In the end moral outcomes of kindness, justice, and “truth,” with a lowercase T, I find to be a good filter for trying to discern what is beneficial and harmful on both a global historical and individual level. The firehose of history has a complexity we can only take in by bits and bites, always determined by our shifting historical and biographical POVs, with blind spots, prejudices, and assumptions. I like the words of Amos—to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly, provides some light on the paths before us, but distinguishing facts from fiction, ends and means, projection from reality, and individual mental states from
“actuality,” is an unfolding challenge. In general I prefer Freud to Jung, Minsky over Mysticism, Epicurus over Plato, but more as a safeguard against wish fulfillment and delusion, not as a statement of reductionistic truth. I am not drawn to any form of “dualism” as I find the categories presumptive and the dichotomy that characterizes 99% of so called “spiritual” or “religious” thought a kind of basic “category” mistake about the “material” and the “spiritual.” Consciousness is our only direct reality and rather than it being imposed upon a “material” world we assume to be the “real” world, it appears to emerge from what “is” whatever labels (“material” “spiritual” “physical” “metaphysical”) we impose upon it. I see rather emerging levels of sentience, on this planet at least, in contrast to the other planets in our little corner of the galaxy, with moral choice–and primarily truth and love–providing our best compass for the existential choices that come to us day by day.
I love these shifting perspectives on “Consciousness” and the mind/body ” problem as presented by Robert Kuhn in his interviews with John Searle and David Chalmers over fifteen years…
https://closertotruth.com/episodes/can-brain-alone-explain-consciousness
