How could we explain the concept of 'Conscience' to the early Humans who were able to talk and think complexly?

What makes you you think that they haven’t already thought of this?

The use of the spear goes way back in time. There are cave paintings depicting its use. Man is a very capable hunter. He is the best long distance runner. No other animal can run a marathon. Early men could follow a herd of antelopes and chase it until the antelopes became exhausted. Don’t ignore the gatherer in hunter-gatherer. Early humans had developed extensive knowledge about which plants were edible. Also, use of fire for cooking predates homo sapiens.

Man is a pack animal and like other pack animals he has a sense of loyalty toward his tribe, and hostility toward other tribes. No idea of conscience is required. I do think we are born with some sense of the Golden Rule, but it is only after man settled in cities that it was generalized to an overall idea of conscience and morality. I don’t think that it could have been understood 30000 years ago.

“Can you observe the thinker/thinking?”

I think early humans always had a sense of community and the advantage of living in numbers and cooperation in getting things done. Strength in numbers and working together to accomplish a goal or task. So, yeah there must have been some sort of conscience there in the human mind long ago. If this were not true, we would have died out a long time ago.

I think their mode of thinking would be too primitive to understand the concept.

I believe the concept of “conscience” could be more better described as evidence of empathy.

There is a well known anecdote about Margaret Mead, the anthropologist setting the start of civilization at the evidence of a healed femur, which demonstrated that someone cared for a long healing of another person.

That healed fossil is dated as 15,000 BCE, but it would have taken generations of trying to care for another to realize what is needed to heal a broken femur.

Empathy is the innate basis for much of what guides us to a conscience.

Seems like you could simply ask someone back then, “So, you killed your brother. How do you feel about that?”

Living among beasts and having almost no means for self-protection (apart from fire and some primitive “weapons” that were absolutely useless against bears or other large and fast beasts) would make the early Humans disappear if they had no Conscience.

Huh? What does that have to do with a conscience? How on earth did their conscience keep them alive?

They grouped together and killed Wooly Mammoths immensely larger than the ones today. What did the ‘hunters’ of the infamous “Hunters and Gatherers” hunt if they were slow and had no “weapons” as you say?

It was early humans who gave us the concept of conscience and pretty much everything else that makes us human. I think such concepts arose long before Christianity or any other religion came along.

I wouldn’t think you would need to explain it. A conscience is a social construct, available to those animals that rely on social structures for their survival. They feel their obligations to the group so innately that a deviation is enough to cause them real pain. This structure certainly predates language. Dog owners know dogs feel guilt. I’m sure tons of animals do,

@smudges, hunting is not the same as self defence.

The early Humans could have dug huge holes and cover them with long branches, or make a herd run towards an abyss.

But that skill wasn’t of any use to them, if a huge animal started to roam their property and kill them one after another.

What can 10 men with spears do against an animal bigger than a grizzly, when it takes them by surprise while they are sleeping? Or even if a pack of huge wolves attack them while they are sleeping?

I think you don’t comprehend the whole area where Conscience works. It’s not just something that works between two people in just one specific situation. It embraces an area much bigger than that. You probably think that Conscience couldn’t have helped them as a weapon – which is true after all, but I’m not thinking of such a “explanation” of that word.

However, I won’t go into details about it, because I’m not paid to do a complex analysis of it. :)

20 to 30,000 years ago is nothing. They were exactly the as us with our same reasoning capabilities. They can’t even be described as “early” humans.
20,000 years ago humans were crossing the Bering land bridge into North America, from Europe, for the first time.

This just makes no sense. A conscience has to do with knowing right from wrong, not weapons and self-defense or hunting.

Conscience is a cognitive process that elicits emotion and rational associations based on an individual’s moral philosophy or value system. Conscience stands in contrast to elicited emotion or thought due to associations based on immediate sensory perceptions and reflexive responses, as in sympathetic central nervous system responses. In common terms, conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a person commits an act that conflicts with their moral values.

Maybe you’re thinking of the sympathetic central nervous system responses.

@smudges, I gave you a GA first and foremost because your said what I said myself.

Conscience is no weapon.

But it helps at surviving on a large scale, not just for minutes during a problem is lasting.

Besides, the long description is not quite the best, ‘cause it contains some mistakes. Conscience has nothing to do with morals but with ethics, which isn’t even mentioned there. The explanation given at the end of the excerpt mentions the less important part of Conscience, because more important than its action after a problem is its importance prior to it.

Actually, the definition is far from being complete, because it doesn’t consider the difference between “good Conscience” i.e. “constructive Conscience” and a “bad Conscience” i.e. “destructive Conscience’.

Constructive Conscience acts before anything happens, it serves to avoid wrongdoings.

Destructive Conscience replaces the former, if it doesn’t get engaged in time.

