S CARCITY, C ONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE N ATURE OF THE S ELF

James A. Montanye Consulting Economist ABSTRACT: All perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and rational actions share common neural processes that are evolved (i.e., contingent) biological responses to the a priori scarcity of economic resources. Scarcity entails the insufficiency of available resources to satisfy all possible biological needs. Thinking about scarcity in economics terms helps with understanding the emergence of consciousness and self from brain structures and modules which themselves are artifacts of the Darwinian struggle against scarcity. Asking What is it like to be some other organism is partly to ask what it is like to experience that organisms patterns of economic costs and benefits. The conscious self is an entrepreneurial brain module that promotes the individual organisms survival and reproductive potential by censoring actions that could be inimical to these interests. Asking What is it like to be some other individual with a differentiated sense of self is partly to ask what it is like to experience that individuals censoring function. Keywords: consciousness, economics, evolution, free will, materialism, naturalism, natural selection, physicalism, reductionism, residual claimant, self Consciousness, in those species that appear to possess it, is an emergent artifact of the silent war against the scarcity of economic resources waged by Darwinian natural selection; the raucous Hobbesian war of all against all is merely one visible aspect of this conflict. Scarcity is the relevant and sufficient first-cause-uncaused in the struggle for existence. It determines not only the ontology of neural architecture and consequent instinctive and rational behaviors, but also the natural selection process itself. In the absence of scarcity, all species and their varieties could exist blissfully in perpetuity, in which case natural selection, consciousness, and the self would be empty concepts. The battle against scarcity is the fundamental challenge of existence. Thinking about scarcity in economics terms illuminates the evolutionary forces that shape the morphologies, instinctive and rational behaviors, and mental processes of organisms. It also clarifies some familiar philosophical constructs regarding consciousness and self. I Consider what it is like to be a marine animal called the sea squirt (Dawkins 2004, 367372; Wikipedia 2012). This evolutionarily ancient urochordate embodies a rudimentary brain only during its pelagic (mobile) larval stage. This brain is genetically programmed with only one instruction: Attach to something solid! Once attached, the creature undergoes a radical metamorphosis during which its cerebral ganglion, which is the functional equivalent of the human brain, is absorbed (the organism metaphorically eats its own brain), and the nutrients are recycled to create the adult body (nature does not waste resources). The brain becomes expendable because, in its adult form, the sea squirt has evolved to be an immobile filter-feeder that passively ingests available nutrients. The adult is incapable of fight, flight, and reproductive

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courtship activities.1 It has no need for centralized consciousness, reason, morality, or a concept of self, and so natural selection has deprived it of the neural basis for these capabilities. The adult sea squirt exists in one sense as an ideal Kantian form: Now in a being which has reason and a will, if the proper object of nature were its conservation, its welfare, in a word, its happiness, then nature would have hit upon a very bad arrangement in selecting the reason of the creature to carry out this purpose. For all the actions which the creature has to perform with a view to this purpose, and the whole rule of its conduct, would be far more surely prescribed to it by instinct, and that end would have been attained thereby much more certainly than it ever can be by reason. Should reason have been communicated to this favoured creature over and above, it must only have served it to contemplate the happy constitution of its nature, to admire it, to congratulate itself thereon, and to feel thankful for it to the beneficent cause, but not that it should subject its desires to that weak and delusive guidance and meddle bunglingly with the purpose of nature. In a word, nature would have taken care that reason should not break forth into practical exercise, nor have the presumption, with its weak insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness, and of the means of attaining it. Nature would not only have taken on herself the choice of the ends, but also of the means, and with wise foresight would have entrusted both to instinct. (Kant [1785] 1987, 1920) The adult sea squirt actually betters the Kantian ideal in the sense that its instincts are fully distributed among functional cell structures rather than being centralized within a single, cognitive organ. The process of Darwinian natural selection has optimized the sea squirt for playing the existential game of survival and reproduction. This game, as Darwin noted, entails a competition for scarce economic resources; that is, a struggle for existence ... either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life (Darwin 1859, 63). Failure is never an option where survival is at stake, but it is a possible outcome. The struggle for existence in fact has contributed to the subsequent extinction of roughly 99 percent of all species that evolved between the beginning of life on Earth and the present time. And yet, as the biologist Richard Dawkins (1995, 96) notes, nature is not cruel, ... simply callousindifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose. The forces that shaped the sea squirts ontology and morphology also shaped that of mankind. One consequence is that all human perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and rational actions share common neural processes that have evolved as emergent biological properties that are contingent on the a priori scarcity of economic resources. The human mind is a device for

