‘Do you believe that human conscience and consciousness ultimately came from mindlessness?’
firstly, consciousness is the state of being conscious, which means aware of surroundings and reacting to them, which just about all life does, so I have no idea why you bring that up...as for conscience, it denotes the ability to discern rightness from wrongness, which would of course concern only those beings with a strong socio-cultural understanding, i.e. humans with their hyper developed brains...why did the human brain grow so large, while the chimp brain remained stuck in the distant past? that’s the real question; a logical answer would be a change in diet, from abundant but nutritionally deficient leaves and grass, to less ubiquitous but more nutritious fruits and nuts, and ultimately, other animals, all of which required larger and more cooperative social units, or tribes, if you will, and of course fueled the growth of cranial activity, enabling abstract thought to become a reality...
your usage of the term mindlessness is also odd, in this context; just because abstract thought is beyond the capacity of most life forms does not confer mindlessness upon those forms...
Personally I do not believe human consciousness and conscience can ultimately come from mindlessness. Mindlessness can only bestow the illusion of consciousness and conscience – the illusion beauty and love – the illusion of any design we believe to see in nature. If our exsistance were to ultimately come from mindlessness, then everything we believe about ourselves and what we see around us is false. But don’t take it from me:
No one can claim that neo-darwinism, which is ultimately a mindless process, made our brains but yet has no relevance on the brain's contents. IOW, neo-darwinism if true, basically states we were built by a mindless process that employs primal survival and is solely responsible our thoughts and behavior. This underlying fundamental idea that deals with mankind’s very essence is what separates neo-darwinism from other scientific theories.
- Dawkins - we are merely lumbering robots doing the bidding of selfish genes created by a blind watchmaker in a universe of blind pitiless indifference without good or evil.
- Rosenberg – we have an illusion that thoughts really are about stuff in the world - we live with the myths that we have purposes that give our actions and lives meaning - and that there is a person “in there” steering our body.
- Provine - no ultimate foundation for ethics exists - no ultimate meaning in life exists – and human free will is nonexistent.
- Pinker - brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth.
- Ruse - ethics is an illusion created by our genes to deceive us – morality is an adaptation.
- Dennett - Nobody is conscious - we are all zombies - Darwinism is like “a universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.
But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
- Charles Darwin
SEE ALSO: Darwin's Robots: When Evolutionary Materialists Admit that Their Own Worldview Fails