I was reading an article about evolution and existentialism.
It was arguing, roughly, that nature cannot tell us what is good.
Something being natural does not automatically mean we should do it.
Fair enough.
But then I started wondering:
Where do our values come from then?
Because they clearly came from somewhere.
And somehow this eventually became a conversation about lions, loneliness, racism, language and Spider-Man.
This is generally how things go.
Is a lion being moral?
The first thing I thought about was a lion.
A lion doesn’t just run around killing everything it sees because it technically can.
It hunts when it is hungry.
It protects territory.
It fights when it needs to.
So I wondered:
Does the lion have some primitive value?
Something like:
Don’t kill unless you need to.
Probably not.
It is more likely biology doing what biology does.
Hunting costs energy.
Fighting is dangerous.
Being injured in the wild is generally not ideal.
So the lion probably isn’t sitting under a tree after lunch thinking:
I believe violence should only be used when justified.
It is full.
There is a difference.
Which made me realise there might be a difference between a goal and a value.
Hunger gives you a goal:
eat.
Fear:
get away from that.
Anger:
do something about this.
But a value seems to involve being able to look at that goal and ask:
Should I?
Maybe being conscious means being able to interfere with yourself
Initially I described this as the ability to say:
No.
But that isn’t really enough.
Animals can restrain themselves.
They can wait.
They can learn consequences.
A dog can clearly understand that the biscuit in front of it is currently under international protection.
So maybe the interesting thing isn’t simply refusing an impulse.
It is being able to understand the impulse, reason about it and then make a decision.
Something like:
I want to hit this person.
Why?
Because I’m angry.
Why am I angry?
Because he embarrassed me.
Okay.
Is embarrassment actually a good enough reason to hurt someone?
Probably not.
So I don’t.
The anger hasn’t disappeared.
The desire hasn’t necessarily disappeared either.
I have just decided that the reason behind it isn’t good enough.
That seems different.
And maybe that is closer to what we mean when we talk about having agency.
Not:
I don’t want to do this.
But:
I want to do this and I have decided not to.
Unfortunately, Spider-Man was right
Because if you can actually do that, there is another problem.
Responsibility.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Apparently this applies to consciousness now.
A lion doesn’t seem to wonder afterward whether it behaved like a good lion.
Humans absolutely do this.
I shouldn’t have done that.
Then:
Why did I do that?
Then:
Do I keep doing this?
Then the especially unpleasant one:
Is this the kind of person I want to become?
Biology can give me anger.
But if I am capable of understanding the anger and deciding what to do with it, then saying:
“Well, I was angry.”
doesn’t completely answer the question anymore.
There is something between feeling and action.
Maybe a lot of being human happens in that little gap.
But I don’t think values appeared out of nowhere
This is where I slightly disagreed with the article.
I agree that:
natural = good
doesn’t work.
Aggression is natural.
Jealousy is natural.
Cooperation is natural.
Love is natural.
Cruelty appears to be perfectly natural too.
Nature has a very wide catalogue.
So saying:
“It is natural.”
doesn’t tell me whether I should approve of it.
But I also don’t think that means nature has nothing to do with our values.
Take living together.
Humans seem to be built around other humans.
For most of our existence, being completely alone was probably a fairly terrible survival strategy.
More people meant:
more protection,
more food,
more knowledge,
more people watching children,
more people noticing danger,
someone helping you when you got injured,
and generally a lower chance of being eaten by something while nobody noticed.
So it makes sense that humans would evolve to actually want other humans around.
Belonging feels good.
Rejection hurts.
Loneliness can hurt.
Maybe loneliness is basically social hunger.
Hunger tells you:
you are missing food.
Loneliness might be telling you:
you are missing people.
That obviously doesn’t mean being alone automatically makes someone miserable.
Being alone and being lonely are very different things.
But the fact that unwanted isolation can hurt so much probably isn’t random.
Maybe survival slowly became morality
So imagine some early group of humans.
Helping each other works.
One person finds food.
Someone else knows where water is.
Another person protects the children.
Someone notices a predator.
Someone knows which mushroom absolutely ruins everyone’s afternoon.
Cooperation keeps everyone alive.
At first maybe it is simply:
help group → group survives → I survive
But humans can eventually notice the pattern.