The philosopher of neuroscience Patricia Churchland (1986) playfully characterizes these universal behavioral components as the four-Fs: Feeding; Fighting; Fleeing; and Reproduction. -2-

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survival and reproduction, notes the biologist E.O. Wilson (1978, 2), and reason [like instinct] is just one of its various techniques. II Critics of Naturalism, Physicalism, Materialism, and Reductionism, including most familiarly the philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974), are skeptical of mind-body thought experiments of the sort adumbrated above. To ask What is it like to be some other organism is considered to be a feckless pursuit, not only because the character of such experience necessarily entails an objective (third-person) point-of-view interpretation of a subjective (first-person) experience, but also because an organism like the sea squirt has no brain with which to cognize the experiences that some other organism conceivably might want to share. To be an adult sea squirt is, among other things, to be blissfully unaware of the fight against scarcity that Darwinain natural selection has waged silently and successfully on its behalf. This blissful state is comparable to the subjective experience of a helpless infant, a pampered human adolescent, and a human adult that has prepaid for an all-in spa visit, resort vacation, or cruise. The individual in each example is relieved temporarily of all material concerns about the marginal economic cost of its momentary existence. By altering patterns of cost, humans are capable not only of empathizing accurately with members of another species, but also of experiencing what it is like to be that species without pretending to behave like a member of it. Some truth exists in the old saw about tenured academics knowing what it is like to be a sea squirt. Biology, economics, and some strains of philosophical argument teach that the capacity for subjective experience is an evolved means for battling against resource scarcity. Intrinsic to this evolutionary development is a conscious sense of self. The self is the I that is to be preserved through conscious reasoning and rational action. Conscious behavior complements instinctive genetic and epigenetic behavioral predispositions. The influential Cartesian dictum, Cogito ergo sum, is persistently unhelpful for understanding this aspect of the relationship between consciousness and the self on one hand, and an organisms continued existence on the other hand. A more enlightening slogan is Inopia est, ergo sumI am because of scarcity. III Darwinian natural selection has rendered mankind as an entrepreneurial species. The neuroeconomist2 Paul Glimcher (2002, 336) avers that economics is a biological science in the sense that the capacity for conscious, rational thought and entrepreneurial action has evolved through natural selection. Mainstream economists nevertheless tend to think of entrepreneurship as being wholly rational, rather than being at least partly instinctive. They do so without

The goal of neuroeconomics is to develop an algorithmic description of the human mechanism for choice (Glimcher and others 2009, 503). -3-

