Computational Behaviour and Thought: or, The Inevitability of Ethics and the Bias Towards Persistence
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/25
What is the nature of ethics? Fundamentally, ethics is about relations between beings.
If a universe lacked any beings, any forms of consciousness, meaning a subjectivity within the universe, then what matters regarding behaviour and thought? Nothing. Thus, we come to the first truism: Ethics requires beings.
How many? At least one, the behaviour and thoughts of said being unto itself. With those formulations of action and thinking towards itself, that amounts to a relation to the self. It is a sense of recursion within the being about the world and itself.
This can involve more than one, too. In this sense, any interpersonal interaction will involve a form of ethics or morality because of the inherent relations, in the first case, between the single being, itself, and the world. Then, this extended to the being, other beings, itself, and the world.
In a sense, if those beings did not inherently have a value towards the persistence of themselves, others, or their environment, evolutionarily speaking, in the long term, they would cease to exist. If the value is not in the self in a single being universe, the being could be off itself. Then, that ends ethical discourse in that universe.
Similarly, regarding the environment sustaining it, this being would require an ethic towards maintaining the environment around it for itself to survive, too. Thus, in most simple models, there would be a requirement for an ethic relating to the being itself and the environment.
In turn, statistically, there is a bias in existence for this form of ethic, a morality of persistence. If this holds for individual beings, then it holds, albeit in a more complex and multifaceted moral calculus, for a multiplex of beings in a universe. All known constructed beings come about by evolved beings; all evolved beings become sustained in an environment.
This is to say; whether evolved or constructed, the persistence bias will be built into the sets and subsets and sub-subsets of beings, whether naturally evolved or somewhat intelligently constructed (or consciously evolved if iterative language is preferable).
All this amounts to claiming that all actions and thoughts in a universe with at least one is creating an ethical universe in the neutral cosmos, i.e., ethics becomes inevitable. With this existence of beings, there will be a statistical bias towards an individual, group, collective, or natural ethic towards persistence over time.
So, an amoral universe with beings cannot exist in principle; an amoral universe only exists without beings. (Q.E.D.)
Amorality is not, except in the set of universes without beings. Since we exist, we have to have morals and, in general, or as a statistical generalization, biased towards existence. This comes to the second truism: All net ethics are biased toward persistence. So, in material terms, here we are stuck with morality or ethical systems, in word and deed, and towards persistence.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 