It had to happen eventually. The "hard problem" of consciousness is being invoked in favor of anti-Darwinist ideas such as "Intelligent Design". Here's a key quote from an already infamous New Scientist article:

"According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."



The reporter contacted me to ask for a comment when she was writing the article. I told her that like many other scientists and philosophers (even people like Steven Pinker!), I have serious doubts about the possibility of a materialist explanation of consciousness, but that those doubts do little to support a religious agenda or intelligent design. I declined to be quoted on the record, though, because of the danger of being taken out of context as supporting the movement. Perhaps this was a mistake, as the article doesn't do a good job of separating the issues. I'd hate to see the consciousness/materialism issue and the design/theism issue run together in the popular imagination. As Peter Hankin says amusingly at Conscious Entities:

"Oh boy: if there was one thing the qualia debate didn't need, it was a large-scale theological intervention. Dan Dennett must be feeling rather the way Guy Crouchback felt when he heard about the Nazi-Soviet pact: the forces of darkness have drawn together and the enemy stands clear at last!"



Anyway, let's get things straight. The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism. In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length here and there. But it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.

The simplest way to see this is to note that the "hard problem" does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn't lawfully depend on physical processes, at least in the sense that certain physical states are reliably associated with certain states of consciousness in our world. Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness. But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness. If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects. And if epiphenomenalism (on which consciousness has no causal role) is true, consciousness can still arise by evolution as a byproduct. Perhaps the thought that consciousness is a byproduct is unattractive, but if so the problem lies with epiphenomenalism, not with evolution.

So I think there is very little support for anti-Darwinist ideas to be found here. I think there's also not much support for theist ideas: of course traditional theism requires that materialism be false, but the falsity of materialism does little to positively suggest that theism is true. As for intelligent design, I'm on the record as saying that I can't rule out the hypothesis that we're living in a computer simulation, so I suppose that it follows that I can't rule out the hypothesis that our world is designed. But there's not much here to support traditional theism or to oppose Darwinism, and whatever support there is doesn't come from the problem of consciousness. In any case, I hope that these issues remain firmly separated, as they should.