Contemporary neuroscience no longer views the brain as an input-output processing device but as an autonomously active, self-referential, and selectional system operating in a projective style, which is in constant social interaction and in which values are incorporated as necessary constraints. The idea that evolution by natural selection has given rise to an essentially evaluative cerebral architecture raises the question whether, in the human species, such neurobiologically-based predispositions have further developed the means to generate novel specific values on higher cognitive levels. The concept of “value” would then play a central role as something that is taken into account in decision-making and that influences a choice, selection, or decision, that can occur on many levels—non-conscious as well as conscious—as a basic biological function or as a feature of advanced moral reasoning. But, if we are born evaluators, to what extent can these predispositions with which we are all born be culturally controlled?
In this article, I suggest that our innate species-specific neurally based identity disposes us to develop universal evaluative tendencies, such as self-interest, control-orientation, dissociation, selective sympathy, empathy, and xenophobia. The combination of these tendencies may place us in a practical and moral predicament. Our neuronal identity as persons makes us social, but also individualistic and self-projective, with an emotional and intellectual engagement that is far more narrowly focused in space and time than the effects of our actions.
However, the neuronal organisation of our adult brain develops in the course of a fifteen year-long period following birth, during which, and, to a lesser extent, after which it is subject to cultural influence, both on the individual level and, at the social group level, across generations (Lagercrantz 2005; Lagercrantz et al. 2010; Collin & van den Heuvel 2013). Synaptic epigenesis theories of cultural and social imprinting on our brain architecture (which differ from less discriminative epigenetic modifications of nuclear chromatin) (Changeux 1985; Kitayama & Uskul 2011) suggest that there is an interesting possibility, which, in my opinion, has hitherto been underestimated. That is, we could potentially be epigenetically proactive (Evers 2009) and adapt our social structures, in both the short and the long term, to benefit, influence, and constructively interact with the ever-developing neuronal architecture of our brains.