small is beautiful. 3
Back to values and virtues
There is one more addition to the talk about ontologies, weltanschauung.
And in particular: why are morals/ethics and related things so important?
Some people might say: we discuss Science, logic, and filosofy, Reason per se, their effect on our life. Science et al is usually seen as 'cold - neutral - unemotional' and consequently (?) distant from human emotion and/or ethics.
OK, here is why there is a connection between senses and reason.
Emotions, feelings, senses are given to The Human at the start as a supplement to human's body. All the Reason grows out of that animal blood and flesh through social interaction thanks to the potential for that is allowed by brain and the totality of our nervous system, our fiziology-anatomy on the whole. We are able to track how our animal senses support the birth of human thinking; this connection between human (social) features such as Reason and animal substrate (senses-feelings) is subject to growth, development and change and takes us from pure Nature #1 to Nature #2.
sorry for repeating myself, but it looks like there are notions and concepts to discuss apple trees while there are no terms to discuss apples in the same vein as we discuss the trees (filosofy and Science use different sets of ontologies which is absolutely normal but stops our discussion of the two realms). Yes, Reason is built using animal senses but it is too much different from its parent.
The concept of Speech Consciousness (SC) gives us some grounds to start looking into how our animal background translates into human noosphere.
The structure of of our human capabilities is extremely complex. Starting from tiny basic units it grows (or has potential for that growth) to the skies. Let us consider several levels of that structure.
The Human sees a fruit and attaches a value to that image: good/bad, tasty, useful, etc. Then we see hundreds of fruit and attach our values to them. At this point we have two components: image of a fruit and its value. But after we produced that connection many-many times our lazy self (in order to save energy on evaluating) generalizes that connection and creates a new value of a higher level: any fruit is good. This is how we get a new component which brings the total number of components to three. The nervous system with three components is stronger (better) than the previous one with two components and it creates another generalization (about meat and vegetables) faster and stronger. The system with five components creates new generalizations faster than before. After handling systems of two levels it creates another level of generalization which makes it even stronger and pushes for further development. Thus the connection between the animal part of the human and Reason becomes richer, more versatile and prone to further development.
At some point humans got new types of emotions and feelings that animal world does not have; this type of feelings are born thanks to our verbal discussing of our feelings; contemporary human love is believed to have been born during Dark Ages and it is a social fenomenon; yet it is a feeling, an emotion which is not experienced by every human.
So, we claim appearance of a new type of sensual abilities in people that exist only thanks to social environment. People acquire some specific social behaviour that is based in our fiziology yet it cannot be manifested by a person raised outside of human society, Mowgli type.
All the previous steps are there to demonstrate a strong link between the two major parts of our SC - sense and reason, where senses changed as to develop new types of sensibility based on speech. Morals/ethic are this type of new sensibility: yes they are feelings, senses and based on fiziology. But this type of senses are built on our speech, social behaviour. Thus it appears only in people after they spent certain years in discussing all this moral stuff. The good point is that this type of feelings comes through only thanks to the new reality, out Nature #2. Which prompts us to nurture our morals more thoroughly. Yet it is not my new point.
My point is that the new sensibility, society based feelings create a new type of link between the animal and reasoning parts of our consciousness: strongly developed, specifically trained new sensuality supports and enables higher levels of abstract reasoning in humans; roughly speaking: a person who discussed spiritual life and high morals in fierce disputes has developed grounds for better (stronger) abstract reasoning in general.
More than that: our social taboos based on ethics (hide our sensual and sexual desires, demonstrate only manners developed by people) creates grounds for better abstract reasoning.
Which may take us to considering the role religion plays in humans becoming 'better' in terms of their ability to go deeper in abstract reasoning. Well, really, Christianity discussed norms and standards of social behaviour and it gave us a chance to let children know about social norms. Chastity is the feature that enables a person to think better. Sorry to say banal stuff: the net allowed a new burst of porn industry; easy access to porn images, the trend of 'candid chats' and attention of the media to sex issues plus general belief that there is no need to think by oneself because of the easy access to all kinds of reference material (I mean wiki type of stuff) lays the grounds for fast and strong decline in the ability of public in general to perform abstract thinking.