IS HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS A TRAGIC MISSTEP IN EVOLUTION?
TRUE DETECTIVE—SEASON ONE
My favourite part of the whole season was episode one, The Long Dark Bright. This is when the anti-hero, Rust Cohle—a solitary cynic and pessimist who believes that human beings are merely ‘sentient meat’—is stuck in the car with his much more straight-laced partner, Marty Hart. Marty interrogates Rust about his religious beliefs.
Cohle gives this poignant response:
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self-aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labour under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.
I think the honourable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” — Rust Cohle (Nic Pizzolatto)
What I loved about this quote was its direct relevance to religion, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. It highlights how humans, as the supposed masters of consciousness—or so we believe—develop an overinflated sense of importance, assuming that our ability to self-reflect makes us supernatural or at least uniquely special.
“I’ve got something intangible inside me. It’s not an eyeball, a head, or an arm. It exists without substance…” — Thomas Ligotti
WHAT EXACTLY IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
In simple terms, consciousness is the awareness of the self, the environment, and the relationship between these two distinct worlds. This capacity ultimately allows us to contemplate our existence.
THE DIVINE ILLUSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Humans often view consciousness as divine evidence for a soul because it feels intangible and unquantifiable. It is also the source of our identity, emotions, and thoughts—experiences that seem too profound to be mere biological processes. This belief in intangibility often leads to the assumption that consciousness must come from something divine, like a soul. Its role in shaping our identity and experiences makes it feel almost supernatural, and the inability to fully grasp its mechanisms reinforces this perception.
To neuroscientists, however, consciousness is an emergent property of natural selection rather than something divine or metaphysical. They reject concepts like the soul or intrinsic purposes beyond evolutionary mechanisms. Instead, they argue that consciousness is a sensation no more valuable than any other neurological process. It evolved as a by-product of natural selection to help us navigate our environment more successfully.
For instance, for humans to predict the behaviour of other animals and humans (theory of mind), we had to reflect not only on ourselves and the world around us but also on our existence within the world. To achieve this, the brain became not just a processor of sensations and thoughts but an observer of itself.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND BRAIN PROCESSES
Sperry’s split-brain research is one of the clearest demonstrations of how consciousness relies on physical processes in the brain. When the corpus callosum is severed (e.g., to treat epilepsy), the brain's two hemispheres can no longer communicate. This creates two separate streams of consciousness within the same individual. For example, if the right hemisphere sees an object or face, that information cannot be passed to Broca’s area in the left hemisphere, which controls speech. As a result, the person cannot verbalise what the right hemisphere knows.
They don’t have conscious awareness of the event, even though the right hemisphere can still act on it. For instance, the person may draw an object seen by their right hemisphere but not understand why they’ve done so. This clearly shows that awareness and the ability to communicate depend on specific neural connections.
Neuroscience also explains how memory—a fundamental part of consciousness—is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Processes like long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampus enable the formation of memories by strengthening neural connections. In dementia, damage to brain structures like the hippocampus and cerebral cortex disrupts this process, leading to memory loss and a gradual erosion of self-awareness. The fact that cognitive and conscious abilities degrade with physical brain damage provides strong evidence that consciousness arises from brain activity.
The idea that consciousness might exist in a ‘non-physical dimension’ faces a significant challenge. If consciousness were entirely separate from the brain, it wouldn’t be affected by physical damage or disease. Yet we consistently see that changes to brain structure—whether through injury, disease, or experiments like Sperry’s—profoundly alter conscious experience. This evidence underscores its basis in physical processes, showing how integral the brain is to who we are and how we perceive the world.
THE EXISTENTIAL BURDEN OF SENTIENCE
The phrase ‘sentient meat’ is a stark but thought-provoking way to describe human existence. At its core, it encapsulates a naturalistic and materialistic view of life: humans are biological organisms made of flesh and governed by the laws of nature, yet capable of self-awareness, complex thought, and emotions. From this perspective, humans are physical entities, with consciousness, emotions, and intellect arising from the interactions of neurons, chemicals, and biological systems.
This framing aligns with thinkers like Daniel Dennett and raises existential questions: If humans are sentient meat, does life have any inherent meaning beyond biological imperatives? Are our thoughts, dreams, and achievements merely by-products of evolutionary chance?
Unlike other animals, humans are uniquely burdened by their sentience. Awareness of mortality, the futility of existence, and the absence of inherent purpose are heavy existential weights. This self-awareness separates us from other ‘meat’ on Earth, such as animals that live instinctually, free from existential dread.
For those who don’t believe consciousness reflects a God, its existence can be heartbreaking. The more mindful one is of the world's appalling state, humanity's selfishness, and futility, the more one desires to become oblivious to that fact.
LIGOTTI’S NIHILISM AND ESCAPE
As a result, many humans engage in behaviours designed to suppress this knowledge: striving to live healthily, obsessing over youth (even though everyone dies), seeking genetic immortality through children, or immersing themselves in their careers.
“Being alive is not OK, as suffering mostly cancels out pleasure. The only complete escape from the predicament of consciousness is either to undergo ego death, which very few humans successfully achieve, or for humanity to cease existing, preferably through voluntary human extinction.” — Thomas Ligotti
Ligotti, an American horror writer and pessimist philosopher, suggests that our capacity for self-reflection—though extraordinary—inevitably leads to despair or nihilism. As described by Ligotti, ego death refers to the dissolution of one’s sense of self—losing the boundary between oneself and the external world. He views this as a rare but liberating escape from the burdens of self-awareness. On the other hand, voluntary extinction reflects his belief in reducing suffering altogether by ending humanity’s existence.
“The ability to reflect on our own existence, while remarkable, often leads to despair or nihilism.” — Thomas Ligotti
CONCLUSION: A GIFT AND A BURDEN
Ultimately, whether we see consciousness as divine or as a tragic misstep of evolution, it is undeniable that this awareness is both a gift and a burden. Perhaps, then, the true tragedy of consciousness is that it leaves us forever searching for meaning in a world that offers none, burdened by awareness yet unable to escape its grip.
