Fusion Skeet Shoot

 

 

Table of Contents

Super Vision and Supervision                                                                            

Fusion Skeet Shoot                                                                                            

Trajectories                                                                                                        

The Road Least Travelled                                                                                 

If it still don’t work, I gets a bigger ‘ammer.                                                    

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall                                                                    

And so. . .                                                                                                           

 

Super Vision and Supervision

 

Don’t be bitter, young sir. If you want to go on living you have to be alert.   
And you can't be bitter and alert at the same time.  
William Tenn

 

We live in a flyspeck we can hardly conceive, a flyspeck that we have not yet mastered, in a universe we have not yet properly conceived. Depending on how you measure our flyspeck, it is a something like a light day across, in a universe billions of light years across, but that is too big for coherent, coordinated control or occupation.

There are implications for the topic of this essay; control of dangerous collisions of natural bodies in our local space, but even so limited a field is spread over many light seconds, even light minutes, and some of the control functions cannot tolerate latency of more than a small fraction of a second. For personal control we generally want millisecond response, which means that even at lunar distances, some forms of local control are impossible, and demand local human presence or, failing that, automation.

Until recently, local presence was the assumed option; when Arthur C. Clarke proposed satellite communication system, he imagined satellites occupied and operated by humans, but even that was preempted by the first satellites, which were unmanned. Less than a century later, we not only have more advanced direct automation, but are developing AGI for meta‑control, in which devices can rationally control events and processes on teleological bases. 

For the alertness aspect of this essay, that demands continuous information coverage and reactions over at least many light hours — light days would be better, but some aspects of control demand latency limited to fractions of a second; one‑second control of a ship might suffice, but in controlling  a car or aircraft, or even walking, a one‑second delay could be fatal.

Conversely, human control that demands constant alertness, sometimes exposed over long periods to stress or danger, or problems of toxicity, radiation, or temperature, can increasingly be relegated to AGI systems that do not require bulky, complex life support systems. In increasing numbers of such cases human operation is inappropriate and impracticable.

This is by no means an academic observation; in recent decades it has become increasingly obvious that humanity on our planet is living on borrowed time, that there are threats of destruction, with plenty of evidence of their reality, their repeated occurrence throughout past millions of years, millennia, decades, and even as recently as the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Even ignoring the relevance of dino‑killer asteroids, a single impact on the scale of the Tunguska event striking near a major city, could cause deaths and destruction greater than the cost of a global system of spacecraft and AGI control for centuries. It would manage indefinite continuous supervision of Solar System activity within the Oort cloud and sentinel duty, including permanent watch for hazardous bodies.

Accordingly, this topic is a classic example of the need for reevaluation of the appropriate technology. At first it was the humans, then machines, then programmed computer algorithms. Currently emerging requirements demand currently emerging technologies, and the outstanding example is AGI.

 

Fusion Skeet Shoot

 

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly  
Macbeth

 

Risk management is a vital discipline (literally, and in more senses than one), but it is one that most people, including some who are professional decision theorists, do not properly understand.

Politicians and opportunists are practically invariably mobile disasters, with power to affect outcomes that it is beyond their training to appreciate, and consequences beyond their rationality to assess.  When we combine low short-term probability and indefinitely high impact threats, these effects are at their worst. “It hasn’t happened yet, so why worry?” or “HAS happened in the past? So what? We are still here, right?” or “Don’t be ridiculous! That would cost billions! Almost as much as a day’s publicity for the next election!”

Also, one gets the opposite, the “Chicken Little”, and “Golden Fleece” attitudes: “No! Just think if it went wrong! What if we set off the next Big One quake when we launched the bomb, and think of the radioactivity and the plastics pollution! How can you prove that it won’t go wrong?”

For some decades now, I have been interested in the risk of cometary or asteroid collision. It is a textbook case in several ways.

·       We know that dino‑killers have struck Earth in the past and will strike again; we do not know when.

·       We know that the worse the collision, the lower the probability that it will happen in any given year.

·       Most of us think that that is the same as proving that nothing will happen; certainly nothing worth doing anything about.

·       We can recognise all sorts of worst cases. A really hefty hit on say, Yellowstone could wipe out all air-breathing vertebrate life on Earth: not from the resulting vulcanism, but if the seismic wave from the impact passed round the planet and focussed on the other side of the planet into deep ocean, causing gross release of dissolved CO₂, it could release enough to poison us all. Even if the mass struck nicely in the deep central Pacific, the CO₂ could have worse effects than the resulting super‑tsunami. It could be another billion years before intelligent life resurfaced, in no predictable form, and it might never resurface at all. The details we cannot predict, but we can be sure that we would like it not one bit.

·       We are inclined to play numbers games of the type one uses in real‑life games theory of the type that works in casinos, without accepting that those games are for numerically acceptable pay‑offs. When it comes to risks of losing whole countries or even all of humanity, pay‑offs simply are not worth calculation. We know that there always is a chance that a rogue planet the size of Mercury could be on its way to Earth already, and that that really could be the end, because we could blast it with all the nuclear devices on the planet without deflecting it enough. No species would survive the resulting fireball, but we also know that dino killers, too big for us to deflect with conventional explosives, and almost as deadly, could indeed be deflected with existing technology — technology that never existed before on this planet.

·       We know that there are no short‑term serious threats from nearby regions in our ecliptic, because the relevant scientific authorities managed to get mandates for such surveys, but we also know that there also can be threats for other quarters, such as from outside the ecliptic, and dark bodies from the Oort cloud or beyond.

·       In a choice between a dino‑killer rock and a bit of radioactivity released in a launch accident, there is no comparison. Look at Chernobyl and Fukushima, two of the worst, and most irresponsible, nuclear accidents in history so far, either of them worse than the worst that could come of a failed launch of nuclear material into space: neither of them made a dent in the respective country’s traffic accidents or deaths from booze or smoking. I am no fan of traffic accidents and the like, but if you lack the perspective on such comparisons, you disqualify yourself from rational discussion of the issues. The dino‑killers are our likeliest, most unacceptable, avoidable catastrophe in history.

·       We know that the deadlier the threat may be, that is to say, the bigger and the faster, the rarer it will be: and by that very fact, the harder to anticipate. But rarity is no consolation when it happens. What is more, the worse the catastrophe, the earlier we must detect it if we are to do anything to prevent or mitigate it. Furthermore, the worse it may be, the earlier it must be deflected if we are to minimise the harm. This is obvious, because the target area (that is to say: you and I) is over 12000 km in diameter. That means that, depending on the direction in which it is displaced, the necessary distance of redirection to make the missile miss our planet could be anything up to some 12000 kilometres. If we were to catch the invader to deflect it say, a year ahead of the impact time, then pushing it aside at an easy walking pace would be adequate.  But if we only detected it in time for our projectile to hit it about a month before impact, we would need to accelerate many millions of tonnes at quite a smart pace. The problem of detecting the invader and calculating whether it is on its way to us, is bad enough, but what is worse, is to organise our defences to reach it in time, and so far the lead time seems to be a few years.

·       DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was a brilliant exercise, and serendipitous to boot. It not only showed that interception was possible, though it took nearly a year for the projectile to reach its target, Dimorphos, after taking a few years to launch the project. In fairness, that lead time to launch could be shortened to less than a year if the necessary infrastructure had been in place when the target had been detected. In fact, if the infrastructure were along the lines of those described in this article, the craft should have been waiting in space in advance, and the launch could have been begun within days of detection of the target, while the course and time of arrival were still being refined.

 

 

Trajectories

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.  
Will Rogers  

 

Although the target we must defend (our planet) seems very big, a 12000 ‑kilometre globe in a 450000000‑kilometre orbital path has only one part in about 30000 of being struck accidentally by any random shot at that path, which sounds either like very good odds, or very poor, depending on your viewpoint. Of course Earth is being struck all the time, though mainly by dust and pebbles.

But there is one reassuring aspect to that reflection: we are by now amazingly precise at predicting the path of any particularly large ballistic object that we can observe. And we can tell how far we need to deflect it from its path, and how fast, if we are to protect ourselves if we find it aimed at us. In short, the incoming object is, as it were, on a tightrope to reach us where we happen to be in our planetary orbit when it arrives. Almost any disturbance sufficiently early and well directed will push it off its tightrope.

That principle is vitally important.

Not only will any sufficient push across the trajectory of the incoming mass make it leave the tightrope altogether, but any sufficient push along the trajectory will equally effectively make it miss because it will arrive too early or too late to hit the planet.

Every particle of the incoming body gets affected by the interception event, and accordingly each one gets pushed off its tightrope, no matter in which direction.