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recognizing the instinctive behavioral predispositions that natural selection has hard-coded into mankinds genetic makeup. Darwinian natural selection operates as if it were obeying Kants prescient, pre-Darwinian insight quoted earlier. Actually, however, natural selection optimizes the distribution and scope of conscious and sub-conscious behavioral processes according to their relative biological costs. The result resembles the efficient distribution of a computers operating intelligence between hardware and software. Philosophers, psychologists, and behavioralists ponder the deep meaning of consciousness, cognition, and self. Economists focus in turn on an analogous concept of the individual as an entrepreneurial residual claimant (Montanye 2006; Tirole 1989, 36). The residual claimant is a self-interested actor who retains any economic surplus that exists after the costs of doing business are paid. Prospective ownership of this surplus is the incentive that causes individuals to act entrepreneurially and efficiently in the face of resource scarcity. Competition ordinarily limits this surplus to no more than a normal return on the entrepreneurs efforts and investment. Shortfalls, by contrast, often occur, and entrepreneurs that consistently reap less than a normal return exit the scene sooner rather than later. Natural selection operates in a similar fashion. The parallel is so striking that economists have been influenced by the writings of modern evolutionists who stress the importance of competition (e.g., Dawkins 1976) and spontaneous organization (e.g., Dawkins 1996). Biologists, by comparison, are not particularly impressed by the work of economists (Wilson 1998, 195205). Natural selection has styled the self as a entrepreneurial, residual claimant that functions rationally at the behavioral margins to promote the individuals prospects for survival and reproduction. These behavioral margins consist of irregular situational opportunities and extremes where evolved, hard-coded behavioral propensities do not (or at least not yet) operate efficiently, if at all.3 Human actions facilitated by the self take many forms, including moral cooperation, reciprocity, the exchange of economic goods, and various signaling functions (Montanye 2012). These behaviors appear as early as six months of age, and so are presumed to be instinctive rather than discretely rational (Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2007). IV The question, What is it like to be a conscious self is philosophically baffling in part

Natural selection tends to engender efficient behavior but, as Darwin noted (1859, 201202), it rarely achieves perfection. Human behavior often appears to be rational because it is driven by evolved genetic propensities that make efficient use of scarce resources. Discrete rationality engages only at the margins of behavior, however, and so it is naive to model all behavior reflexively as exercises in rational choice, as some economists and philosophers are inclined to do (Becker 1976; Gauthier 1986 and 1990). The philosopher Richard Joyce (2001, 105) aptly asserts that the rationalist is someone who invents an unnecessary riddle and then tries to solve it. -4-

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because the brain lacks the comprehensive ability to perceive itself directly. Human individuals feel as though their self inhabits a panoptic realm, which the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1991) calls The Cartesian Theater. Imagining what it is like to be some other organism of either the same or a different species is to imagine what it is like to sit as an audience member in that organisms panopticon. The Cartesian Theater is illusory, however, and so Cartesian intuition is intrinsically vexed. Neuroscience, which examines the mind-body relationship empirically using brain imaging and other methods, reveals the self to be an emergent and essentially non-reductive neurochemical state that is reified through the workings of literally millions of specialized neural structures and distributed brain modules comprising billions of neurons and synapses, all of which are consequences of natural selection working against scarcity (Gazzaniga 2011). The Cartesian notion of mind-body dualism persists nevertheless, in part because it provides a useful grounding for theocentric arguments regarding mankinds spiritual nature and place in the cosmos. Mankind is remarkably reluctant to accept its own biological nature (Dawkins 1995; Pinker 2002; Dennett 2006), preferring instead to unite spontaneously around objectively false beliefs that nevertheless facilitate cooperation and exchange among individuals (Montanye 2009 and 2012). Mankind shows a similar reluctance to submit certain kinds of human behavior to the frigid calculus of economics (Becker 1976, 4). The upshot has been philosophical confusion. A highly developed self is presumed to have free will, and so ought to be held socially accountable for its behavioral choices. Neuroscience, however, re-characterizes free will as free nil. Rather than initiating action, the self operates instead as a filter that censors and squelches imprudent actions initiated by subconscious brain structures and modules, actions that, if unchecked, could run counter to the individuals overarching strategy for survival and reproduction. The self adjusts the filters settings in order to tailor a differentiated competitive strategy with which to battle against scarcity. These strategies become part of the individuals will, or volition. The choice of strategy and settings defines the individual, and it is these properties that other individuals judge, both morally and legally. Asking What is it like to be another organism with a differentiated sense of self is asking in part what it is like to experience these settings. Mankind appears to be the only species of organism in this class. The choice of ones filter settings results from an inherent, entrepreneurial awareness that a differentiated competitive strategy betters the individuals chances for survival and reproduction. Individuals are spurred to adopt a strategic uniqueness by an evolved, second-order desire to want a particular sort of will by which to satisfy first-order wants (Frankfurt 1971).4 Essential first-order wants might be satisfied directly, as the sea squirt example shows. Consequently, the emergence of second-order wants indicates a species evolution toward increasingly more intense competition for scarce resources (akin to an arms race) within a given ecological niche. This evolutionary development leads entrepreneurial humans to want, among other things, the wealth

