Plus, of the countless decisions I make every day, almost none of them are conscious. I can retroactively justify them as if they had been, but studies show we are far less conscious thinkers than we think we are.
Ultimately, until we resolve the mind-body problem, we cant say that our decisions are based on more than a chaotic soup of interacting proteins and electrical sparks that are only marginally distinct from our environment.
Even if consciousness is a complete illusion that our mind fabricated for us, we still seem to have some control over our reactions. I say this as someone who is teaching my children better reactions to what life throws at them, and similarly having to mediate my own responses to mistakes they make.
Even if all this is happening at the margin, that seems to be enough for us to have some profound differences in how successful we are at navigating life.
And I don't! I consider it unproven, but a duality option definitely remains an option. Plus, there's always the default excuse that if I assume consciousness is reality when I can't in fact decide, well, then I can't be blamed for coming to that conclusion :)
That said, I think we really need to pay attention to how many "conscious" decisions we don't bother to be conscious for. I have a personal theory that consciousness is a state that is generally invoked only when the mind doesn't have a preset behavior - consciousness is invoked to ponder "what if" and decide what to do. Once we have prescribed behavior, consciousness shuts down. Thus, we might be "conscious" for only a few hours or even less in an average day. If so, we CAN be self-aware more often, but it takes effort.
Side Note: This theory is based in part on the idea that there's an advantage in minimizing conscious time - be that caloric requirements or an innate danger of being too aware. I've recently read some claims that hurt the caloric argument (brains are high caloric things, but that doesn't mean consciousness requires more calories) but the innate dangers of overthinking remain strong but vague and anecdotal.
Finding ways to make and support this theory without lapsing into it being an automatic (and thus not trigging awareness) response gets more tricky each time :)
Thus if intelligence is a factor at all in survival (and it seems like it should be) your ancestors may not have had a choice but to select for intelligent.
And this explains the large collection of (in our understanding) not-terribly-intelligent creatures on the planet how?
Not trying to be snarky, just pointing out that intelligence is just one of many paths, and it's very hard to have strong conclusion about how something so rare fares in evolution, and if the tend will maximize or if it pays off to be "just a little" intelligent, just like it pays to be "just a little" able to swim.
Grappling with chaos and complex interacting and intertwining systems is very difficult. It helps to not be led too astray by the easier to access tools we have (such as verbal language), which help, but many of which are woefully inadequate towards a coherent understanding of these issues.
Here's what I think was part of what lead to the development of large brains (and general intelligence). Keep in mind that biology and psychology are not my fields.
Intelligence was inherently advantageous for humans because they allowed us to operate better in different environments. That's where natural selection took effect.
Human tribes were and are (like most populations of social species) characterized by hierarchies, particularly among males in the species. Females tended to choose (and still tend to choose, as far as we can tell) males higher up in social hierarchies when all else is equal (just like most social species, even favoring position in a hierarchy more highly than most other traits). If a tribe has many different possible kinds of hierarchies for males (e.g. they inhabit many different kinds of environments), then one trait that enables a male to do well across many hierarchies is general intelligence. When females select males as high up the hierarchy as possible (in general), they are in effect sexually selecting for intelligence.
I think something similar likely happened with males selecting females with higher intelligence, but it was likely more subtle of a process than I can grasp, since males tend to mate far less selectively than females among humans (and most other animal species), which complicates it quite a bit for me.
Also, just because a choice is unconscious does not mean it is illogical. Many unconscious human choices are quite logical and make a lot of sense, but are not well suited to our current environment.
And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors, unless you mean by that statement that our ancestors consciously endeavored to further their own interests and as a side effect of this, we evolved the way we did. But if that's what you meant, it's a really disingenuous way to describe basic natural selection.
I would like a source to read more about this. I don't distrust you. I'm genuinely interested in reading more about this.
>And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors
I think humans sexually select for intelligence, because it's a trait that affects how high up a human can climb across different social hierarchies.
Sorry, I don't have a source. Epigenetic changes in somatic cells (all the cells in your body except for your sperm or egg cells) are common and necessary for the differentiation that takes place as cells divide and multiply to create a growing organism. But epigenetic inheritance is rare, because epigenetic changes can only be inherited if they somehow change the DNA in germ line cells (sperm or eggs). There just aren't many plausible ways for stuff that happens in the environment to modify the DNA in sperm or eggs. The most plausible way would be for some sort of systemic stress. And, IIRC, one of the only known instances of epigenetic inheritance was a result of starvation.
But, more generally, epigenetic inheritance has to be rare. Evolution is a balancing act. On the one hand you need some mutation, because otherwise there is no variation against which natural selection can act. But on the other hand, you need to limit the amount of mutation so that beneficial genes can persist through time (otherwise they cease to be beneficial), and so that the crazy house of cards that is a developing organism doesn't collapse.
If you know anything about how complex organisms work, it's absolutely insane. There is almost none of the abstraction and encapsulation that we use in engineering to manage complexity. Instead, everything effects everything else. Evolution is like building a computer program by mutating individual bits in a binary program. If you play that out in a massively parallel fashion over billions of iterations, you can get some programs that do really cool stuff.
But they would be incredibly brittle. It would be incredibly easy to crash the whole thing by mutating the wrong bit. And these types of catastrophic mutations seem pretty common in complex organisms. Among humans, the miscarriage rate is 30%-50% (according to Wikipedia; look up the Miscarriage article). A significant number of those are believed to be caused by the female rejecting the fetus because of defects of some kind.
All of this is a long way of saying that it's simply not believable that there is some process which is introducing significant mutation into the reproductive process.