It might help to visualise the effect with an imaginary model. Suppose one drops an unlit sparkler on a trajectory that ends on an exposed square inch or so of ground. Mark the spot. Then light the sparkler and throw it up into the air. Of the thousands of sparks flying backward, forward, and sideways, hardly any will land on that same square inch where the stick had fallen, and any stray spark that does happen to land there, would be minute compared to the stick.

The same principle applies to a disintegrated asteroid: the debris does not flock to the target; it scatters away from the original trajectory into the void, striking hardly anything corresponding to that first trajectory.  And necessarily of course, each fragment would be small in comparison to the parent body.

With any incoming asteroidal mass that gets fragmented, the effect is still more marked: the fragments all are moving apart; and every one is moving away from any trajectory that ends where Earth will be, no matter whether those fragments were driven by collision, blast, or fracture. We probably would not even have a meteor show worth staying up for.

 

If our explosion hits early enough, particles will be so scattered that the planet can pass harmlessly between them.

This article deals mainly with bodies sufficiently urgent to deal with by dramatic measures such as explosives and impacts, but it is important to remember that there are alternatives, in particular if the trajectory is determined long enough before any anticipated impact, for instance with a few orbits around the sun before threatening Earth, one could use gentler means, such as attaching a reaction motor, or several kilometres of conductive wire, leaving it to the solar wind to drag the object off trajectory. Those two could be combined, so that say, the reaction motor could be attached by a conductive spring many kilometres long; it would continue to work long after the fuel were exhausted.

Such items need to be borne in mind for perspectives on real, but rare events that need attention.

The Road Least Travelled

 

Experts have  
their expert fun  
ex cathedra  
telling one  
just how nothing  
can be done.  
Piet Hein

 

Many schemes for asteroid impact avoidance have been proposed; some wish to push or pull the mass in some direction or other, some to explode it into vapour, some by directing lasers to divert it by vaporising just its surface with lasers or nuclear bombs.

And some spend all their time and breath explaining just how nothing can be done, and therefore why nothing should be done.

Well, the beautiful DART experiment showed that one class of thing really could be done, and surprisingly effectively at that. So everyone seems to have decided prematurely that the problem was solved and we could relax.

This article was inspired by DART, which has pioneered a practical technology for deflecting asteroidal bodies of up to about a kilometre in diameter. The vehicle used in the test was inert apart from its propellent, and it was directed to strike the incoming body head on. This meant that if it were used in that way in a genuine emergency, it would have retarded the incoming, and if it did so early enough, then the body would have missed Earth because it would not have crossed the Earth orbit till after the planet had passed. (The complexities are greater than that suggests, but they do not affect the relevant point: that the body still would miss Earth.)

People unfamiliar with the principle would prefer to have hit the body side‑on to make it pass by on one side, but actually, the head-on impact is the most efficient in converting the energy of its momentum into the necessary acceleration of the incoming body.

Possibly unexpectedly, it turned out that the effect of the DART collision was vastly greater than expected — something like thirty times greater. The reason was not hard to guess, and showed beautifully in the footage of the collision: at the speeds involved, the missile literally splashed out a huge gout of the asteroidal material in the direction that the missile had come from. The dust and gravel of the splash was necessarily far greater than the missile itself, and the reaction, the “kick” of the splash, acted like rocket propulsion.

This was a broad hint. No other principle of deflection could have been more efficient.

But there was room for more. Although this method is estimated to be good for bodies up to a limited size, it would not in itself be suitable for far bigger bodies.

However, the associated implications are not reassuring.

If you could intercept the incoming body enough years before it hits Earth, the DART technique still would work for much larger bodies, but we cannot plan on intercepting bodies light years away. Even within the solar system we  might not be able to be sure whether a very distant body will hit the Earth at all; in fact, a bad shot theoretically could turn a near miss into a hit. And by the time that we were sure, it might be too late for us to deflect the incoming body with a DART‑like missile.

So the question is: what else could we do?

We could send a more massive, faster missile, a javelin instead of a dart, so to speak. This would work if done properly, but in fact, that is not as simple as it sounds. On the other hand, if you could instead give your missile an extra mass of fuel and aim it to hit at a much higher velocity, we could exploit the fact that the energy of a missile increases with its mass, but increases with the square of its speed.

But even that sort of design is limited.

Another improvement might be to add a payload of as much mass as is practical, of a suitable high‑explosive bomb to the missile’s payload. That would give you the same maximal payload as an inert mass, but if the explosive, perhaps a tonne of RDX or TKX-50, were timed to explode when it had penetrated deep into the target after a few microseconds, it would expel a far larger reaction mass than an inert missile would, and expel it far more energetically than any passive impact could have done. We would have increased the mass of ejected material by tonnes, but the effect of the increase in the speed of the ejected material would be squared.

That bomb need not be the only option either; you could follow the first missile with another one if the body was still on target and mainly intact.

Which of these routes of loss of forward momentum is most important, depends on the parameters  of the impact. As long as the vector sum of the impact is opposed to the vector of the incoming object, there will be a matching loss of the incoming momentum. There also may be a matching loss of energy in diverting momentum to accelerate material transversely to the incoming body’s trajectory. This was vividly visible in footage of the DART impact.

The effectiveness of the impact of the intercepting missile depends largely on how efficiently energy is diverted from the momentum of the incoming body, and how optimally the internal explosive effect can be placed inside the target. Ideally an explosion at the centre of mass maximises the forward propulsion of part of the mass of the incoming in its original direction, but in a harmless form such as dust. But the mass that the missile has passed on the way in, amounts to reaction mass in reducing the momentum of the hinder part of the incoming body.

The optimal effect probably would be if the missile penetrates to the centre of mass of the incoming, and explodes there, as a combination of the impact energy plus any explosive payload of the missile. Ideally the front half of the incoming then would act as the reaction mass, generally harmlessly pulverised. Then the rear half, whether shattered or not, but in any case greatly reduced, would be maximally slowed, removing its trajectory tightrope far from planet Earth. In any case, there would be a considerable mass of shattered material scattered radially, and any lumps in that cloud would never get near to the original trajectory again.

The optimal allocation of the mass of the missile to fuel, rather than to an explosive payload, is not a simple matter. Ideally every joule of the fuel that went into accelerating the missile would go into the impact, and the fuel mass greatly exceeds the payload mass. But it gets worse.

Suppose that we have a choice of adding to the missile, a tonne of payload in the form of say, TKX‑50, or adding to the momentum of the missile by increasing its fuel load. The latter would be cheaper and possibly safer and would avoid the problem  of the extremely tight timing of the detonation, not to mention the possibility of something going wrong on the way into the centre of the incoming mass, such as hitting a large lump of nickel‑iron that wrecks the warhead.

But that too is not a compelling choice; if the extra fuel in lieu of the explosive payload pays off in the missile being too fast, and accordingly too penetrating for the nature of the target, it could go more than halfway through, even right through the pile. That certainly would cause considerable slowing to the residual mass, and probably would disperse much of the rubble at right angles to the trajectory, but still would direct hardly any of the reaction mass in the preferred direction. It might even accelerate the main mass forward, still very likely to miss Earth, but at best it would be an ineffectual outcome, if not actually excessively dangerous.

And, even if a tonne of TKX‑50 would be less energetic than an extra tonne of rocket fuel, it would be more brisant, would have more shattering power placed more precisely where desired, more likely to break apart the target body as required, than mechanically pulverising rock all the way in.

We can solve all those riddles systematically as they arise, but there is one aspect that must not lose sight of, even though it is increasingly rare, as the parameter increases: the size of the incoming object. Suppose we were not dealing with a ping pong 1‑km diameter asteroid, but a real dino‑killer 10 km or more in diameter.

Teratonnes. Your real dino‑killers.

By then it is time to up the ante seriously.

What I prescribe for much larger targets instead of a chemical explosive, is to use a nuclear explosion, and not a toy nuclear bomb burning plutonium either; such bombs are both dirty in the isotopes they produce, and expensive in fissile materials. So what would be better would be a (relatively) clean fusion bomb (H‑bomb); it uses just enough fission to set off the fusion explosion, producing a far larger explosion, and far larger acceleration than any comparable chemical could provide, whether as propellent, or excavation agent.

 

If it still don’t work, I gets a bigger ‘ammer. 

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  
Abraham Maslow

 The political problems with nuclear devices far outweigh the technical problems.

For example, try asking random members of the public in any nation, about the difference between fission and fusion. If they even know what you are talking about, you probably are in a University town, and most likely in one of the physics departments.

Most of the laity would object violently to any use of nuclear devices off Earth anyway. If you pressed them, some would object to radiation contamination of outer space — an absurdity, but very difficult to explain. Other members of the voting public, better informed, but still by no means competent in the field, would object to sending such things up into space because of the risk of the rocket crashing down and scattering radioactivity all over.

