Symbolic reference is thus both arbitrary and capable of providing considerable displacement and abstraction. Displacement refers to the capacity to refer to things distant in space or time, and abstraction refers to the ability to represent only the more spare and skeletal features of things, including their logical features, such as whether they are even ontologically existent. So it is with the evolution of this symbolic capacity that it first becomes possible to represent the possible future, the impossible past, the act that should or shouldn\u2019t take place, the experience that is unimaginable even though representable. These capacities are ubiquitous for humans and largely taken for granted when it comes to spiritual and ethical realms, but this is precisely where crucial differences in ability mark the boundary that distinguishes humans from other species.<\/p>\n
Consider the ethical dimension of humanness. Though the family cat may gleefully torment a small animal causing its terrifying and painful death, few among us would consider this a moral issue concerning the cat, though whether to intervene may be a moral dilemma for us. Even when a large predator, say dog or bear, happens to maul and kill a human being, efforts to destroy the animal are not accompanied by moral outrage, just a desire to prevent further harm. But the situation is very different in cases where humans perform similar actions. It is not merely that we consider non-human predators to be guiltless because it is in their nature to kill. We hold them guiltless because we believe they lack a critical conception of the consequences of their actions on their victim\u2019s experience. This ability to anticipate and to some extent imagine the experience of another are critical ingredients in this moral judgment. <\/p>\n
This does not mean that other creatures are merely selfish robots. Selfless behaviors of a sort are not at all uncommon in other species. Caregiving behaviors by parents are nearly ubiquitous in birds and mammals, and what we might call prosocial emotional responses and predispositions that cause individuals to behave in ways conducive to social solidarity are especially widespread among social mammals. However, there need be little or no role played by intersubjective considerations in the generation of these emotions and their associated care-giving, protective, and comforting behaviors. And if that is so, then it may not be appropriate to consider these as moral or ethical, even incipiently.<\/p>\n There is good reason to believe that the capacity to represent the intentions and experiences of others is deeply dependent on human symbolic capacity. This is because it is a difficult cognitive task. It involves generating something like a simulation of oneself in different circumstances (i.e., projected from another individual\u2019s point of view), and it must include the emotional experiences this would invoke as well. This representation is perhaps supported by recall of images from analogous past experiences, juxtaposed against the images and emotions of current experience. But the salience of direct experience, especially one\u2019s current emotional state, poses a difficult impediment to simultaneously representing the perspective of this other simulated emotional experience. Holding such mutually contradictory representations in mind at once is a difficult task, even when there is little emotion involved, but it becomes deeply challenging when the exclusive states are heavily emotion-laden.<\/p>\n All such cognitive tasks depend critically on the prefrontal lobes of the cerebral cortex. This brain region is essential to any mental process that requires holding the traces of alternative associations and behavioral options in mind to be compared, so that one can act with respect to likely consequences and not merely with respect to their general reinforcement value or their stimulus salience. Reduction of such stimulus drives allows the most effective sampling of options. It is suggested that the prefrontal lobes are disproportionately enlarged in human brains as an evolutionary adaptation to the demands imposed by symbol learning and use. The indirectness of symbolic reference demands a shift of attention away from immediately associated features and to the relational logic behind the symbols, which binds them into a system. So this neuro-anatomical divergence from the ancestral condition likely contributes to the capacity and perhaps even a predisposition to generate the \u201csimulations\u201d required for the representation of others\u2019 experiences.<\/p>\n But it is the referential displacement provided by symbols themselves that is probably critical to reducing the differential in salience of competing emotional state representations to make this mental comparison possible. Studies with primates and children have shown, for example, that failures to make optimal choices when highly arousing stimuli (e.g., candy) are presented can be overcome by substituting representations for the actual thing. By a somewhat ironic logic, then, it may be the capacity to use representations to reduce the emotional salience of particular experiences that has enabled the development of intersubjective empathic abilities.