A new image of homo sapiens

It is clear that a new image of humankind is emerging in science as well
as in philosophy. Increasingly, this emergence is being driven not only
by molecular genetics and evolutionary theory but also by the cognitive
neuroscience of consciousness and the modern philosophy of mind. At
this critical juncture, it is important not to confuse the descriptive and
the normative aspects of anthropology. We must carefully distinguish two different questions: What is a human being? And what should a human
being become?
Obviously, the evolutionary process that created our bodies, our
brains, and our conscious minds was not a goal-directed chain of
events. We are gene-copying devices capable of evolving conscious selfmodels
and creating large societies. We are also capable of creating fantastically
complex cultural environments, which in turn shape and
constantly add new layers to our self-models. We created philosophy,
science, a history of ideas. But there was no intent behind this process—
it was the result of blind, bottom-up self-organization. Yes, we have the
conscious experience of will, and whenever we engage in philosophy,
science, or other cultural activities, we experience ourselves as acting intentionally.
But cognitive neuroscience is now telling us that this very
engagement may well be the product of a self-less, bottom-up process
generated by our brains.
Meanwhile, however, something new is happening: Conscious Ego
Machines are engaging in a rigorous expansion of knowledge by forming
scientific communities. Gradually, they are unraveling the secrets of
the mind. The life process itself is being mirrored in the conscious selfmodels
of millions of the systems it created. Moreover, insight into how
this became possible is also expanding. This expansion is changing the
content of our self-models—the internal ones as well as their externalized
versions in science, philosophy, and culture. Science is invading the
Ego Tunnel.
The emerging image of Homo sapiens is of a species whose members
once longed to have immortal souls but are slowly recognizing they are
self-less Ego Machines. The biological imperative to live—indeed, live
forever—was burned into our brains, into our emotional self-model,
over the course of millennia. But our brand-new cognitive self-models
tell us that all attempts to realize this imperative will ultimately be futile.
Mortality, for us, is not only an objective fact but a subjective chasm, an
open wound in our phenomenal self-model. We have a deep, inbuilt existential
conflict, and we seem to be the first creatures on this planet to
experience it consciously. Many of us, in fact, spend our lives trying to
avoid experiencing it. Maybe this feature of our self-model is what

makes us inherently religious: We are this process of trying to become
whole again, to somehow reconcile what we know with what we feel
should not be so. In this sense, the Ego is the longing for immortality.
The Ego results in part from the constant attempt to sustain its own coherence
and that of the organism harboring it; thereby arises the constant
temptation to sacrifice intellectual honesty in favor of emotional
well-being.
The Ego evolved as an instrument in social cognition, and one of its
greatest functional advantages was that it allowed us to read the minds
of other animals or conspecifics—and then to deceive them. Or deceive
ourselves. Since our inbuilt existential need for full emotional and physical
security can never be fulfilled, we have a strong drive toward delusion
and bizarre belief systems. Psychological evolution endowed us
with the irresistible urge to satisfy our emotional need for stability and
emotional meaningfulness by creating metaphysical worlds and invisible
persons. Whereas spirituality might be defined as seeing what is—as
letting go of the search for emotional security—religious faith can be
seen as an attempt to cling to that search by redesigning the Ego Tunnel.
Religious belief is an attempt to endow your life with deeper meaning
and embed it in a positive metacontext—it is the deeply human attempt
to finally feel at home. It is a strategy to outsmart the hedonic treadmill.
On an individual level, it seems to be one of the most successful ways to
achieve a stable state—as good as or better than any drug so far discovered.
Now science seems to be taking all this away from us. The emerging
emptiness may be one reason for the current rise of religious
fundamentalism, even in secular societies.
Yes, the self-model made us intelligent, but it certainly is not an example
of intelligent design. It is the seed of subjective suffering. If the
process that created the biological Ego Machine had been initiated by a
person, that person would have to be described as cruel, maybe even diabolic.
We were never asked if we wanted to exist, and we will never be
asked whether we want to die or whether we are ready to do so. In particular,
we were never asked if we wanted to live with this combination
of genes and this type of body. Finally, we were certainly never asked if
we wanted to live with this kind of a brain including this specific type of conscious experience. It should be high time for rebellion. But everything
we know points to a conclusion that is simple but hard to come to
terms with: Evolution simply happened—foresightless, by chance, without
goal. There is nobody to despise or rebel against—not even ourselves.
And this is not some bizarre form of neurophilosophical nihilism
but rather a point of intellectual honesty and great spiritual depth.
One of the most important philosophical tasks ahead will be to develop
a new and comprehensive anthropology—one that synthesizes the
knowledge we have gained about ourselves. Such a synthesis should satisfy
several conditions. It should be conceptually coherent and free of
logical contradictions. It should be motivated by an honest intent to face
the facts. It should remain open to correction and able to accommodate
new insights from cognitive neuroscience and related disciplines. It
must lay a foundation, creating a rational basis for normative decisions—
decisions about how we want to be in the future. I predict that
philosophically motivated neuroanthropology will become one of the
most important new fields of research in the course of this century.