When we help each other, things go better.
Then perhaps:
Helping each other is good.
Then:
We should help each other.
That last sentence is interesting.
Nature did not say it.
Evolution didn’t carve it into a stone tablet somewhere.
But evolution may have created the kind of animal that could eventually arrive at it.
So maybe values aren’t completely separate from biology.
Maybe biology is where some of the ingredients started.
Then somebody inevitably asked “why only us?”
This is where I think human morality gets really interesting.
Suppose your group develops a rule:
People in our group shouldn’t be harmed without a reason.
Makes sense.
Then eventually somebody encounters another group.
And perhaps after enough interaction you realise:
They love their children too.
They don’t want to die either.
They feel pain.
They get scared.
They tell stories.
They have friends.
They also think they are the normal people.
Awkward.
And then somebody can ask:
Why does our rule only apply to us?
That question can keep happening.
Family.
Clan.
Village.
Kingdom.
Citizen.
Human.
The circle keeps getting bigger.
And maybe a lot of what we call moral progress comes from people taking a rule that already exists and asking why it isn’t being applied consistently.
Racism starts having a problem
Imagine a society says:
People deserve freedom.
Someone asks:
Which people?
Us.
Why?
Because people should not be controlled without justification.
Okay.
Then why doesn’t that apply to them?
Now you need another reason.
Or:
People shouldn’t be punished for things they didn’t choose.
Alright.
Then why should someone’s ancestry determine how they are treated?
Or:
Citizens deserve equal rights.
Are those people not citizens?
Once you make a general principle, it becomes harder to stop other people from picking it up and applying it to themselves.
You can still refuse.
Humans have proved ourselves extremely capable of inventing exceptions.
But now the exception has to be defended.
“That’s just the way things are.”
becomes much weaker once someone can respond:
“Why?”
Maybe racism is partly what happens when an old tribal instinct runs into principles that have expanded beyond the tribe.
And then the principles start winning the argument.
Slowly.
Very slowly.
Painfully slowly.
But the circle moves.
Language probably changed everything
And I don’t think any of this gets nearly as far without language.
Not necessarily spoken language.
Modern sign language is obviously language.
I mean imagine humans communicating only through very basic gestures.
Pointing.
Facial expressions.
Grunts.
Miming.
Rapid hand movements.
You could probably communicate:
Danger.
Food there.
Come here.
Go away.
I am angry with you.
Give me that.
Pretty useful.
But now try:
“I understand why you did that yesterday, but I don’t think your reason was good enough to justify what you did.”
You are going to need a lot of pointing.
Language lets us do something completely different.
We can create concepts.
fairness
promise
tomorrow
person
cause
wrong
because
And then combine them.
Once I have the idea of a promise, I can make a decision today about something that hasn’t happened yet.
Once I have the idea of fairness, I can compare two completely different situations.
Once I have because, I can explain why I think something.
And somebody else can tell me my reason is nonsense.
This seems extremely important.
We can think about things that don’t exist
Humans can also do this strange thing:
What if?
What if I had done something else?
What if everyone behaved like this?
What if I were that person?
What if we continue doing this for fifty years?
What if I’m wrong?
We can compare reality to imaginary realities.
That means I can regret something because I can imagine a past where I chose differently.
I can avoid doing something because I can imagine a future where it goes badly.
And I can try to understand another person by imagining myself in their position.
Maybe empathy becomes much more powerful once imagination gets involved.
I don’t only see someone suffering.
I can think:
What would that be like if it were happening to me?
That seems like quite a leap.
Other people have an “I” too
Which connects to something from my previous Field Note.
I experience everything from inside myself.
So naturally I am the centre of my own experience.
But everyone else is doing the exact same thing.
There is another entire:
I
behind every other pair of eyes.
That person has memories I don’t know.
People they love.
Things they are scared of.
Things they regret.
Things they want to do tomorrow.
Things they think about while staring at the ceiling at 2 AM.
Once I genuinely understand that, another person’s pain becomes harder to treat like something happening to an object.
Maybe empathy begins biologically.
Someone cries and I feel bad.
But reasoning can take that much further.
Humiliation hurts me.
He is conscious too.
So humiliation probably hurts him.
Then:
Maybe I shouldn’t humiliate people.