Rockets do certainly fail now and then, and that is why the inert bomb components, including the lithium deuteride etc, would be sent up separately together with most of the bomb body components. If the launch failed, they would do no more harm than any plane crash, and that only where they landed. Expensive anyway, so you could be sure that such a crash would be as rare as anyone could make it.

As for the radioactive fissile component, it is a relatively small part of the bomb, the match so to speak, intended to set off the main fusion explosion. But though it is not inert, it still cannot explode nor even present much of a radioactive threat unless it is set up to do so, any more than a car engine’s parts can start unless they are assembled.

The problem is by no means new, and techniques for dealing with it are well established, either on launch failure, or on returning to Earth. Unused parts of fissionable material can be packed into steel containers sufficiently shock‑proofed so that even if the rocket comes apart and dumps its load in a failed launch, or the failed assembly has to be dumped on re-entry, those lumps of steel will not release their content, no matter when or how they land.

Once in orbit, and with no problems, the bomb can be assembled ready for use in the missile; this should be done by robots with advanced AI, but supervised by online inspection of humans on the ground. It would make no sense to send humans up to do jobs that machines can do better, faster, more cheaply and more healthily. Even if such a bomb were somehow ruined beyond recovery, its inert parts could be jettisoned to be destroyed on re-entry, and its fissile materials, which could not cause any nuclear event on their own, could be directed to the moon or Venus or the sun, depending on practicalities, or returned in their impregnable delivery containers.

Some people argue that if you use a fusion bomb, you need not make contact with your target at all: simply explode your bomb at the right distance away, and the flash will ablate its surface, vaporising it explosively, producing a thrust with far less chance of the target flying apart.

It is an interesting approach, but its advantages are arguable, even if it were conceded that avoiding fragmentation were desirable. Besides, its inefficiency would be appalling: if it could be shown that the thrust from such an explosion amounted to using 0.01% of that bomb’s power, I would be shocked. Major arguments in favour of the idea are that the blast would not disrupt fragile targets, and that in such a project what counts is not efficiency, but effectiveness: if we can afford to send out a megatonne bomb, we can afford some inefficiency, so why do we need such efficiency?

This may be true as far as it goes, but it ignores pertinent considerations. Firstly, there is no relevant limit to the size of possibly incoming bodies, but there are realistic limits to how big a body we can deflect, even using nukes. In contrast to the external fusion bomb, techniques based on the rocket reaction‑mass impact, or even more, an explosive or even a nuclear explosive deep inside the mass, would give enormous efficiency. A deep impact nuclear bomb could shift even a real dino‑killer if we caught it soon enough. The efficiency of the measure sets the limit to the size of threat we can avert. If by deep impact with a nuclear bomb we could improve an efficiency of 0.01% to 1%, that would suggest an ability to protect Earth from targets a hundred times more massive, using the same bomb.

That ratio is far more important than the numbers immediately suggest: the frequency of a threat from an incoming body of a given size varies inversely to the mass, according to power laws with various parameters, but all scales of estimation agree that increases in efficiency that enable us to avert threats a hundred to a thousand times greater, would increase the life expectancy of our civilisations to geological periods rather than millennia. We could rival the dinosaurs.

Furthermore, we can expect our technology to improve over time, enabling us for example to detect and intercept incoming bodies from far greater distances. Our ability to deflect larger targets than anything currently foreseeable would increase disproportionately. We could extend the probable survival of our heritage beyond geological periods, to when planet Earth itself could no longer support life because our sun would no longer have a stable habitable zone. For example, imagine having detected an incoming rogue planet the size of Pluto, large enough to reduce Earth to a glowing ember, and too large to attack directly. By efficient use of penetrating nuclear bombs, we might be able to steer some billion-tonne bodies from the Oort cloud to collide with the incoming rogue a light‑year out. At such a distance a tiny deviation to the rogue’s course could save our planet. The last time Earth encountered such a threat was some four billion years ago. By proper attention to efficiency we could face threats orders of magnitudes greater than by wasting the potential of our tools.

Discussion of those details is beyond the scope of this essay, but not to be dismissed as academic; prospects for extending human longevity to similar orders of magnitude, not only are realistic, but essential to the survival of our species and heritage and the quality of our future.

 

 

 

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall 

The only thing to prevent what's past is to put a stop to it before it happens   
Boyle Roche

 

Bigger bombs, harder hammers, are all well, the sceptic insists, but what if your bomb, or even your DART‑type impact blows your target apart? Then where you had one dino‑killer, you now have a whole flock of them.

That sounds ominous of course; for one thing, not every asteroid has the cohesive strength of a solid lump of nickel‑iron. More often it will be a relatively fragile chunk of rock or even a rubble pile or a muddy snowball with no considerable cohesion at all.

Rubble piles in particular, as in fact was the case with Dimorphos, have been posed as a great concern to interceptors of incoming bodies, because they seem likely to absorb impacts much as massive marshmallows might. This view however, is unrealistically pessimistic; we now have seen vividly that if the target is solid, or a rubble-pile that maintains its cohesion after the impact, it may react like a rocket, with much of its own body material serving as reaction mass. Dimorphos in fact did not split, though it did scatter a lot of harmless dust and gravel.

Even a marshmallow must obey the conservation of momentum, and that implies that the vectors of the various components of the impact all contribute to the outcome. The incoming rubble pile must get slowed down by the reverse scattering from the impact, and it also loses its momentum towards the target, Earth, to particles expelled by transverse scattering. It simultaneously gains momentum from material ejected from the rear of the body, but that of course is trivial in most circumstances.

We already have seen that the path of any distant object on the way to our planet, is tightrope-precise, and that even a slight disturbance, say one part in tens of thousands, either in direction or in time of arrival, will cause it to miss. This has a very important implication for our concern about the consequences of shattering the incoming body: those particles share common attributes, no matter what the nature of their disturbance.

Accordingly the dread of creating a swarm of dino‑killers whenever we shatter an incoming body, is deluded. Not only can we dismiss any fear of the swarm; we want the swarm, the shattered invader, because after the original contact, the bullseye of the original target (typically planet Earth) is the safest place to be.

An incidental concept is that it might be practicable to hit a large, known rubble pile off‑centre with a projectile too small to shatter it, but setting it spinning rapidly enough to shed large amounts of loose rock, small enough or far enough off‑trajectory to ignore. After such an exercise, the remnant’s trajectory would be reassessed to see whether it was still unsafe. If so, the remnant could be assumed to be solid, and probably suitable for a DART‑type deflection.

 

 

And so. . . 

Most people miss Opportunity because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.   
Thomas A. Edison

 

And so... We need to act, and we need to act before the next disaster. Proper protection of our biosphere from threats that range from city-busters to dino-killers, would ultimately work out cheaper than ad‑hoc reactions; how does one price a vaporized city or a Pacific‑wide tsunami?

We need to establish a permanent infrastructure of autonomous, AGI‑controlled detection and interception craft in space. They would pay for themselves anyway by utility functions such as communication and navigation infrastructure, astronomic observation, and mapping the Kuiper belt.

By utilizing the sheer efficiency of deep nuclear impacts, we can shift the life expectancy of our civilization to geological epochs. But that survival is contingent on having these indifferent sentinels already waiting in the void, ready to secure the environment. We cannot afford to start building the hammer only after we see the nail.

 

 Acknowledgement: Though this work is my own in conception and authorship, I used the services of Google Gemini in editing and in colleague mode for criticism, and am gratified at the effect. 

Immortality and Ethicality

Immortality and Ethicality

 

Table of Contents

 

Where, Whither, Why, and How

Ethics, Sex, Cooking, and Other Clichés

From time to Time

SI Technical Table table of seconds

Was it to read THIS that I went to school??

Homo pertransiens: Humanity from Past to Last

Ethics? Philosophy??? Help!!!

Origins and Effects of Human Communities

Family groups

Village groups

City or Nation status

Modern national concepts

Isms, Acies & Functional Teleological Ethics

Ethics in particular. . .

Values, selection, and decision

Values

Inherent Values, Adaptations to Communal Scale and History

Values in Social, Interpersonal Relationships

Material and abstract values

Parameters as Values

Calling Back the Anvil

Entities, agents, and the CES of the team

Sacrifice, Scaffolding and the Team

Meta-teams

Hives of minds

Functional Teleological Ethics in Responsibility and Rights

Rights, Responsibilities, Obligations, Law

Ethics, Aesthetics, Emotion and Motivation

Conflicts of interest within the body

Keeping the gate

Possession, Ownership, Property

Preservation of legal systems

Social Contracts and Strategies

Instilling and Securing the Principles

The Future is the Territory, not the Map

Can we get there from here?

Outgrowing the kindergarten

Something New: Ethical Vaccination for Righteousness

 

 

Where, Whither, Why, and How

Any enterprise that by its own nature strives against its own survival,
whether it succeeds or not, deserves not to survive.