<\/p>\n Symbolic reference also provides a critical support for an additional element of ethical cognition: the need to project forward the consequences of different possible alternative actions. Projecting the plausible physical consequences with respect to one\u2019s own needs and desires is difficult enough, but simultaneously projecting the likely affect on another\u2019s experience is doubly complicated. This is the mental equivalent of running simulations of the effects of simulated actions on simulated emotions, all in conflict with current experiences and emotional states. As the numbers of potentially interfering images and the intensities of the potentially conflicting emotions increase, the importance of symbolic support grows. For this reason, not only do we recognize that young children have difficulty performing anything beyond simple moral assessments, but all cultures actively provide narrative and ritual exemplars for guiding its members in handling ethical matters. The symbolic traditions that constitute cultures almost universally transmit the expectation that one is responsible for considering experiential consequences for others before acting\u2014a moral imperative. Of course, it is also this capacity for imagining the experiences of others that makes possible the most heinous of human acts, such as extortion and torture. The emergence of good and evil are not, then, just mythically linked. Both are implicit in the symbolic transfiguration of emotional experience and the gift of intersubjectivity that results.<\/p>\n Ultimately, humanness may be most clearly marked by this transformation of the merely physical and physiological into the meaningful and implicitly value-laden by virtue of symbolic reference. Under the influence of the generalizing power of symbols this experience of ethical significance can be extended well beyond the social sphere, to recognize an ethical dimension implicit in all things. This suggests a way to think about two additional features that are characteristic of most spiritual traditions: the ubiquitous assignment of symbolic meaning, purpose, and value to things outside human affairs (e.g., origins, places, natural phenomena, and life and death itself), and the presumption that there is something like intentionality or intelligence behind the way that things are and the unfolding of worldly events.<\/p>\n Both of these nearly universal tendencies reflect a complex interaction between the cognitive predispositions that have evolved to ease the acquisition of symbolic communication and the implicit power of symbols to alter conditions of life in the world. Since a prerequisite to symbolic reference is the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of the logic of the system of inter-symbolic relationships that supports any individual symbolic reference, there are reasons to believe that the changes in prefrontal proportions contributed not just an ability to sample these non-overt relational features, but also a predisposition to look for them. With symbols, what matters is not surface details, but a hidden logic derived from the complex topologies of semantic relationships that constrain symbol use.<\/p>\n So the neuropsychological propensity to incessantly, spontaneously, and rapidly interpret symbols should express itself quite generally as a predisposition to look beyond surface correlations among things to find some formal systematicity, and thus meaning, behind them, even things that derive from entirely non-human sources. Everything is thus a potential symbol\u2014trees, mountains, star patterns, coincidental events\u2014and if the systematicity and intentionality is not evident it may mean merely that one has not yet discovered it.<\/p>\n Symbolic meaning is a function of consciousness and symbols are produced to communicate. So if the world is seen as full of potential symbols, it must implicitly be part of some grand effort of communication, and the product of mind. Whether this projected subjectivity is experienced as different personalities resident in hills, groves of trees, or rivers, or as some single grand infinite mind, this personification also taps into the intersubjective drive that is also fostered by symbolic projection.<\/p>\n In summary, the role of symbolic communication, and especially language, in moral cognition is ubiquitous. It has played a role in the evolution of a brain more capable of the cognitive operations required; it has provided critical tools for easing the implicit cognitive strain of performing these mental operations; and it has made it possible for societies to evolve means for developing these abilities (as well as opening the door for the horrors of their abuse). Moreover, the capacity for spiritual experience itself can be understood as an emergent consequence of the symbolic transfiguration of cognition and emotions. Human predispositions seem inevitably to project this ethical perspective onto the whole world, embedding human consciousness in vast webs of meaning, value, and intersubjective possibilities.<\/p>\n The consequences of this unprecedented evolutionary transition for human religious and spiritual development must be understood on many levels as well. There are reasons to believe that the way language refers to things\u2014symbolic reference\u2014 provides the crucial catalyst that initiated the transition from species with no inkling of meaning in life to a species where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,46],"tags":[52,230,7895,1630],"class_list":["post-4874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-philosophy","tag-evolution","tag-language","tag-symbols","tag-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/a\/aa\/ElmelundeChurchInsideFwd.jpg\/1200px-ElmelundeChurchInsideFwd.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFrom J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen, Encyclopedia Of Science And Religion<\/a><\/pre>\n
J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen, Encyclopedia Of Science And Religion<\/a><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"