Mind, morality, meaning

Neuroscience maps correlates of experience with increasing skill. It has not dissolved the hard problem of consciousness into a pile of spike trains, and claiming otherwise is philosophy again — usually physicalism asserted as if it were an experimental result. Explaining how brains process information is not the same as explaining why there is something it is like to be a subject. The gap may close someday; asserting that it already has is not science.

Morality presents a parallel issue. Evolutionary accounts can describe how cooperative dispositions arose. They do not, by themselves, convert “we tend to prefer X” into “X is obligatory.” That conversion is a normative move. You can deny objective moral facts; you can affirm them on theistic or non-theistic grounds; what you cannot honestly do is pretend that a fitness landscape settled the meta-ethics while you weren’t looking.

Meaning follows the same pattern. A complete physical description of the universe — if such a thing is even coherent — would still leave open whether life has purpose beyond preference and survival. Science measures; it does not anoint. When someone says “science shows that meaning is an illusion,” they are preaching metaphysics. Label it. Then argue it on its merits.

More to come: how to keep psychology and biology in their lane without pretending that mind, morality, and meaning are non-questions.