How do you suppose humanity is doing?

Exploration of our possible future, takes us so far beyond current concepts and technology, that we founder in those most treacherous of questions: “WHY?” and “WHY NOT??”. To avoid their hobbling us, this essay is an attempt to separate the questions into proper contexts, and to show that they are matters of ethics: a foundational aspect of decision theory, far more important than “being nice”.

Ethics has long been among the most incoherent, even hysterical, branches of applied philosophy, and this essay attempts to avoid emotional traps in suggesting the need for humanity to develop our logical, technological, and practical abilities if we are to have any long-term future at all. The text describes fundamental teleological ethical concepts as well as our mental capacities, and we must shed many traditional delusions; as things stand, we are hobbled by our biologically inherited social obsessions with emotions adapted to our ancestry in villages, towns, and nations — a species that cannot grow beyond a perspective in which dictators can raise golden statues to themselves, will be dooming itself.

We have not yet adjusted to recognition of our realities as a planetary community, and that status in turn we shall have to shed as we grow beyond this planet. We need to build rather than consume, defile, and destroy. Like monkeys climbing trees to reach the moon, we are trapped in a local maximum: every step feels like progress in the right direction, but climbing higher trees is functionally bankrupt for a challenge that demands fundamental paradigm shifts.

Related essays that deal with some of the paradigm shifts will build on this one, a series that contemplates our future as demanding developments more radical than our ascent from our fellow-chimpanzees: constructive hubris for engineering our own indefinite survival.

This is no sermon; it is a survival map for a territory where there be dragons.

 

 

Ethics, Sex, Cooking, and other Clichés

Only some of us can learn by other people’s mistakes.
The rest of us have to be the other people.
Chicago Tribune

 

Some fields perennially tempt authors into unconscious clichés in well-worn fields, and many of those clichés are not even valid. Ethics is one such field, and my excuse for this essay is that some aspects need attention, not so much for our day, nor our near future, but particularly for the indefinite future of humanity.

For that I need to touch lightly on various topics, some in established science, others still largely arguable. The details I cover more elaborately elsewhere. Those requirements are nothing new in applied branches of philosophy; philosophy is largely thinking about thinking, and such thought cannot realistically be confined to allegedly established facts.

What is the point of discussing anything so remote, you might ask?

I nowhere suggest that daily realities may be neglected, but while everyone else deals with them, some of us should wonder what we are heading into — and why.

And how.

 

 

From time to Time

 

Killing Time
There’s scarce a point whereon mankind agree
So well as in their boast of killing me;
I boast of nothing, but when I’ve a mind—
I think I can be even with mankind.
Voltaire

 

This essay was written as a companion piece to the essay Immortal imperatives, in which vast periods of time were relevant, and not primarily on planet Earth. Accordingly some of the conventions in the essays have been shared, and one is that, since time units such as days and years are not uniform from planet to planet (or even between cultures on Earth), we use the SI time units of seconds, megaseconds, teraseconds, and so on, according to the following table.

 

 

SI Technical Table table of seconds
Prefix	Symbol	Seconds (s)	Power	≈ Human Equivalent
Kilosecond	ks	1000	103	17 Minutes
Megasecond	Ms	1000000	106	12 Days
Gigasecond	Gs	1000000000	109	32 Years
Terasecond	Ts	1000000000000	1012	32 000 Years
Petasecond	Ps	1000000000000000	1015	32 Million Years

 

One Earth Year	1 yrs	≈32  Ms
Human Lifespan	100 yrs	≈3 Gs
Near History	10 000 yrs	≈320  Gs
Homo sapiens so far	300 000 yrs	≈10  Ts

 

 

Was it to read THIS that I went to school??

I saw Adam leave the garden
With an apple in his hand
I said, “Now you’re out What are you gonna do?
Plant some crops and pray for rain
Maybe raise a little Cain
I’m an orphan and I’m Only passing through”

Passing through, passing through
Sometimes happy, sometimes blue
Glad that I ran into you
Tell the people that you
Saw me passing through
Pete Seeger

 

This essay is largely informal, so it does not deal primarily with the philosophy of ethics in standard ways, though it might point out some defects persistent in common debate. It omits definitions and discussions of many terms that will be familiar to readers in various fields of philosophy, and with ethics in particular.

To reduce clutter, many terms first appear as hypertext links that readers may follow as they prefer. For definition and discussion of hypertext‑linked terms, readers with the necessary connections can click on the highlighted words.

Anyone who would like to delve even more deeply, might fossick in libraries or online among philosophical sites such as Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The reason for the hyperlinking is to avoid bogging down in side issues. The concerns of formal work in philosophy are not essential to material implications. Ethics as dealt with here have little to do with standard, religious, or personal morals, dealing instead with principles relevant to the survival of, not just our species and its future, but rather the heritage for which we have responsibility, whether our future turns out to be human or not.

The relevant concepts and terminology are convenient to view in terms of ethics; accordingly, we deal primarily with:

Implications of ethical concepts for Humanity’s distant future  — if any distant future is to include Humanity or life at all

For material discussion of that theme, to which many topics of ethics are relevant, you might want to read another essay: Immortal imperatives, in which I give some indication of what our future should be, if our prospects permit. At present those prospects do not look reassuring, but neglecting them will do nothing to mend matters.

One topic concerns the realities of world lines, causal relations, similar concepts, and their relevance. More broadly, one also could also consider time geography, but I must not wander too far afield.

In Immortal imperatives I point out that if humanity does not develop what amounts to personal immortality, and fails to develop the necessary mental and physical powers to deal with it, we are doomed, physically and morally. As a species we do have the necessary temporal potential as a global or universal community, but our present form, which I call Homo ephemerens, will not suffice. If we are to succeed, or even persist, we must work towards a physical and mental status that I call Homo futurens, in which the individual will have indefinite life expectancy, and be equipped to manage it, to grow and prosper, without boredom or mental paralysis or stultification — otherwise there would be no point to the effort anyway, would there?

In short, we shall have to be planning towards, and working towards, a future that we Homo ephemerens never shall see. Call that altruism if you will, but altruism is not the intended primary line of thought.

One fundamental point is the dramatic and crucial difference between personal perceptions and perspectives within world lines of Homo ephemerens and Homo futurens. We currently are limited, not only according to our individual lifespan, which is pathetic, but to our mental capacity for retaining personal shreds of memory and shreds of identity, and those limitations make for incoherent principles of ethics, values, and objectives.

A large part of human literature is inspired and formulated in terms of the way the cross sections of world lines change as time passes; those are the ways one sees one’s life at any time, and those ways determine what matters to our entire nature and how it is important to our current community: Homo ephemerens.

The same is true of Homo futurens, but in largely different ways. To anyone who regards the world from a perspective of  Ts or Ps, including the science and enterprise that demand such time spans, most of the very ideas behind most of our familiar ethics, family, community, understanding, stock markets, ecology, business, engineering, accountancy, and bottom‑line economy of today, would make no more sense than the games of children playing with mud pies, marbles, and Monopoly. In such perspectives, any minds functionally more mature than ours, should see their own world lines on scales of Ts rather than Gs, in greater depth and breadth and complexity of pattern, in different dimensions, than any of us could in our day.

 

 

Homo pertransiens: Humanity from Past to Last

No man is an Island, entire of itself;  every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were,
as well as if a Manner of thy friends or of thine owne were;
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
John Donne

 

All that sounds very simple and compelling (at least I hope it does) but there is a vitally important aspect: we are Homo ephemerens beyond question, and our descendants had better be Homo futurens, because if they are not, we simply will have no future. But there will never be anyone who can say sensibly: “my parents were Homo ephemerens and my children are Homo futurens and I in between am neither, owing nothing to either: a link in no chain”.

Such a link would be futile, not part of any chain, even as a link, and if links can read, any such link here is reading the wrong material; we lack values in common.

Another peril is to say either: “I am Homo ephemerens, and I owe nothing to Homo futurens; what have they ever done for me?” or “I am Homo futurens, and I owe nothing to Homo ephemerens; what does anything but the future matter to me?”

A link without a chain is a futility without meaning, and a waste.

As long as a chain of humanity endures, however an outsider might see each link, that link can look back to another, and forward to yet another link. Such a link might see itself, not as Homo futurens or Homo ephemerens, but Homo pertransiens, humanity passing through.

Passing through, from past to last, Homo pertransiens is the healthy human answer to questions of the purpose, the challenge, the matter, and the meaning of life. Homo ephemerens and Homo futurens are regions on the map, but Homo pertransiens is the territory.

 

 

Ethics? Philosophy??? Help!!!

 

An Ethical Grook
I see and I hear and I speak no evil;
I carry no malice within my breast;
yet quite without wishing a man to the Devil
one may be permitted to hope for the best.
Piet Hein. . .

