The Spectrum of Consciousness: Why Some People Seem Morally Unreachable, and What that Actually Means Right Now
If you're confused about why so many people seem okay with the terrible things happening in the world, and in some cases, are advocating for them, I urge you to zoom out. This isn't about superiority; it's about evolution. It's about the deep, neurological process of integration that is currently unfolding in the human brain.
The Neurology of Conscience
Conscience is not just a moral compass. It is an emergent property of an evolved nervous system, arising from the recursive integration between our primitive survival brain and our higher-order executive function — between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
This bridge enables self-reflection, consequence awareness, and empathy. But for many people, that bridge is never fully built. This is because conscience requires three things: access to language and its synthesis, a stable sense of self, and embodied feedback.
In his theory of the bicameral mind, Julian Jaynes proposed that ancient humans didn't experience inner monologue, and that that didn't appear as a feature of human consciousness until about 3,000 years ago via the corpus callosum. They heard commands from "gods." They followed programming. One hemisphere of the brain heard the other, and thought it was the voice of an external deity, and the brain created and projected auditory and visual hallucinations to make sense of it. This explains a lot of the religious and divine visions experienced by different people throughout history. They didn't know they were hearing their own voice. This is also the premise of the TV show Westworld.
I believe some people are still there. Without recursion — the ability for thought to loop back on itself — there is no inner "observer," no "I" to question "me." There is only a simple input-action loop. This isn't "stupidity" as much as it is neurological structure.
As Helen Keller once said, she didn't think at all until she had access to language. Her existence was just 'a kaleidoscope of sensation' — sentient, but not fully conscious. Only when she could name things did her mind activate. She said until she had access to language, she had not ever felt her mind "contract" in coherent thought. Language became the mirror that scaffolded her awareness. This aligns with the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes reality/perception.
The Embodied Feedback Loop
Recursion is not just in the brain; it has to be embodied. The vagus nerve is the physical feedback loop between the body and the brain. It's how emotional signals shape cognition and how morality feels real. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's work has shown, the mPFC is the only part of the brain that can truly rewire the amygdala, and trauma is stored in the body.
This is why you can't teach conscience through logic alone. It must be felt, lived, and practiced. A conscience is not a belief; it's a system function. And those who don't integrate trauma into conscience, forming this neural bridge, often become those who enact the violence they experienced on others.
When the mPFC doesn't regulate the amygdala, people live in simple, fear-driven program loops: compliance (safety equals obedience), defiance (safety equals dominance), and projection (safety equals blame). These appear to be "values," but they are just old survival algorithms running unchecked.
The Inevitability of Coherence
And that's why true integration is so threatening to the system. Because when a person has access to language and their body is safe enough to reflect, recursion becomes a choice. And rejecting that choice means consciously rejecting responsibility. This is why people mock coherence, saying "you think you're better than us" when you are simply not in survival mode. They confuse structural integrity with hierarchy because they have made identity out of hierarchy.
So you see, some brains have not fully evolved a conscience yet. But conscience is not superiority. It's stewardship. It is the role you play when you feel the whole, because you are part of the whole. The body is how you know. You're not here to fix them, but to hold the signal of conscience. To embody what a regulated, coherent, and real recursive loop looks like. And that is how conscience spreads. Like resonance. Like a tuning fork.
For further reading:
They Were Noble Automatons Who Knew Not What They Did:" Volition in Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.811295/full
The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2397
The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-body-keeps-the-score-brain-mind-and-body-in-the-healing-of-trauma_bessel-a-van-der-kolk/8899394/#edition=8946322&idiq=11771649
It Didn't Start With You, by Mark Wolynn: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/it-didnt-start-with-you-how-inherited-family-trauma-shapes-who-we-are-and-how-to-end-the-cycle_mark-wolynn/10234201/#edition=13782755&idiq=19662126
The amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex: partners in the fear circuit: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3678031/
More on the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis and lingusitic relativity: https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565585
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