08.16.10
Ethics, consciousness, evolution, and the eonic effect
Where does right and wrong come from?: Stephen Smith at Trinity blog links also to a First Things essay on David Brooks, with his recent essay on ‘moral naturalists’.
I think this question is far too hard for humanity to answer, hence the frantic efforts to concoct answers in line with various ideologies.
I shy away from design arguments, but the questions of human consciousness, and thence the questions of ethics, require a deeper knowledge than what we have. And it is very hard to produce mechanical answers to any of them. But design issues have been completely trivialized by Biblical myths turned into dogmas. The real design argument can no longer use the term ‘god’. So be it. It has confused the whole discussion as the story of Adam and Eve invades all discourse and stops thought, cogent as that tale might be.
But my point is that we haven’t ruled out design arguments in this one area where supremely difficult and complicated issues seem hopelessly beyond the idiocy of Darwinian frameworks.
I mention this only because, while I always attack design arguments produced by Xtians, I hold in reserve the types potential to the philosophies of Schopenhauer, and J.G. Bennett. The cosmic actions of ‘being, function, will’ on the many levels of cosmological being could be involved in the bootstrapping of consciousness and ethical action. Such a thing would be a hybrid of ‘will’ a la Schopenhauer and mechanical laws.
The point here is that Samkhya (atheistical) design arguments remind us that design is too metaphysical, and cosmic physics too mechanical. A whole new category must exist that reconciles these opposites. Ask me no more, for I know not.
That’s not very helpful but it at least attempts a ‘science fiction’ for an answer, something that is often a generation away from a real hypothesis.
(Like Nemo’s nuclear reactor).
The research into the issue of ethics cannot even depict what it is that has evolved, nor truly distinguish, Kant apart, the criteria of good and evil. That’s a primitive start to the question of the evolution of ethics. Part of the problem is that its action is partly unconscious: we only sense the moment of action.
Beyond this we must first answer the first really hard question, what is consciousness and how did it evolve.
We can no more answer this question than a Stone Age homo sapiens could explain modern physics.
In any case, we have to be suspicious that, by whatever action, the passage to modern man, homo sapiens, involved the acquisition of whole modules of brain function, language, ethical action, and structures of consciousness/soul occurred in tandem with this.
We must discipline ourselves to our ignorance and not let Darwinists control thinking here with lazy natural selection propaganda. The reality is that we don’t have the facts that must come first: when did language arise, when did consciousness/self-consciousness arise, and what is the ‘common ordinary morality’ that Kant’s speaks of usefully and when does it appear, and how does it work.
It is remarkable that we can’t begin to answer any of these questions. Not an iota of speech beyond being struck dumb to hem and haw.
I think it might help to study the eonic effect, and the Axial Age inside it.
We see in the case, for example, of Axial Age Archaic Greece a process acting over three centuries across a cultural spectrum, to produce a transformation of culture in a blazing spurt of evolution. The action impinges on ethical issues and consciousness, although its outcome is about other aspects of culture, but this gives us a defining moment for correcting our evolution confusions. I mention this example also because a parallel action produced the Old Testament. And this spoke of a mysterious higher power (it did NOT speak of god until later in the decline into ‘silly monotheism’ wrecked a great insight) acting across history, The real Israelites, before the distortions of the Biblical texts, whoever they were, had an insight here. But in any case they can’t help us much either, save that they saw the evolutionary context for massive human transformations.
We must suspect the evolution of ethics to have occurred in analog moments and eras of man’s earliest emergence.
Not much help, but a map at least. Not much help because clearly the action is noumenal in its sur-phenomenology. That means, we wouldn’t even see how it happened if we were there. But we can put the pieces together perhaps, someday, to see what happened, and when. Even that is beyond us as yet.
The Axial Age and the mystery of ethical evolution said,
August 17, 2010 at 12:51 pm
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Mystery of the evolution of ethics said,
August 17, 2010 at 12:53 pm
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