Consciousness, experience, spontaneity, 'the present moment'..
There's a very good book on this called "The Wisdom Of Insecurity" by Alan Watts. It's very short and definitely worth a read if this question interests you.
Most of what i 've heard about consciousness and experience from philosophers involve arbitrary constructs such as "qualia"; one of the most prominent philosophers of mind posits that consciousness should be an ubiquitous property on top of the physical world, leading to some sort of panpsychism [1].
While charming, these sound to me as borderline serious new-age dualist contraptions. Consciousness and experience are under active investigation by neuroscientists and we have no reason to believe they won't be explained away.
Imho, the most valuable domain of philosophy is still the domain of Ethics.
1) I am concerned that the excellent reputation Alan Watts deserves for his work will be diminished by those who cite him. So I will just fondly remember to myself his story of trying to mail water.
2) It is my understanding that 19th Century science would have asserted authority on the subjects of things like consciousness it should not have, and which 21st Century science does not assert. On the other hand at least the Roman Catholic church has withdrawn from over exerting its authority on at least some matters addressed by biologists.
3) non science has abdicated its authority on any non scientific questions by its assertions that no means exists that can assure that anything is true, because there is nothing to any statement but its social context. The obvious consequence of that movement should have been its instantaneous invalidation by its own social construction by Marxists, or as the observer Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, They would say that, wouldn't they?
Consciousness, experience or the present moment are not a question. What about these? What in particular about them is answered better (i.e. more correctly or truthfully) by non-scientific answers. What answer can be satisfying at all if it is not tested at all? Or if it does not give correct predictions.
Feeling better about something or wishing it were so are not good enough criteria in my mind. Finding consolation in illusion is not a worthy goal either.
All questions are scientific questions. What is right, what is moral or what we should do follows from what is true. Science happens to be the only sure way to discover what is true on the other hand. All other methods fail us.
If all question are scientific question then what is a question 'What is right (in the sense of morals)?' and can that answer in any way help me?
Science isn't about truth. Science is about three things. Making hypothesis, making decisions based on hypothesis and testing them. It has no singular answer and that answer changes depending on scales we operate.
Of course "what is right" is a scientific question. If science (i.e reason and evidence) has nothing to say about it, then what does?
What is right follows directly from what is true. For example, if animals are indeed sentient, if they are self-aware even, if they can suffer, are scientific questions. If scientific answers to these questions are positive, then some of us sufficiently evolved, aware humans can't ignore the fact, and we have no choice but to treat animals differently than what we do now. Some countries like Spain have gone so far as to give protection and right to life to higher primates, our closest cousin apes.
We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that fairly applied laws, rather than nepotistic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions, products of our minds, as much as lightbulbs and telegraphs are.
Oh, what science deals with it then? What experimental evidence is that this thing you do is right as opposed to another? What models are made, what predictions do they make? Are they good at predicting wrong from right?
Is it wrong to steal? Is it wrong to steal to feed yourself when you are starving?
Is it wrong to lie? Is it wrong to lie to a known murderer that was asking about your friends whereabouts, knowing that he will hurt him?
What if we have no free will, but we behave better when we are lied about it? Should the system lie about nature of our decisions? What else should system (i.e. state, school, college...) lie us about?
Science is good when there is objective reality underlying its assumptions. When there isn't any strong objective reality it kinda doesn't work as well.
We are still in early stages of developing scientific answers to these questions. But they are fundamentally scientific. Note also that like culinary tastes there may not be unique answers to these questions, but sure it does not mean that all diets are equally good for your health.
Human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known about it. A more detailed understanding of these truths will force us to draw clear distinctions between different ways of living in society with one another, judging some to be better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less ethical. Clearly, such insights could help us to improve the quality of human life.
We may not be able to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain. But opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts. And it is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer. Exactly how many people were bitten by mosquitoes in the last sixty seconds? How many of these people will contract malaria? How many will die as a result? Given the technical challenges involved, no team of scientists could possibly respond to such questions. And yet we know that they admit of simple numerical answers. Does our inability to gather the relevant data oblige us to respect all opinions equally? Of course not. In the same way, the fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that all competing responses to them are equally valid. Mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of confusion.
People who want to argue moral questions are not scientific are in effect saying reason is powerless to answer the most important questions in human life. And how a person perceives the gulf between facts and values seems to influence their views on almost every issue of social importance— from the fighting of wars to the education of children.
This rupture in our thinking has different consequences at each end of the spectrum: religious conservatives tend to believe that there are right answers to questions of meaning and morality, but only because the God of Abraham deems it so. They concede that ordinary facts can be discovered through rational inquiry, but they believe that values must come from a voice in a whirlwind. Scriptural literalism, intolerance of diversity, mistrust of science, disregard for the real causes of human and animal suffering, this is how the division between facts and values expresses itself on the religious right.
From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems like little more than a hatchery for technology. While most educated people will concede that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good life. Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for his existence, but that faith in him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance. Mutually incompatible religious traditions now take refuge behind the same non sequitur.
It seems inevitable, however, that science will gradually encompass life’s deepest questions—and this is guaranteed to provoke a backlash. How we respond to the resulting collision of worldviews will influence the progress of science, of course, but it may also determine whether we succeed in building a global civilization based on shared values. The question of how human beings should live in the twenty-first century has many competing answers—and most of them are surely wrong. Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic, and environmental goals. A science of human flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that the intellectual terrain actually exists.
Neurology has a lot of information about where consciousness comes from. It's not complete, but nothing we know is.
> experience, spontaneity
More neurology, from what I can tell that these words mean. However, they're vague, and can be defined in so many ways that I don't know precisely what you mean.
> 'the present moment'
This is amazingly vague. It could be related to time, to consciousness, or to who-knows-what.
There's a very good book on this called "The Wisdom Of Insecurity" by Alan Watts. It's very short and definitely worth a read if this question interests you.