ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that consciousness is the ability to simultaneously live in two types of reality: perceived everyday reality and invisible magical reality. At some point around 100,000 years ago, humans became aware of the inevitability of personal death and developed the idea of an afterlife – the reality in which the spirits of dead ancestors dwell. They also discovered that the spirits have unusual properties: they are invisible, immortal, can read people’s minds and feed on smoke from burning sacrificed animals. Due to these discoveries, humans became able to look at their everyday world from another perspective and were surprised that their world was designed very differently from the world of their ancestral spirits. That was the moment when consciousness as we know it was born: the ability to view the everyday reality ‘outside of the box’, from the perspective of the gods. This ability for reflection gave rise to new forms of behaviour: executively controlled action and moral behaviour. Around 30,000 years ago, people developed a way to tangibly represent the invisible world of spirits through signs and symbols, such as cave paintings or figurines made from stone and bone. At the same time or shortly afterwards, people started using symbolic means for utilitarian purposes, such as for memorising numbers of killed animals or for manufactured items of clothing. Eventually, symbolic reality gave birth to written languages and mathematics. But the emergence of consciousness, along with other achievements, also created psychological problems. The main problem was keeping the everyday and magical realities apart. To make this possible, a new psychological mechanism emerged: the ‘effort of reality distinguishing’ (ERD). It took millennia for the ERD to achieve the level of perfection it has in modern humans. Like the heartbeat, the ERD in modern humans is automatised and subconscious. Disturbances of the ERD result in phenomena such as mental disorders, mystical visions and religious radicalism. Recent psychological studies have revealed that early human beliefs in the supernatural live on in the subconscious of modern, rational people; it feeds people’s magical thinking and makes the ERD ever more important.
