Aftermath of Battle of Gettysburg   (1863)                                                                  (credit: Henry William Elson, via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                           Aftermath of Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia (2005) 

                                                         (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

              Which of the disasters above was natural and which was human-caused? 

2. Establishing Foundational Terms

Let’s establish some basic terms. I will speak of a moral code as a behavior code because in the end, that is what a moral code does: it tells us how to behave. I will use the words tribe, society, and nation as though they are interchangeable. For our purposes here, they are. They all name groups of similarly programmed humans, each member of the group sharing a set of memes that enables the group to act in coordinated ways as a team.

Among animals, individual humans aren’t impressive. We’re not fast or strong compared to other animals. We have puny fangs and claws. But in teams, we’re the deadliest creatures on earth.

I will also speak in what follows as if the mind, the capacity for reason, is a given for nearly all humans. A concept that is near to irreducible. It is very difficult to further describe or explain what a mind is in terms of simpler concepts.

Each of us has a capacity to sense details in our physical surroundings (i.e. to see, hear, smell, etc.), then to spot patterns in our sense data, then to compare them to memories of past sense data and our responses to them, then to plan action to steer our bodies safely through our environment, second by second. If we didn’t have this capacity, we’d quickly get buried in landslides, drowned in rivers, eaten by predators, smashed up on the roads, or destroyed by some other hazards too many to list and some we can’t yet imagine.  

Most of the time, disasters don’t happen to us. Why? Because we carry code in our bodies (in our brains) that enables us to spot patterns in sense data, act in ways that enable us to avoid oncoming, potentially painful events, exploit useful ones, then save what we learn for future use. The programming that enables us to recognize recurring patterns in physical reality is the source of our complex capacity to form concepts, i.e. ways of grouping sense data memories that look alike to us. (That’s what concepts are.) We call this big program mind.

We’ve had much difficulty explaining in simpler terms what a mind is, though science is getting closer to pinning it down. But for now, roughly, it is software that stores, organizes, and processes sense-data. It runs on extremely complex hardware: the brain. I am software (mind) running on hardware (brain).

Mind is a crucial program found in all living things; to varying degrees for each of them, it enables survival. The degree of its power and importance for human survival is just higher than for other species. We humans survive by our minds.

Every living thing has programming built into its body that enables it to detect and handle the hazards and opportunities in its reality. All living things can thus be said to have some form of mind. With our complex brains we hold larger minds so we can store, update, and use sense data memories and the concepts we have built with them to direct our actions more efficiently than most other life forms do. Even as individuals, we humans have higher level ‘executive apps’ that tell us when to open lower level apps (concept sets) that tell us how to act.

Then, most importantly, we can save what we learn and pass that programming on to our young. It is our complex human minds that have made possible our not only developing effective programs for survival in this universe but passing them on to our kids. This is our most powerful trait. We teach our kids how to avoid our mistakes and remember and use our successes, even over generations.

In short, it is mind that enables what we call culture. And it is this capacity for learning, and passing on, a culture that makes us fully human. I will define culture more thoroughly below, but roughly it is all that we absorb as kids from other members of our tribe, especially ones we call “family” or “teachers”.  

 

                

                                            Wildfire near Ashcroft, B.C., Canada (Aug., 2017) 

                                               (credit: Shawn Cahill, via Wikimedia Commons) 

 

                                    Searching for bodies in rubble in Gaza (2023) 

                                                 (credit: Jaber Jehad Badwan) 

By the way, I consider the harsh worldview I take here that sees the universe as relentlessly dangerous and uncertain to be obvious. This essay assumes readers know the universe is harsh. Like all living things, we’re surrounded by objects and forces that would destroy us if we didn’t detect them, then block, run, or hide from them, or fight back against them.

The hazardousness of physical reality is pervasive; it’s fair to say it is reality. If you think you’re navigating toward a secure future situation in which you will be able to stop worrying, you should disabuse yourself of that view as soon as can. That secure future does not exist, never has existed, never will exist. We’ll discuss further the basic destructiveness and uncertainty of the universe later in this essay.