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same category—they are perceptions of mind. When unaccountable events occur—babies are born, people die unexpectedly, planes crash, someone survives an accident that ought to have killed him, a lucky number wins the lottery—these events are grist for the social machinery in the brain. Because the events are unlikely or unpredictable, they do not lend themselves to a physical mode of explanation. Instead they inspire social perception—the perception of a mind that must have intended those events.

    A standard and, I think, unnecessarily dismissive scientific explanation is that God is a faulty deduction, an incorrect theory, or the result of wishful imagination. Perhaps so for some people, but I personally doubt that a god that was purely imagined would have so many people fervently convinced, or would have so much cultural universality. The absolute certainty expressed by worshippers suggests to me that underlying the imagination and the speculation and the theorizing and the desire is a genuine percept. I don’t suppose that all monotheistic people have had this perceptual experience, but enough of them have had it to form a critical mass at the core of the religion. Such people at certain moments perceive the presence of God as a tangible emotional and mental warmth—as a consciousness that is physically present.

    Consider the following list of perceived minds. Perceiving—sometimes misperceiving—the intentions of another person. Perceiving a soul in a favorite stuffed animal. Mourning the death of a favorite glass knickknack that used to sit on the mantle shelf. Feeling that a tree has a spirit. Feeling that a ghost is in the room behind you, watching you. The Greek gods who were in control of lightning and the sea and the wind and the fortunes of war. A monotheistic god who orchestrates the world. Obviously not everybody has all of these experiences, and yet they are all examples of the same ubiquitous process. They are perceptions of mind. My central scientific point is that you never do experience another person’s mind. You experience a model that your brain constructs. The spirit world, from God on down, is the product of the machinery for social perception.

    A philosopher might say that if we live in an experiential world made up entirely of simulation, of simulated objects and simulated actions, of simulated minds and simulated intentions, then within the only universe that matters, the universe of our own personal experience, the universe that we walk through and live in and interact with, the soul exists, minds exist, spirits exist, ghosts exist, God exists, as real or unreal as anything else, as real as a table, as real as the color of the sky. Perception supplies our reality. This point of view belongs to the general approach called solipsism. The mind creates the world that we experience. Can a belief in God ever be consistent with science? Arguably I am proposing a way in which the science of the mind can breathe some solipsistic existence into God. God is not imaginary, not a theory, not a wishful fantasy, but a part of the perceptual world. As a scientist, however, I would also like to know about the universe beyond the simulated world of perception. The spirit world, by its very nature, by its dependence on social perceptual construct, is a creation of the brain. It is perceptual illusion.

Chapter 4

    Explaining consciousness

    The previous chapters describe in some detail how we humans perceive the world around us as though it were painted with mental attributes. A specialized system in the brain for social perception does that painting. We perceive the properties of mind in other people, in animals, sometimes in inanimate objects, and even in empty space. A central point of this book is that we perceive our own minds using the same neuronal machinery and essentially the same processes that we use to perceive other minds. Consciousness is social perception applied inwardly. At first glance