And eventually:
People shouldn’t be deliberately humiliated for entertainment.
A feeling has become an idea.
And ideas can jump between brains
This is probably one of the strangest abilities humans have.
Someone can spend twenty years thinking about something.
Then write it down.
I can read it in ten minutes.
Now I have the thought too.
Maybe I disagree with it.
Maybe I modify it.
Maybe I apply it somewhere the original person never considered.
But I didn’t have to rediscover the entire thing myself.
Human beings can inherit thinking.
A child might start with:
Don’t hit him.
Then:
Don’t hit him because it hurts him.
Then:
How would you feel if he hit you?
Then eventually:
Does hurting somebody become acceptable just because you dislike them?
That child is not discovering morality from zero.
They are being handed thousands of years of humans arguing with each other.
Stories do it.
Religion does it.
Philosophy does it.
Law does it.
Films do it.
Parents do it.
Friends do it.
Sometimes Spider-Man does it.
We inherit unfinished arguments.
Culture seems to have escaped biology
Genes change slowly.
Ideas don’t.
One person can have an idea.
Someone else changes it.
Someone writes it down.
Another person finds it 300 years later.
They disagree with half of it.
Someone else takes the remaining half and uses it somewhere completely different.
Eventually something that began as:
protect my family
can perhaps become:
all humans have rights.
And maybe one day:
all conscious beings deserve some form of moral consideration.
Who knows.
But that movement can happen far faster than genetic evolution.
Which creates a very strange situation.
Evolution produced a brain capable of creating ideas.
Then the ideas started telling the brain:
Don’t necessarily do what evolution makes you feel like doing.
Nature accidentally created its own complaint department.
And then we can question the values themselves
Maybe this is the part I find most important.
Humans can think about their own thinking.
I can believe:
Those people are bad.
Then ask:
Why do I think that?
Because my parents said so.
Why did they think that?
Because their parents said so.
Did anybody actually have a reason?
And suddenly something that felt obvious five minutes ago becomes much less obvious.
We can do this with almost anything.
It’s traditional.
Why does that make it good?
It’s natural.
Why does that make it good?
Everyone believes it.
Does that make it true?
I feel strongly about it.
Why?
We can inherit a value and then turn around and interrogate it.
That might be one of the most important things consciousness gives us.
Not freedom from every influence.
That clearly isn’t true.
But some ability to notice the influence and ask whether we still agree with it.
So where do values actually come from?
I don’t think I have a clean answer.
But I don’t think they simply appeared from nowhere either.
Maybe it looks something like:
biology → instinct → emotion → consciousness → language → reasoning → values → culture
And probably a hundred arrows going backwards as well.
Biology gives us things like:
attachment,
fear,
anger,
empathy,
competition,
cooperation,
jealousy,
the need to belong.
None of those are automatically good.
But they are things to work with.
Then consciousness allows us to notice them.
Language allows us to describe them.
Reasoning allows us to ask whether they make sense.
Other people can challenge us.
Culture remembers the argument.
The next generation continues it.
And somewhere inside all of that we end up with:
justice,
rights,
mercy,
honour,
dignity,
fairness,
and probably a lot of things we still haven’t figured out properly.
No conclusion
I still agree with the article that nature cannot simply tell us:
This is good. Do this.
Nature contains far too many contradictory things for that.
But I don’t think humans created values completely separately from nature either.
Maybe nature gave us the starting conditions.
We are social.
We feel pain.
We form attachments.
We care when people leave.
We get angry.
We cooperate.
We fight.
We love people.
Then something happened where this animal became capable of looking at all of those impulses and asking:
Which ones should I listen to?
And then we invented language, which meant we could ask another person what they thought.
That person disagreed.
A third person joined.
Someone eventually wrote it down.
Several thousand years later we are still arguing.
Maybe that is morality.
Not a finished rulebook hidden somewhere in nature.
Not something completely arbitrary either.
Just an enormous conversation being carried forward by conscious animals trying to decide what they should do with the fact that they are conscious.
And perhaps the thing that separates us isn’t simply the ability to say:
No.
It is being able to say:
I know why I want to do this.
I have thought about that reason.
And I have decided whether I think it is good enough.
Which is, admittedly, an enormous amount of responsibility to give a monkey.
Spider-Man was right.