 

Ethics and philosophy? What is all this about?

Relax. Probably you don’t need the next few paragraphs, and can skim or skip them. Even if you do need them, there is no sermon, nor a test at the end. If on the other hand, you really do need anything when you get deeper into the material, I will supply you with links, such as this one: Science and Religion

Ethics in general is a branch of philosophy, so wide, and so widely discussed and disputed, so relevant to various branches of choices of behaviour and compulsion, that most definitions are smugly arbitrary and protean.

Some branches of philosophy in turn, are formal, meaning that they are founded on what I call axioms: concepts and principles defined arbitrarily, if defined at all, plus theorems compellingly derived from that basic axiomatic material. In other words, each deals only with the universe of discourse of its own axioms and their derivations. A classical example might be Euclidean geometry.

Other branches of philosophy are applied, meaning that they deal in part with empirically or arbitrarily defined subject matter apart from any formal axioms that apply to their content; this essentially implies that applied branches of philosophy are constrained by the intrinsic attributes of their subject matter. A good example might be celestial_mechanics, in which initially simple Newtonian behaviour of point sources of momentum and gravitation, rapidly and inescapably ramify into tidal forces, entropic effects, relativity, heat flow, and more.

If your applied philosophy leads you into predicting outcomes that do not match the assumptions about your subject matter, then either your assumptions are wrong, or your philosophy is wrong, or more likely both.

It then is time to think again about thinking; some people do very well without thinking, so for them there is no problem: those might as well steer clear.

 

 

Origins and Effects of Human Communities

A Philosopher seeing a Fool beating his Donkey, said: “Abstain, my son, abstain, I implore.
Those who resort to violence shall suffer from violence.”
“That,” said the Fool, diligently belaboring the animal,
“is what I’m trying to teach this beast — which has kicked me.”
“Doubtless,” said the Philosopher to himself, as he walked away,
“the wisdom of Fools is no deeper nor truer than ours,
but they really do seem to have a more impressive way of imparting it.”
Ambrose Bierce

 

This document aims mainly at the future of humanity; in fact so remote a future that I could have left out our history up to the present almost without anyone noticing. Not many people realise just how trivial, even how ignominious, our history has been to date.

Anyway, books on human history and prehistory number in their thousands, and books on ethics in their hundreds, but not many deal with our indefinite future, and without our far future we will amount to nothing better than a polluting smear on what I believe to be an exceptionally beautiful planet, and I hope to inspire a few readers to take themselves and their responsibilities to our past and our future seriously, and to pass that on.

It might even make a difference; it can’t do more harm than letting everything slide into decay.

But some of our greatest shortcomings so far, and for the foreseeable future, reflect the nature of our past; it leaves its mark on our present, as we leave our mark on our future.

If that means nothing to you, then you really should try to make some progress in ethics in that context. And if you do not understand that, you would do better to spend your time and effort elsewhere.

But if you still wish to see whether I say anything worth saying, welcome, and thanks for the compliment.

I begin with just an outline of some of the marks that our past has left on our present. I do not apologise for the brevity, because there are plenty of books on that topic.  I do not tout for any particular one myself, but you can find more than you want if you google books under keywords such as: “society in prehistory”.

The main objective of the next few sections here, is to direct your attention towards some of the effects of our past on trends in our current emotions and society; it is high time to grow up. If we do not do so soon enough, we never will, and if that is the case, good riddance.

But that is no reason for not trying, and that is where I start.

Note well! The fact that there is some evolutionary significance to this part of the discussion, does not mean that all the books and recommendations you will find on the topic need be taken seriously; the sheer volume of nonsense published on the subject is discouraging.

Meanwhile, here are a few superficial hints to think upon.

 

 

Family groups

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor
Eric Hoffer

 

The original human communities may have been family groups, and the means to accommodate the groups would have been largely arbitrary. A group would favour family members above strangers. A family member in approved possession of valued items would be favoured in retaining it against acquisition by other family members. Acquisition of assets from aliens to the family group would be favoured with strength according to how alien or even inimical to the family the aliens were seen to be.

Family grouping probably originated before we were special among the primates; many animal species behave very like that. It is likely that origins of those forms of community preceded our descent from related species several hundred Ts ago. Traces still show in the fundamentals of our legal and moral systems (blood is thicker than water, and all that) but they do not suffice in themselves for guiding social life, current or future.

Chimps, gorillas, and some other sociable primates are well into that stage, so it is nothing to brag of, that the traces still are evident in our society of today. For some discussion on related topics, you might like to read some of the history of nepotism; the subject is larger than you might think, in fact the very origin of the term in history is embarrassing, though it neither began nor ended with the papacy.

 

 

Village groups

The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein.
It rejects it.

Sir Peter Brian Medawar

 

The next stage of human social development presumably was at the level of the village‑ or tribal‑group. This dealt at some level with larger groups than families, and very likely began to take hierarchical effect, where personal values would favour neighbouring groups, over strangers if they did not kill or eat each other. Probably this attitude grew to be increasingly favoured somewhere in the last 3 Ts or so.

There is no single attribute of humanity or sociality that is to blame for either the rise or the fall of the human community in general — different scales of populations and ecologies require different social, indeed different genetic strategies. Without the original Family Group adaptations, it is not clear how we could have survived functional Village Group status. But neither of those completely fitted the demands of the other. Partly as a result, each suffered from the adaptations to the needs of the other; the Village suffered from greeds and partiality that harked back to family concepts, while hermits who renounced Village life tended to doom themselves to sterility. Whether they cared or not, was another matter, but it came to the same in the end.

One way or the other, the realities of emotional and social adaptations inappropriate to the size and ecology of the wrong scale of population, are arguably the single most virulent social poisons threatening our survival as a species. Their traces bid to destroy our species — or leave it as an open question whether a species that cannot overcome pernicious of influences such origins, is worth trying to save.

 

 

City or Nation status

Learn from the mistakes of others.
You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.
Groucho Marx

 

By something like 600 Gs ago it is likely that the concepts of formal city‑ or nationhood or ruling dynasties had begun to be established, and they grew and elaborated in a few regions around the world. By this time there were difficulties in the formulation of legal systems, for which the original village structures were inadequate, and in which we still have to deal with primitive village‑society mores that functionally are totally unsuited to global society.

Difficulties arising from the failure of residues of village mentality to adapt to the demands of larger communities emerged in the extreme messiness and instability of the history of nations, dynasties and religions from classical times to pretty nearly the present day.

 

 

Modern national concepts

Human beings seem to have this endless ability to think they are at the end of history.
The only people who now are saying we know enough are people who don’t know enough.
Richard Klausner

 

In the last 30 or 60 Gs or so, we have been struggling with successions and radiations of social structures that all bore the village stamp, often magnified into the dictator-ruled horde level and intermittent Imperialism. Somehow some traces of intellectual advancement occurred, such as in some pre-classical Greek communities, and in the next 60 Gs, we hit the advance of science and technology, and then of printing or other media of communication, which led in turn to idealism beyond the religious parasitism and divine right of kings.

In some (or all?) major “civilisations” religious command structures were among the most powerful and consistent communication structures in every nation. And they always left their stamp on all the information that they passed on.

It is not always clear how, when, and whether royal or religious command and communications were most influential or durable in the shaping of nations and politics, but by the time that they were established, the Family and Village mentality were already making themselves felt as inappropriate.

And so in turn, we already should have outgrown nationalism and party politics.

One would have thought that simple intelligence and common sense would have been sufficient for shaking off such flagrant social parasitism, but it remains as vigorous and ubiquitous as ever. I hope that the developments proposed in Immortal imperatives would put an end to the problem, but I do not expect to be present to assess progress.

 

 

Isms, Acies & Functional Teleological Ethics

How have people come to be taken in by [the book] “The Phenomenon of Man”?
We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind for philosophy-fiction.
Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies,
so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people,
often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes,
who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
Peter B. Medawar

 

The main differences that have emerged in the nature of human leadership, and submission to corruption, resulted not so much from any differences in the attributes of people, as from the rise in technology, especially transport and communications. This has left us with generic categories of poisonous derivatives of the village disease, under names such as such as Communism (so‑called). Nationalism (so‑called), Racism (so‑called), indefinite numbers of religionisms, Aristocracy (so‑called), Democracy (so‑called), and kakistocracy (equally popular, but not so‑called).

Not within historical memory has humanity been free of that scourge.

Exactly whither this is taking us, I cannot tell, but if we do not come to our senses soon enough, humanity will be relegated to the trash-bin of the planetary history that has swallowed successive  ≈3 Ps waves of global domination followed by extinction. Only, at the current rate, humanity’s will be the briefest yet. And if we do not get it right this time, I am of the opinion that our sun will swallow the planet, and everyone on it, though by that time there will be no one at home, burp, and settle down to a lifeless shrinking dwarf phase, a stellar ash‑heap that will last thousands of times longer than our entire history of life on this planet.

