[...] As he did so, he realised that around the world, researchers were trapped in a senseless empiricism. Nothing in their experimental results brought them closer to a conclusion, nor did they provide support for any particular hypothesis. Individual consciousness seemed to emerge among animals for no apparent reason, and seemed largely to predate the capacity for language. Darwinians, with instinctive determinism, put forward hypotheses about how natural selection might have benefited from the emergence of consciousness, but these in no way explained anything; they were Just So stories, no more. Then again, the anthropogenic model was hardly more convincing: life had thrown up something which could contemplate it, a mind capable of understanding it, but so what? That in itself did not make understanding consciousness any easier. Self-consciousness, which is absent in nematodes, was clearly observable in inferior lizards like Lacerata agilis, implying the presence of both a central nervous system and something more. What that something was, remained completely mysterious; consciousness dod not seem to depend on any single thing, whether anatomical, biochemical or cellular. It was all rather pressing.
Houellebecq, Michel. Atomised. pag. ?. Vintage U.K., 2001.
