Crawford concludes that Homo sapiens could not have evolved on the savannas but instead were holed up at the beach, gathering along the shoreline. - Michael S. Gazzaniga

Hume concluded that many of the questions that philosophers asked were pseudo questions — that is, questions that cannot be answered with the likes of logic, mathematics, and pure reason because their answers will always be founded at some level on an unprovable belief, on an axiom. He thought that philosophers should stop wasting everyone’s time writing copiously about pseudo questions, dump their a priori assumptions, and rein in their speculations, as the scientists had. They had to reject everything that was not founded on fact or observation, and that included eliminating any appeal to the supernatural.

How come the left brain doesn’t complain about the fact that it is no longer conscious of things on the left side of space? Imagine having your brain disconnected. Imagine waking up in your hospital room the next morning and, as your surgeon walks in to see how you are faring, you only see the left half of her face. Don’t you think you would notice that the right half is not there? The thing is, you would not. In fact, your left hemisphere wouldn’t even be conscious of the fact that there is a left half of space. But this is the weird part: I spoke as if the new, split version of you were just your left hemisphere, and that is not true. You are also your right hemisphere. The new “yous” have two minds with two completely separate pools of perceptual and cognitive information. It is just that only one of the minds can readily speak. The other initially cannot. Perhaps, after many years, it will be able to produce a few words.

Schopenhauer’s framing kicked the problem of consciousness onto a much larger playing field. The mind, with all of its rational processes, is all very well but the “will,” the thing that gives us our “oomph,” is the key: “The will … again fills the consciousness through wishes, emotions, passions, and cares.”14 Today, the subconscious rumblings of the “will” are still unplumbed; only a few inroads have been made. As I write these words, enthusiasts for the artificial intelligence (AI) agenda, the goal of programming machines to think like humans, have completely avoided and ignored this aspect of mental life. That is why Yale’s David Gelernter, one of the leading computer scientists in the world, says the AI agenda will always fall short, explaining, “As it now exists, the field of AI doesn’t have anything that speaks to emotions and the physical body, so they just refuse to talk about it.” He asserts that the human mind includes feelings, along with data and thoughts, and each particular mind is a product of a particular person’s experiences, emotions, and memories hashed and rehashed over a lifetime: “The mind is in a particular body, and consciousness is the work of the whole body.” Putting it in computer lingo, he declares, “I can run an app on any device, but can I run someone else’s mind on your brain? Obviously not.”15