A fitting end to a mindless, idealless, mob.

In the light of the last ten thousand years or so, I would almost guarantee that current Homo ephemerens would be too stupid to survive for more than a few more cycles of war and corruption, given the way that poisonous political leaders are chosen, and dictators are supported, by slogan‑hungry rabble who destroy democracy in all but name by justifying support for symbols instead of testing them against objective realities.

Dictators ask nothing better, because they can progressively increase their grip on their supporters to degrees that would at first have seemed ludicrous. Their power grows as they gain the commitment of allies and supporters whose interests come to depend on abuses that at first would have seemed intolerable and incredible; As Jonathan Swift put it: Reason is a very light rider and easily shook off.

Go ahead; prove me wrong. No one would be happier to lose a bet. By these very essays, I am trying to move my successors to do just that.

This is not a moral judgement; it neither allocates praise for charitable deeds, nor blame for sin or taste or distaste for outcomes; it is a diagnosis of violation of the principle of functional teleological ethics: I often use the initialism: “FTE”.

Let’s have a drum roll in introducing it by a title of its own:

 

FUNDAMENTAL TELEOLOGICAL ETHICAL ASSUMPTION:
Any system, however complex, that by its own nature, deliberately or implicitly opposes its own long term success, may be described as functionally bankrupt, and cannot rationally be supported

 

One key requirement in making sense of such thoughts, is teleological: that we establish a viable, effective structure of functional teleological ethics that we can use in making and testing our decisions. And I am hinting at the logical requirements for our survival in indefinite challenge and constructive hubris.

In FTE, commitment to expansion and propagation of our heritage is essential. That does not sound like much, but if we get it wrong, we earn nothing better than to die out ignominiously and painfully — betraying all that our ancestors, our families, and our nations worked, built, and struggled for, wasting it for the sake of short-lived greed, malice, and destruction.

If that is what you vote for, go ahead — I am not selling anything. By all means, decide what you want to work for, but remember one thing at least: be careful what you fall for! All of humanity’s internal weaknesses and parasites are still with us; down the ages, the opportunists have needed only minor tweaks to their pitches. Snake‑oil salesmanship and political self-aggrandisement have hardly changed since the days of Plato’s philosopher‑kings.

Whoever cannot learn from education and good sense, will continue to gratify the parasites, and drag humanity down the same old gutters. To preserve and promote our heritage we will need to achieve ethical and intellectual progress to challenge vestiges of adaptations that moulded our ancestors of tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the past. They may have helped us survive the realities of their day, but they are destroying us now, in the form of traditions that still are variously defended as noble or holy in the face of documented evidence.

Without singling out Catholicism as being better or worse than dozens or hundreds of religions (depending on who does the counting) reading papal histories will provide plenty of convenient examples.

I hope to put to rest, perpetual questions of meaning, meaning of life in particular, and purpose, not with any pat formula of nihilism or religion or mysticism, but with some basis of decision based on values and objectives.

Basically it comes down to: “No matter who you are, or who advises you, avoid whining and blundering: do something effective!”

 

 

Ethics in particular. . .

Incompatibility: . . . a similarity of tastes, particularly the taste for domination.
Ambrose Bierce

 

Ethics, as an applied, and at least partly material branch of philosophy, deals with choices of behaviour, and accordingly with human realities and action. The choices are assumed to be largely voluntary — the very concept of involuntary choice is semantically problematic.

Or to put that into English: ethics is a difficult subject to talk about sensibly. That need not mean that the study of ethics is nonsense — it might mean no more than that we have not thought about it clearly and deeply enough as yet — have not yet done our homework, so to speak.

Whatever your personal feelings or standards, your functional ethics reduce to the nature of your choices of action in the light of consequences, and largely in the context of conflict of interests. In that sense, ethics is the branch of decision theory that guides or constrains your choices to minimise unwanted consequences and maximise desirable consequences, commonly in the context of the views and actions of the community.

Some people hate that definition, as being too coldly mechanical, but, as far as it goes, it is inescapable. Whenever you wonder whether it is right to do something, then your ethical basis might not tell you whether it will be profitable or clever or kindly, but if it cannot tell you which is wrong, or sinful, or unkind, or dishonest, or otherwise calculated to offend your sense of righteousness or moral security, then at least in that connection your ethical standard is insufficient, and you might need to find some guidance. The guidance might be religious, or supplied by an experienced companion, or personal experience, or from a little book of rules, but to the extent that your ethical guidance helps you to choose, whether for good or evil, it cannot but constrain your choices as a decision‑theoretic tool. And whenever it fails that, it fails as an ethical system.

Well, not many of us like the idea of  being manoeuvred into action willy nilly. Some elect to be mulish: simply to refuse to choose anything; trump free will with free won’t. That should show the bosses who is boss or who won’t be bossed! But that old gambit has whiskers: inaction and arbitrary or constrained action, are in themselves choices of action.

This essay is in no way exhaustive, but concepts that are necessary for the very meaning of ethics, include some of the following topics.

 

 

Values, selection, and decision

The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow
Richard Buckminster Fuller

 

Selection, which amounts to choice in most contexts, is a fundamental concept in the nature of entities, relationships, and emergent consequences. In fact, as R. A. Fisher pointed out a century ago, natural selection is not restricted to Darwinism; its mathematical nature is closely related to that of entropy. Accordingly, in ethics and, more widely, in decision in general, ethics without choice would be meaningless, and so would choice without values.

In simple terms, in ethics and morality, values are what people care about. If there is no CES, if there is no one to care, then the concept of ethics decays into a cipher, a concept without supporting rationality.

And values without rationality would be suicidally ineffectual.

And stupid. Moralists have historically been prone to go haring after incoherent delusions, and calling them religions, and in fact each religion is the only right one, so any attempt to improve it is blasphemy, because it would suggest either that every God can change its mind repeatedly, or that every past worshipper or priest has hitherto been wrong in claiming that his claims were the god’s truth.

And we cannot have that, can we?

The very concept of ethics depends on the intelligence, the good sense and good intention of the practitioner.

Any political landscape will demonstrate the point and the limitations of our current ethical and practical environment.  As Churchill put it: “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter”; this need not be a fair reflection on the intelligence and ethics of Joe Average, but it might as well be.

No values can be free of every aspect of arbitrariness; we all have our needs. Our perspectives, our conflicts, and our preferences, and any human without innate or instilled appropriate values, is Darwinistically unfit.

This is no moral reflection, only diagnostic of fundamental realities.

Note that any appeal to Darwinism or post‑Darwinism as a basis for ethical schemes, or explanations of ethology and its relevance to humanity, should be extremely cautious. Very few fields are more widely and deeply misunderstood, both by its detractors and enthusiasts. Most of the controversialists couldn’t even coherently distinguish between stochastic, heuristic, and teleological selection, let alone their respective significance.

To select anything but our available preferences, according to our values, teleology, and capacity, would be irrational. That sounds ever so freely democratic of course but it leaves an albatross hanging around one’s neck, an albatross called responsibility: choose wisely and act wisely, or blame none but yourself when you suffer!

Ethics in its prescription of conduct, is essentially a branch of decision theory.

It could be argued that when you define a code of conduct that combines values, logic, and responsibility, what you get looks remarkably like a code of ethics.

That however, is an inclusive definition, not exclusive; ethics covers wider fields of decision and values than one might at first expect. Here I deal mainly with two fields, neither of them comprehensively.

Both must be accommodated comprehensively in contemplating the future of humanity, all the way from Homo ephemerens now, to Homo futurens millennia down the line.

Let us first discuss values in general.

 

 

Values

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows
precisely what is right and what is wrong.
All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of
 men who have doubted the current moral values, 
not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.
H. L. Mencken

 

Like many of the concepts of ethics, the idea of values sounds simple, but going into detail reveals complications. The Wikipedia article on Values offers a useful introduction. In this essay I deal mainly with these aspects:

·       what sorts of things values might be,

·       the roles of values, now and in future, and

·       what happens when values clash.

We usually think of values in terms of what we want to have or wish will happen. So far so good, but first, suppose you had to write a program that would avoid certain results up to a certain point, and beyond that point, favour those outcomes that you had been avoiding so far. Also, suppose you wrote to favour one of those outputs if some things happened, but to change the choice if other things happened.

One way to do that sort of thing would be to store a number suitably in computer memory, and change that number as required. You could add to the number every time some particular thing happened, and subtract from it every time something different happened. The way you programmed it could differ according to the appropriate behaviour; for example, you could have positive or negative feedback of increasing or decreasing rates, or no feedback at all.

Call that number the value.

