The Unnatural Selection of Consciousness

In a recent issue of The Philosophers Magazine , atheist philosopher Raymond Tallis claims that Darwinism cannot explain the human mind:

Consciousness makes evolutionary sense only if one does not start far enough back; if, that is to say, one fails to assume a consistent and sincere materialist position, beginning with a world without consciousness, and then considers whether there could be putative biological drivers for organisms to become conscious. This is the only valid starting point for those who look to evolution to explain consciousness, given that the history of matter has overwhelmingly been without conscious life, indeed without history. Once the viewpoint of consistent materialism is assumed, it ceases to be self-evident that it is a good thing to experience what is there, that it will make an organism better able so to position itself in the causal net as to increase the probability of replication of its genomic material. On the contrary, even setting aside the confusional states it is prone to, and the sleep it requires, consciousness seems like the worst possible evolutionary move.

If there isn’t an evolutionary explanation of consciousness, then the world is more interesting than biologists would allow.

Indeed it does. I’ve always thought it was rather obvious that a person could believe in materialism or a Darwinism but not both. As much as some people might want to mash them together, the two concepts are simply incompatible.

(Via: Doug Groothius )