^^ Nevermind, I guess I don’t understand your whole point in the original question because in my mind it has nothing to do with hunting or self-defense.

Conscious, morals, ethics has nothing to do with survival.

@smudges, just don’t bring Conscience in connection to hunting or self-defense. See it as a feature that helps people coordinate their actions for the benefit of all.

Without Conscience, they would only care about themselves e.g. their small group.

With Conscience, they would mind every one who’s in need of something.

The less Conscience – the more enmity among people and parallel with it the more written rules.

The more Conscience – the more friendship among people, and accordingly the less written rules.

You’re the one who brought self-defense into it in your original question. That’s what made me discuss it in the first place.

You wanted to know: How could we explain the concept of ‘Conscience’ to the early Humans who were able to talk and think complexly?

I’ll go back to my original answer: “Seems like you could simply ask someone back then, “So, you killed your brother. How do you feel about that?” ” That’s how you could demonstrate/explain the concept of conscience.

@Dutchess_III, Consciousness and Conscience are two different things.

Both are related to each other, Conscience being “born” of Consciousness, but the latter can live without the former – as has been the case with oh-so-many Billions of people so far…

Consciousness is purely psychological. Conscience is rather ethical, which is Psychology plus something else, that can’t be defined easily, people haven’t figured it out yet. It has a certain “mystical” essence. Another example for such a “mystical” feature is Intuition.

@smudges, you’re fixed on just one specific moment of it.

You could as well have asked them the question: “So you helped your enemy. Why did you do that?”

Here’s where I got the quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience

“So you helped your enemy. Why did you do that?”

That’s only vaguely similar to asking how someone feels after killing their brother. One asks why, the other asks what one feels about it. The latter is about conscience. The former could conceivably lead to a a matter of conscience, but not necessarily.

Thank you for the link, @smudges. I just read it and I can tell you this:

Most of it is just blabbering, especially Darwin’s part, and you can do yourself a favor by simply forgetting it.

Those few parts that come very close to the meaning of Conscience are these:

The psychologist Martha Stout terms conscience “an intervening sense of obligation based in our emotional attachments.”[56] Thus a good conscience is associated with feelings of integrity, psychological wholeness and peacefulness and is often described using adjectives such as “quiet”, “clear” and “easy”.[57]

Sigmund Freud regarded conscience as originating psychologically from the growth of civilisation, which periodically frustrated the external expression of aggression: this destructive impulse being forced to seek an alternative, healthy outlet, directed its energy as a superego against the person’s own “ego” or selfishness (often taking its cue in this regard from parents during childhood).[58] According to Freud, the consequence of not obeying our conscience is guilt, which can be a factor in the development of neurosis; Freud claimed that both the cultural and individual super-ego set up strict ideal demands with regard to the moral aspects of certain decisions, disobedience to which provokes a ‘fear of conscience’.[59]

except for Freud’s last sentence, where he talks about moral aspects and a fear of conscience. Those two things have nothing in common with Conscience. They are connected to something that we can call “fear of guilt” or ‘fear of punishment”, but that is something quite different. Conscience doesn’t consider fear, guilt or award, terms like those are not parts of Conscience’s “acting or reasoning”, resp. they are no motives for its involvement. Conscience is not triggered by outward things, be they positive or negative.

When Freud says that “the consequence of not obeying our conscience is guilt…” he doesn’t equate Conscience with Guilt. He says that Guilt REPLACES Conscience (which is very similar to my own interpretation that Destructive Conscience replaces Constructive Conscience if the latter doesn’t do what it is supposed to do). The guilt that Freud is mentioning there is just an expression of the Destructive Conscience, because it has to manifest itself in a certain form, and that form is Guilt. The way you have to manifest yourself as a professional in certain situations, although your very nature is not the professional in you, but your person. Your professional manifestation is just the way how YOU manifest yourself some times.

Constructive Conscience manifests itself in many ways, all taken together seen as GOOD HEALTH.

Destructive Conscience manifests itself in many ways, too, such as Guilt, for instance, but taken all together it manifests itself as BAD HEALTH.

Please don’t presume to preach to to me @AhYem.

What primitive humans had was instinct, and not conscience at all.
Just because they banded together doesn’t mean they cared. It was purely survival. Occasionally, some might feel attachments which might prompt guilt, or a protective attitude beyond simple survival, but the fact is, most injured, ill, or deformed were left to survive or die by chance and pure will because they were considered a hindrance. Remember the practice of setting the aged adrift on ice floes?
This is not a changing concept.
Hospitals by ability to pay, aborted fetuses for convenience, nursing homes failing standards; we still follow practices of eons gone by.

Read “this: https//www.britannica.com/topic/Cro-Magnon”: for starters. And it goes back and back from there. Educate yourself.