, somehow not meant to be known. Dostoevsky put it this way "Man needs the unfathomable and the infinite just as much as he does the small planet which he inhabits."

As a result, mythology and religion have been a part of all human history, and, even in this age of science, probably will remain so. No one has thought or written more extensively about mythology than the late Joseph Campbell. The lesson of mythology, he said, is as powerful as it is simple. The elements of mythology, through space and time, confirm "the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history." Perhaps the single most important behavioral adaptation of Homo sapiens is the passage from generation to generation of the elements of culture, the folk knowledge of the means of survival. Part of that cultural passage is the profoundly felt urge to understand the world. A people's mythology is its means of coping with that urge, for mythology is a body of explanation, an embodiment of the Truth.

It is interesting enough that every human society has felt the need to generate a body of myth, an explanation of how the society came to be and its place in the world. Even more interesting are the many commonalties between different mythologies. "The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit," observed Campbell. "We find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same."

The way people arrived at answers about their world followed much the same path individuals take in coming to understand one another. In all of the mythologies that we know, and by extrapolation in mythologies long extinct, many of the important elements, such as animals and physical forces, are endowed with humanlike emotions and motives. The mind that evolved subjective consciousness as a tool with which to understand the complexities of social chess used the same formula to understand the complexities of the rest of the world. It is anthropomorphizing on a cosmic scale.

To the earliest members of Homo sapiens, and to societies through much of human history, life was played out in full interaction with other powers in the world. The interaction assumed, if not fully human qualities in these powers, then at least some human qualities. The migratory herd had to be treated with respect; otherwise it would refuse to return next season. Appropriate gifts had to be made to the sun; otherwise it would become angry and not rise. The spring had to be constantly blessed; otherwise it would choose to flow elsewhere.

Explanation, then, was what people sought, not as demonstrated fact but as authorized story, the basis of myth. The definition of myth, according to Alan Dundes, an anthropologist at Berkeley, is "a sacred narrative explaining how the world or humans came to be in their present form." The origin myth is the most fundamental story of all societies, and every society has one. Not only does the origin myth serve the purpose of telling how a particular society came into being; it also explains and therefore justifies the nature of that society. Consider the Yanomamo Indians, whose territory straddles the border between southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. For these people, warfare and violence is a way of life. Napoleon Chagnon, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, who has studied the Yanomamo for many years, refers to them as "the fierce people." The Yanomamos' origin myth encompasses this aspect of their life. Yanomamo elders told Chagnon their origin myth, and he recounts it as follows.

After the flood, there were very few original beings left. Periboriwa (Spirit of the Moon) was one of the few who the soul parts of children. On his first descent, he ate one child, placing his soul between two pieces of cassava bread and eating it. He returned a second time to eat another child, also with cassava bread. Finally, on his third trip, Uhudima and Suhirina, two brothers, became angry and decided to shoot him. Uhudima, the poorer shot of the two, began letting his arrows fly. He shot at Periboriwa many times as he ascended to hedu, but missed. People say he was a very poor shot. Then Suhirina took one bamboo-tipped arrow and shot at Periboriwa when he was directly overhead, hitting him in the abdomen. The tip of the arrow barely penetrated Periboriwa's flesh, but the wound bled profusely. Blood spilled to earth in the vicinity of a village called Hooteri, near the mountain called Maiyo. The blood changed into men as it hit the earth, causing a large population to be born. All of them were male; the blood of Periboriwa did not change into females. Most of the Yanomamo who are alive today are descended from the blood of Periboriwa. Because they have their origins in blood, they are fierce and are continuously making war on each other.

The story goes on to explain that women originally sprang fully formed from the body of one of the men. But, says Chagnon, the essential point is that "this myth seems to be the 'character' of Yanomamo society." The fierce people are fierce because of their origins. The same pattern is to be found in all origin myths they describe both the origin of the people and the nature of their world. Explanation is both descriptive and prescriptive. It provides a framework for life.

The appearance of a devastating flood in the Yanomamos' origin myth is, incidentally, just one of many examples of a flood as an essential agent in a society's birth. Real floods can loom large in the worlds of many people, and often must have threat-remained. He had a habit of coming down to earth to be eaten their safety. But the ubiquity of flood myths they can be found in societies on every continenthas convinced anthropologists that their origin is more fundamental, less tangible." I would ascribe these myths to that basic and clearly universal human longingmanifested less dramatically when a man changes his job or moves to a new house to get rid of an unsatisfying past and start all over again," speculates the anthropologist Penelope Farmer. " Just so a world, postflood, could be restored to innocence, to another Eden, all bitter experience laid aside, and the history of mankind begin anew." Animals figure large in many societies' mythologies, not surprisingly, as hunter-gatherers rely heavily on animals as resources. They were anthropomorphized in terms of their "intentions," and often took on special roles in people's interaction with "spirit worlds," sometimes representing sources of power. Frequently, animal images are distorted, becoming part human and part beast, an expression of the ambiguity of life, an elision of human, animal, and spirit worlds.

The ultimate expression of this anthropomorphism, of course, is the creation of gods. "The Old Testament states that God created man in His own image," note Gordon Gallup and Jack Maser. "We would argue that the opposite has occurred. Because of our capacity to use personal experience as a means of understanding the experience of others and because of the well-studied phenomenon of generalization, humans create God(s) in their own image, and not vice-versa."

Maser, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, joined Gallup in a recent essay, "Theism as a By-product of Natural Selection," in which they extended Gallup's ideas on human consciousness to reach the product of human attribution. "In another reversal of a familiar idea, we would say that it is awareness of self that should be construed as a high-level abstraction; God then follows as a rather concrete extension of self."