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ceaseless source of awe and respect for anything human. Last, naturalizing the mind may solve one mystery but only to raise the curtain on other mysteries quietly awaiting their turn.
    Placing the construction of conscious minds in the history of biology and culture opens the way to reconciling traditional humanism and modern science, so that when neuroscience explores human experience into the strange worlds of brain physiology and genetics, human dignity is not only retained but reaffirmed.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote memorably, “His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.” I can understand why he said so, but his condemnation is only half the story, appropriate for moments of discouragement with the imperfections of nature that conscious minds expose so nakedly. The other half of the story should be occupied with praise for such an invention as the enabler of all the creations and discoveries that trade loss and grief for joy and celebration. The emergence of consciousness opened the way to a life worth living. Understanding how it comes about can only strengthen that worth. 19
    Does knowing about how the brain works matter at all for how we live our lives? I believe it matters very much, all the more so if, besides knowing who we presently are, we care at all for what we may become.

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From Life Regulation to
Biological Value
     
The Implausibility of Reality
     
    Mark Twain thought that the big difference between fiction and reality was that fiction had to be believable. Reality could afford to be implausible, but fiction could not. And so the narrative of mind and consciousness that I am presenting here does not conform to the requirements of fiction. It is actually counterintuitive. It upsets traditional human storytelling. It repeatedly denies long-held assumptions and not a few expectations. But none of this makes the account any less likely.
    The notion that hidden underneath conscious minds there are unconscious mind processes is hardly news. This idea was first aired more than a century ago, when the public greeted it with some surprise, but today the notion is commonplace. What is not commonly appreciated, although it is well known, is that long before living creatures had minds, they exhibited efficient and adaptive behaviors that for all intents and purposes resemble those that arise in mindful, conscious creatures. Of necessity, those behaviors were not caused by minds, let alone consciousness. In brief, it is not just that conscious and nonconscious processes coexist but rather that nonconscious processes that are relevant to maintaining life can exist without their conscious partners.
    As far as mind and consciousness are concerned, evolution has brought us different sorts of brains. There is the sort of brain that produces behavior but does not appear to have mind or consciousness; an example is the nervous system of Aplysia californica , the marine snail that became popular in the laboratory of the neurobiologist Eric Kandel. Another sort produces the whole range of phenomena—behavior, mind, and consciousness—human brains are the prime example, of course. And a third sort of brain clearly produces behavior, is likely to produce a mind, but whether it generates consciousness in the sense discussed here is not so clear. That is the case of insects.
    But the surprises do not end with the notion that in the absence of mind and consciousness brains can produce respectable behaviors. It turns out that living creatures without any brain at all, down to single cells, exhibit seemingly intelligent and purposeful behavior as well. And that too is an underappreciated fact.
    There is no doubt that we can gain useful insights into how human brains produce conscious minds by understanding the simpler brains that produce neither mind nor consciousness. As we engage in that retrospective survey, however, it becomes apparent that in order to explain the rise of such long-ago brains we need to go even deeper