Woven into this essay is a family of themes normally discussed in ethics and moral theory, but in this case augmented by Cultural Anthropology, the biological sciences and my view of human history. I am deeply skeptical of claims to absolute moral objectivity, where an ethical or moral standard is held to be unconditionally true, in some manner reflecting fundamental and indubitable aspects of the cosmos.

This essay results from re-considering issues in “Some Thoughts Concerning Consciousness” dated 2-10-2024 in this blog. A fully naturalistic point of view is retained, but with conceptual twists—a reframing—as I return to quandaries surrounding human consciousness and subjective experience.

For millennia, even before Neolithic times, our species’ earliest ancestors survived by their intelligence, adaptibility, and perhaps some luck. Creating ever more effective tools and forming more funcrional social groups increased their likelihood of success. Problem-solving skills emerged in response to varied environments, abilities only possible because of their awareness and understanding of the world around them—an accumulation of essential knowledge.

Since the time of the Pre-Socratics, natural philosophy has struggled with the nature of human consciousness, and the issue remains an acute philosophical and scientific quandary. We ask by what processes consciousness could have arisen, and whether neural processes themselves could provide a fully satisfactory description of its origin.

This essay examines ideas related to how we percieve moral and ethical thinking. A helpful first step is realizing how varied—even fragmented—thinking about moral issues can be. The population of ideas we’re trying to understand is not a tightly interrrerlated whole, but is much more like pieces strewn here and there.

Many discussions in the science and philosophy of consciousness are framed by a profound challenge—searching for an intellectually satisfactory understanding of consciousness, often called the “hard problem” of consciousness. A common thread running through much inquiry is the assumption that consciousness is not observable—consciousness is a felt or experienced phenomenon, never seen or experimentally approachable in a third-person sense.

How easily we can be drawn into moods of deep pessimism. Media are filled with images from around the world of violence and tragedy, and active fundamentalist ideologies and authoritarian governments threaten intellectual freedom, toleration and democracy —the core values of creative, open societies. But despair is but one reaction to living in our era.

For uncounted millions of us, an elemental, intuitive awareness of ourselves—consciousness of oneself as a discrete organism (individuation)—becomes an indubitable fact, touching much of human action, thinking and experience. Self-awareness is a foundational experience.

During the last century’s darkest political and social period—World War II and its prelude—Karl Popper completed The Open Society and its Enemies, an articulate and impassioned defense of the social and political philosophy of democratic liberalism. The rule of law, free inquiry, toleration, universal suffrage and reason, are values of democratic liberalism. Parallels between his era and our own are disturbingly obvious.

Recent advances in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and science-based philosophy have deepened our knowledge, especially for appreciating how, and in what sense, the mind emerges from complex interactions in the brain. What follows is a series of interrelated summaries of a naturalistic interpretation of the brain/mind relationship.

Ever since the beginning of the modern era, science-based inquiry has extended our comprehension of reality unthinkable to our remote ancestors. Some changes have occurred slowly, while others have been rapid and transforming, especially over the past 200 years. While many implications of our growing knowledge are universally recognized, especially its effects its on technological advances, a philosophical, or meta-analysis of the nature of acquired knowledge is more often left to professional journals, rather than widely-read periodicals written for non-specialists.

When consistently applied as a world-view, Naturalism re-writes traditional definitions of humanity, imposing substantial constraints on what qualifies as meaningful language in describing human cognition, consciousness and action in general.

During the middle decades of the 20th Century Existentialism rose to considerable prominence, influencing cultures on both sides of the Atlantic with its fusion of philosophy and psychology. Sartre, Camus and others passionately rejected theism as a world-view, substituting full acceptance of the contingencies of the world, with its random, uncertain and arbitrary nature.

A central aspect of anyone’s world -view is what they believe to be our species’ place in the Cosmos. What could be more defining than how we view the nature of human-kind? Are we cognitively advanced animals on a continuum with other species, or something categorically different?

First a short preface—what follows is an extended postscript and clarification of my 7-15-18 and 1-29-18 essays, “That Notorious Phrase Free Will” and “Consciousness, Human Action and Cognition”. Both essays examined issues central to understanding the nature of our species. While their eventual resolution lies in the future, continuing to articulate useful descriptions of human agency helps counteract ideas and intellectual habits that have brought little help to discussions, and at times added confusion.

We almost always see ourselves as conscious agents: entities capable of making decisions, selecting from multiple options, problem solving, asking engaging questions, those innumerable human actions that make us the complex and interesting creatures we take ourselves to be.