Then each time the program had to make a choice, it could calculate a pseudo‑random number, and compare the result to the stored value number. If the random number is smaller than the stored value, then the program chooses one action, otherwise the other action.

A computer that acted according to such a value calculator would in many respects behave very like a human, or a rat, or an octopus. But is it the same as the way we living things calculate our values in an FTE?

We do not usually think in such simplistic terms, but they are not as easily denied as you might expect. We do in fact tend to have certain states in our brains that make us prefer say, one food to another. I love good chocolate, but if I stuff myself even with very good chocolate, then for some time afterwards, I can hardly look at another chocolate without a shudder. Certain chemicals in me have changed, and when my brain checks on them, they affect my choices, even if they do so too late.

You might protest that that is not at all the same as making an ethical choice, and I partly agree — but it would take special pleading to establish the difference.

Now, as values, functional, irrational, or parasitic, are fundamental to ethics, let us consider some aspects and contexts.

 

 

Inherent Values, Adaptations to Communal Scale and History

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.
If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs,
we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power. .
P.J. O’Rourke

 

Discussions of “values”, implicitly usually “human values”, commonly take almost mystical assumptions as to their nature. People speak of “natural” law and morals, not to mention divine law, all of which turn out to be remarkably whimsical and illogical for the products of natural or divine genius. Otherwise, where the orientation of the views is ethological, Darwinian evolution rears its ugly head, demanding sense and logic, as well as equitability and effectiveness.

Ethological studies make it clear that, religion, politics, and assorted fads and dogmata aside, large ranges of human values derive in various forms from evolutionary sources. There is room for voluminous and passionate debate about the details, but the principle remains that there are several inherited modes of emotion and thought that deeply affect our values, our politics, our legal, social, familial, and intimate relationships. Whole categories of our salesmanship, religions and fiction reflect our inherited values, and offer targets for opportunists who wish to steer, parasitise, or dominate our social structures and behaviour. Details aside, they have played important parts in our roles in our history and prehistory, from at least as early as our first Villager cultures.

This essay does not concern the fine details, which are a whole field of study in themselves, though an insightful and entertaining place to start could be to read Konrad Lorenz’s book “On_Aggression”. More recent introductory material could include E.O.Wilson’s Sociobiology, and recent editions of Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene.

There are plenty where those came from, but the relevance to us here, all the infighting to the contrary, is the unanimous view that certain aspects of human behaviour are genetically based, instinctive, if you like, even if they are not genetically determined in detail, like the stereotyped behaviour of small-brained creatures such as spiders.

Furthermore, inherited behaviour patterns, much like inherited physical attributes, are subject to evolutionary modification by natural selection as their circumstances change. The patterns manifest themselves as emotional reactions to their environments, and those largely amount to values.

Such congenital ethical values, as we use the term here, are not absolute, but vary with the social structure. Values that suit the isolated family do not suit the village, in which everyone knows everyone. And values that suit the village do not suit the town, in which no one knows more than say, half the town, and town values might not suit national values, in which hardly anyone even knows all the communities in the nation. 

Now, also like inherited physical attributes, inherited emotional values vary considerably, both under congenital and educational influences, and the effects on the individual and the populations range from vital to tragically pathological. Selection pressures change the fitness of various values according to changing circumstances, and most subtly, though perhaps most insidiously, according to population size and duration and the complexity and tradition of history.

Superficially, the Village and Family values would seem to have vanished, mutated into more sophisticated laws and mores of the city and nation, but the origins leave their mark, and it shows in the ways that laws and customs and education fail to move with the times and to adapt to shed the abuses of the opportunists adapted to exploit the vulnerable.

Once again I direct your attention to Immortal imperatives, in which I point out the need for humanity to adapt to indefinite longevity and educability. It then would be a matter of common sense to relegate the isms and acies, the slogans and catchwords, to the dustbins of political parties, and mob pressures.

Why do such things actually matter?

Because it is for practical purposes impossible for a social system to survive indefinitely if the underlying principles are unsound. I discuss those details in the section on Social Contracts and Strategies, together with the stability of social strategies (SSS).

 

 

Values in Social, Interpersonal Relationships

The way to eliminate the harm caused by stereotypes is to teach our children to recognize false
stereotypes, to be empathetic, and to be skeptical. We need to promote these critical-thinking
skills in addition to instilling the best values we know. Skepticism, the heart of the scientific
method, is the only way we know how to ferret out fact from fiction.
 Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence 

 

A more difficult question is how much it matters whether values may be mechanical, or whether they have to do with warm human emotions, however passionate. Suppose you programmed your computer to do nothing but display an appreciative, complimentary message every time you pressed a button labelled praise, and to display a repentant message every time you pressed a button labelled punish. You could have nice messages as often as you liked, but to the computer the labels on the buttons would not matter at all, because they would reflect no meaning apart from the ways the electrons flowed when certain circuits were closed, and nothing in the program specs even needs to correlate the labels on the buttons with the messages, or anything meaningful.

In contrast suppose your significant other reacted favourably to praise for a while, but then refused to forgive you after you had cheated and gone after some other partner, or your partner had courted someone else after promising to be true to you, or had turned nasty after missing a meal? That certainly reflects emotions, but how is it in any apparent way different from the program’s reactions to the buttons? Is there more to be said for an invisible gland or neural circuit in the brain, than for an invisible counter or circuit in a computer?

Do not labour over that challenge; it is just an illustration. The point is to show how value judgements could work differently in different systems, yielding similar behaviour from wildly different agents. If we compared modern AI machines with humans in how they react to given values, we might not be able to tell them apart, but the human values would have internal subjective effects, emotional, pain, pleasure, and possibly moral, connections, while the machines certainly would not, except in the sense that electronic switches encoding those numerical values had been formally set.

We could say that the processes in the machines are abstractions of human social values and their effects. After another few centuries we might know how to build genuinely subjective emotions into machines, though for purposes not clear to me yet.

Would that matter? To whom? How? What would all that mean? Why is it at all possible to model emotional effects in a machine in which every action and reaction can be shown to be purely mechanical?

How is the apparent effect in a machine, different from that in a human or animal in which every mental or emotional process can be affected by action of particular nervous tissue or chemical states in an organism?

What I posed there is neither a rhetorical question, nor a logical quibble or trap.

The social parasites that I mentioned, the flatterers, the flag-wavers, the bullies, and the rest, have led us down the ages, with minor tweaks to their various sales pitches. Snake‑oil salesmanship and political self-aggrandisement have hardly changed since the days of Plato’s philosopher‑kings. They had no need to change their pitches; the praise and punish buttons, and the desperate human wishful belief in whatever forms of snake‑oil undertake to promise what they want most, have been bred into our DNA. They are the residue of the survival strategy of our family and villager membership: “Believe, and remember what your elders tell you, until you are an elder yourself; thereafter punish any youngster who contradicts you”.

Anyone who disbelieves this need only study the history and current status of the marketing of religious relics and quack measures like homeopathy and Reiki among an indefinite series of the type. The harder the evidence making nonsense of either, the more desperately they cling to what their modern surrogate “Village Elders” tell them.

Rejection of such snake‑oil emphatically is not a reductionistic fallacy: it neither reduces anything, nor rejects findings of evidence‑based medicine. Nor does the hypothesis of the reality of the CES reduce anything, and its experience is empirical. I experience my CES myself (take my word for that!) and I experience its variation under the influence of pharmaceuticals, violence, disease and so on.  To claim that my experience of my own CES is imaginary is self-refuting illogic; if I have no CES to imagine my CES with, what is experiencing the imagination?

My CES seems to me to be emergent from my brain and its workings, but I have hardly any useful deductions to base on that idea. Good luck to anyone who can take that speculation any further.

Be all that as it may, who has ever demonstrated the nature of the abstracted CES in human mental processes? In physics we might be unable to bootstrap our understanding of the likes of entropy, mass, energy, force, electromagnetism, and acceleration except in terms of each other, but we have pretty good plesiomorphic handles on their relationships and “realities”.

We have not however, come within sight of identifying self-sufficient absolute fundamentals of physical reality and existence. Just think: less than two centuries ago, we thought that elements... err atoms... nuclei... err... hadrons and leptons... were basic, but we have been able to do a lot of valuable work in determining and predicting their behaviours and interrelationships at deeper levels than we had originally imagined. We have not yet managed anything like that with our CES, even though we have been able to achieve interference with its nature and effects by brain mutilation, behaviour, and pharmaceuticals though with nothing as predictable and meaningful as say, QM in everyday physics.

Some prominent minds have speculated on direct connections between CES and QM, but, beyond hand waving, nothing either formal or material has yet emerged. Such speculation has nothing to do with quackery, but opportunists already have been invoking the idea in support of their attacks on DNA-based loyalties to vestigial traditions.

