I understand it’s that little voice in our head. But whenever I look it up all I find is religious reasons why we have it and what it is. I myself believe in God but I want the true scientific reason for this “conscience”
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It’s, in part, an evolutionary response.
We share with others because early proto-humans only survived through group dynamics and cooperation.
Much of our social conditioning is also integrated, whether that includes any religious beliefs or not. We’re all taught from a young age how to act, what is and isn’t acceptable, and that we should feel bad when we violate those societal norms.
Conscience is an aspect of sentience and social intelligence. It comes down to, “don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want others to do to you.” For example, you would be inconvenienced or downright gutted if somebody stole something from you, so you do not steal from others. Meanwhile, a seagull doesn’t have the capacity for conscience, so if you turn your head for two seconds at a picnic, a piece of your food goes byebye.
Humans are a social species, and our own survival depends on the success of the “tribe”
This means we have evolved a lot of altruistic behaviors that serve little individual benefit but benefit the tribe as a whole.
You inherently want to help a child in distress – any child, not just yours.
Watching someone do something wrong when you can easily help is excruciating – you have an instinctive response to demonstrate the correct way to do something.
And when you have the opportunity to do something that benefits yourself but harms the tribe, you agonize over the decision. The clash between instinct to help yourself and instinct to not harm the tribe is your “conscience”
Some people still pick the harm option of course, it doesn’t always work.
Another factor to consider: Society, your parents, friends, schools, things you’ve read and so on tried to (or didn’t try, but ended up anyways) giving us our senses of right and wrong.
I view it as part of our meaning/valuation system, which is a series of instincts (physiological system we feel in our gut, bones, chest, butt clench, etc–aka, not just an idea).
Means it has a strong pack origin because we like to go with the flow of our “in group”. Also why people like some of the Alaskan inuits be like, “let’s just cover the road and eat the next trucker we see lulz” and that is fine to them. It’s their pack culture.
Basically our emotions frame patterns that we eventually call our values and virtues. Our values and virtues frame what we perceive as positive/desirable/good and negative/undesired/bad.
It’s really worth noting that the biological bodies we currently use have been this way 200,000 years. Same brain capacity. It is culture and circumstance that has done the “evolution” during that time (written word is 5000-6000ish years old). So don’t go discounting culture as “unreal”. It’s a hell of a force.
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