Erik Adams

MORALITY is an area of culture that is highly susceptible to philosophical skepticism. This has been so at least since the time of the Greek Sophists. But modern Western civilization seems to be especially prone to philosophical doubts about the moral enterprise because of widely shared assumptions and views in the modern age about the knowledge-yielding powers of the human mind. This particular trouble spot in the culture has received extensive philosophical attention ever since the seventeenth century, but activity in moral philosophy has never been greater than in our own time.

The purpose of the article is to challenge widely accepted views of the relationship among rationality, morality, and prudence. It contends that we cannot understand either the rational or the moral enterprise without a correct philosophical view of the human self, and that such a view of the self is impossible without taking account of the rational and the moral enterprises themselves. The paper concludes that the moral point of view is anchored in the nature of selfhood so that one can be neither rational and immoral nor prudent and immoral.

This essay presents a novel framework for understanding consciousness. Consciousness is defined as the juxtaposition of subjective points of view with the points of view embedded in our dreams. It is argued that memories by themselves do not define us; rather, it is the continually revised points of view we form upon those memories that constitute our identity. The paper further contends that because artificial intelligence cannot genuinely dream — that is, generate and passionately care about its own irrational, self-deceiving, and aspirational dreams — it cannot possess consciousness or true desire, no matter how sophisticated its simulations may become. The final section explores how consciousness, through free will and the collapse of quantum superpositions, interrupts the deterministic law of supervenience, thereby introducing genuine novelty and meaning into the universe.