A third-order want might arise in an individual whose neural apparatus for forming second-order wants is either physically impaired or missing. An individual in this situation conceivably could want the second-order ability to want particular first-order wants. Unlike firstand second-order wants, this third-order want would flow from reason rather than instinct. -5-

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and productive potential of other individuals. Evolved propensities for moral cooperation and exchange notwithstanding, [t]he most pervasive hostile force that remains, for any human individual or group, is other members or groups of the human species itself. Apparently no other species has accomplished this peculiar evolutionary feat, which has led to an unprecedented level of group-against-group within-species competition (Alexander 1987, 228). Empirical evidence shows that conscious moral choices rarely mitigate this competition. The claim that moral choice is a myth appears to be closer to the truth (Joyce 2001 and 2006). V Nagel (1974) lamented four decades ago that philosophers had no conception of how to explain the conscious mental status of any organism other than itself; that is, to explain What is it like to be some other organism. Accordingly, he challenged philosophers to develop a fresh approach to the mind-body question and the issue of consciousness; to form new concepts and devise a new [philosophical] methodan objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy and imagination. ... [The goal] would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences (Nagel 1974, 446). A few philosophers responded to Nagels challenge by developing unhelpful koans that ask, for example (and perhaps at least partly in jest), What is it like to have your brain transplanted into another individuals body? By contrast, the approach I have outlined examines the objective nature of subjective experiences by considering the patterns of economic costs and benefits that arise as a consequence of natural selections battle against resource scarcity. These patterns motivate individual behavior, in part by contributing to the individuals differentiated sense of self. All conscious organisms experience these patterns subjectively, and so they provide a fruitful basis for developing objective explanations of subjective experiences. References Alexander, Richard. 1987. The Biology of Moral Systems. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Becker, Gary. 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Churchland, Patricia. 1986. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Darwin, Charles. 1859. On The Origin of Species. London: John Murray. Dawkins, Richard 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1995. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. New York: BasicBooks. -6-

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. 1996. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. . 2004. The Ancestors Tale: The Pilgrimage To The Dawn of Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little Brown and Company. . 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking. Frankfurt, Harry. 1971. Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person. Journal of Philosophy 68(1): 520. Gauthier, David. 1986. Morals by Agreement. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1990. Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and Reason. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Gazzaniga, Michael. 2011. Whos in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain. New York: HarperCollins. Glimcher, Paul. 2002. Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Glimcher, Paul, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Russell Poldrack, eds. 2009. Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain. New York: Elsevier. Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom. 2007. Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants. Nature 450 (November 22): 557559. Joyce, Richard. 2001. The Myth of Morality. New York: Cambridge University Press. . 2006. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kant, Immanuel. [1785] 1987. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. T.K. Abbott. Buffalo: Promethius Books. Nagel, Thomas. 1994. What Is It Like To Be a Bat. Philosophical Review 83(4): 435450. Montanye, James A. 2006. Entrepreneurship. The Independent Review 10(4): 549571. Online at www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=574. . 2009. Civilization Without Romance. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 17(2): -7-

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. 2012. Morality, Altruism, and Religion in Economics Perspective. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 20(2): 1944. Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking. Tirole, Jean. 1989. The Theory of Industrial Organization. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Wikipedia. 2012. Tunicate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunicate. Wilson, E.O. 1978. On Human Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. . 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage Books.

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