Universal Values and the Representational Perception of Ethics
As the ethical values must be considered to be universal in content to every human with relative asymmetric differences, it should be noted that as we experience the reality in the form of different representations in our consciousness, we use representational perception in our consciousness to perceive ethical values, beyond the mere physical environment.
The ethical values are produced of information that exists in the category of behavioral representations. The representational perception means in this context perceiving and receiving values from behavioral representations as units of information that combine as a whole the ethical value, since representations are the sum of their parts, i.e. that the information in representations such as these are not build of one unit, but of many. There might for example be ethical motifs on why the ethical behavior must be conducted value-relatively, there might be manners that are related to it and there might be bodily movements that are also related to it. This is to say that ethical behavior can be build of information from different category and type, but which non-the-less produce the ethical value such as a gentleman opening a door and bowing to an elderly person as a sign of respecting the mounted experience and knowledge.
The need for representational perception of ethics is obvious also in case when we come in relation to a situation where we must humanely valuate ethical behavior. Without being able to perceive any ethical values, we would function fully in relations to our innate responses, thus not exceeding the boundary of human animal with the sentient sublimity developed throughout generations. This is important note when we consider the possibilities on how the range of our being can be heightened in relativity with knowledge. In other terms, the ethical values, existing not in the environment as physical things, are fully artificial, and can be said of extending virtually the innate nature in the human animal and replaces/extends that nature with ethical behavior. But why are ethical values artificial?
It is because information as it is, is virtual, but has its physical correlates in the neurology of human brains, when they for example compose a representation of our environment. The perception of colors in our environment is due to the qualities in our receptors that receive the light and send it to individual neurons as impulses, who again send them forward to be assembled through multiple different areas of the brains to be a part of the complete representation of the environment that is send to consciousness, and the layer of information they produce as our conscious perception of the environment has the content generated by them.
The image is only in our conscious mind with the content generated by our sub-conscious brain functions and is therefore an artificial representation of the environment, composed of multiple and simultaneously emerging types of information (sound is not a color, position of the body is not a sound, ethical value is not a smell, emotion is not a semantic sentence, ect.). And the ethical values are no different from this. But are they then beyond our nature? No. But they have the quality of us being able to extend the scope of our innate behavior of the human animal into ethical behavior, but which require non-the-less the understanding of the ethical values in our micro-level brain functions in order to produce meaningful representations.
Henry M. Piironen is a contemporary philosopher and a humanist who considers religious values to be universal and invaluable for generations of ethical development. He has also studied closely the representational sense of reality, human brain anatomy, complex adaptive systems, memetics, existentialism and is the creator of the philosophy of cultural continuums, published for free through EzineArticles.com. To learn the universal and deeply rooted wisdom from 1361 quotations, collected from Buddhism: The Dhammapada, The Diamond Sutra, The Lankavatara Sutra; Christianity: The New Testament; Confucianism: Confucian Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Great Learning; Hinduism: The Bhagavad Gita; Taoism: Tao Te Ching, purchase his latest book Divinity the Amazon bookstore now.