There still is no clearly causal functional connection between CES, emotions, physical mechanisms, and value judgements; in fact in their confidently phlogistian ignorance, some schools of psychology with pretensions to authority, try to deny even the juvenile social mechanics of the playground, and thereby forbid half the innate tools of the CES as no-noes. In particular they anathemise anything unpleasantly adversarial, authoritative, competitive or constraining in education. Unfortunately, even tragically, such minds fail to recognise the implicit nature of fundamental education as two-fold: not just permissive, but constraint; not just self-indulgent, but self-protective; not just acquisitive, but cooperative and supportive.  An education that stops short at the level of the playground, and fails to provide the tools to deal with the world beyond, is more like betrayal than education. We are still in an educational stone age, with far to go before we face the future.

As a culture, we need more than the traditions of Homo ephemerens if we are to accommodate to the dimensions of time and space of Homo pertransiens at least. We must adjust our views and values to different orders of magnitude, and different perspectives, if we are to adapt our ethical principles to interstellar distances, to communication latencies of Ts or even Ps,

But the basic principles of the future composition of social skills, commitments, and values, are at the handwaving stage. Until we make progress towards an algebra of the CES, let alone an algebra of physics, we must be extremely cautious of assertions and denials in those fields, or any related fields, such as ethics. Until we master such matters in terms of predictive and rational cogency, we are groping.

Now, consider some more familiar conflicts of interest, however informal.

Suppose you are desperate to get onto a flight or a voyage, and so is someone else, and there is only one ticket left; that is a conflict of interest of a familiar type. Would one of you two competitors for the last ticket be satisfied if told that the other had been ahead in line? Or had booked by email the day before? Or would you try to force your way ahead with the venerable likes of “Do you know who I am?”

And whether your bluff or bullying did work or not, how satisfied would the rival be?

And why not satisfied? Largely because our value judgements include equitable treatment as part of our benefit as a member of the community. We value the principle of equitability so highly that many people, if not entitled to the ticket, would yield without protest rather than make a fuss, but would fight stubbornly to keep their own ticket when anyone tried to take it. We probably would demand the treatment that our status as a member of the community entitles us to.

On the other hand, if we are feeling generous and the other person spins a convincing story of hardship, we might consider it a worthwhile deed of charity to yield our right, instead of demanding the support that we are entitled to from the authorities that are empowered to enforce it. It might be altruistic of us to yield, but we might more highly value passing through in an altruistic society, than getting a seat on the flight.

Whose penalty for yielding a right, such as a paid-up, booked ticket, would be greater, would not always be clear; suppose there would be an equally good flight in another ks or so. That might be trivial in your scheme of things, or it might not at all be trivial if it means your missing a critical connection. But suppose your life expectancy, instead of perhaps three Gs, might be ten or a hundred, or even a Ts or Ps; would those ten or twenty minutes affect your life any the more or less?

The choice still would be a quantitative comparison of values, but the possible values might not be measurable only in seconds — time is one dimension in such an equation, but when the time involved is enormous, and memories are indefinite, the considerations may change. If one player is likely to remember a favour or an injury for Ts or Ps in an intelligent population, then it is sensible to make a habit of cultivating considerate manners and patently trustworthy, even generous, business practices and social behaviour.

Without having to mention such items explicitly, significant players with long lives and long memories would expect people they deal with, to remember a slight, a favour, or an injury, and to pass on the reputation. Whether sincerely or not, only a fool would waste public goodwill on trivialities, when a reputation for courtesy and generosity could be expected to outlast periods in which cities or nations might rise and fall.

At the same time, a sensible citizen would avoid getting a name for being a dupe, especially in an intelligent population.

Other forms of holding or yielding rights might be played off against future rewards or penalties, or for the privilege of favouring someone you respect, or to ensure that a precious animal or relic is protected, or that your country or company wins an advantage in another country.

Trying to fit such challenges into any choice of action, whether material or emotional, always reduces to decision theory. No matter how you might wish to avoid unsentimentally mechanical profit‑and‑loss decisions in an ethical context, the end decision is always quantitative in some sense or dimension.

Consider the man who cut off his own arm so that he could escape when he had caught it in a cleft in a rock, I am not sure that I would have had the grit to do that myself, but for a man with such logic and courage, it was a clear choice. When faced with a conflict of interests: “your arm or your life?”, he had had made a rational choice according to rational values. He unquestionably valued his arm greatly, and his instinctive distaste for pain was his evolutionary adaptation to ensure unwillingness to damage his arm,  but the value that he put onto his life was greater: a quantitative comparison.

Analogously, consider stories of a dying soldier in his desperate thirst, realising that he could not survive, passing on the last of his water to a wounded enemy who might survive, instead of sharing it. Values are not necessarily easy to categorise, and it can make a difference whether the valuation concerns a short period, or in indefinite future or past..

If at some time in the future, humanity in our species, Homo ephemerens, survives long enough and improves far enough to attain the role of Homo futurens, and to share life with intelligently engineered animals, and with genuinely, but artificially, intelligent machines that that have CES, and would be willing to share life with us, and possibly with intelligent aliens as well, then what would our attitude be?

Within not many centuries we certainly should be able to breed and engineer companion animals as intelligent as humans are today, and occupying similarly functional roles in society. A few centuries beyond that, and we could literally create totally new organisms, possibly each with its own form of CES. I would say that our responsibilities towards such animals and creations should be every bit as cogent as our responsibilities to humans; arguably more cogent, because we are less responsible for the existence of our fellow humans than for our creations; if we create sorrow and pain, we must face the implications, just as we could celebrate the joy of anything else we create.

Suppose we created living organisms that lusted to be miners under conditions impossible to humans, but that enabled those biological miners to work themselves to death willingly and profitably for their owners. How ethical would that action of creation be? Suppose that we then experienced remorse, and told our creations to relax and stop ruining their health in the mines, then whom would we be doing any favours? They would want to mine irrespective of whether it ruined their health or benefited your pocket. To gratify your conscience would not suit them at all, much as you might not gratify someone whom you rescue from the risk of cancer, by depriving him of tobacco.

Decisions such as in the notorious trolley problem do not escape the quantitative aspect either: you are confronted with the situation in which you have a trolley rolling downhill with no choice but to choose which of two trajectories it will follow. The current trajectory will cause it to kill several people on the track, but you just have time to switch it onto a track on which it will kill just one person.

No matter how you decide, it still is a choice of one being better or worse than the alternative. Some people try to escape the horns of that dilemma by refusing to choose at all, but that refusal too, is a choice, and a particularly contemptible choice: it falls foul of the widely disparaged vices of cowardice and irresponsibility, and leaves you with the blame for the consequences.

That entire field is a moral quagmire; all sorts of implications are unclear. Would it be ethical to create intelligent creatures with a positive desire for slavery? Having created them, who are we to refuse their desire? Or to criticise their personal values? Would we refuse to gratify ordinary Homo ephemerens with similar desires or fetishes? Could we morally dare to try to “cure” them of their arguably “pathological” preferences? If they are happy in say, their slavery, then was it wrong of us to create them in the first place?

And if we created biological organisms of great beauty, but without any CES, would we morally dare to abuse them, or, for that matter, to abuse artificial devices with no CES, but with behaviour patterns suggesting a CES? As a matter of personal emotional hygiene, I would refuse to do anything of the kind, and I would recommend that anyone who would see fit to indulge in such abuse to undergo serious self-examination, but could I rationally criticise such a person’s ethics? I think so — I similarly would criticise someone who bought a valuable car, or a precious work of art, and drove it out into wasteland, and set it on fire.

It may have been his legal right in some countries, but there is an element of vandalism that offends my sense of values on the grounds of reduction of human resources.

I am reminded of a certain British adventurer who bought himself an old battered car and set off on a Britain‑to‑Cape Town trip down Africa. About halfway down Africa the car really failed, and he in his sentimental affection for his faithful vehicle, intended to burn it on its own funeral pyre. The local authorities intervened, and he had to abandon the car to the tender mercies of the waiting peasantry. He made it clear in his reminiscences, that he was deeply embittered at the frustration of his sentimental scheme, but though I have some sympathy for the violation of his sense of possession, I approve the outcome; the limits and significance of possession, I discuss in a later section, but there is more to it than that; for him to pollute the foreign soil and air, possibly causing a veld fire into the bargain, and destroying valuable components that the local, badly impoverished, residents would value instead of destroying them, strikes me as an obscene net reduction of human resources.

It is not for us to condemn his resentment without qualification; suppose that any of us were travelling similarly, but with a live companion dear to us, whether human or animal, say a dog, a spouse, a friend, a parent or a child, that died en route; and suppose we had a portrait or a sculpture of the deceased. We then learn that we are not allowed to take the memento with us, and that we were not permitted to bury or burn the remains, which the local population insisted on eating, or otherwise putting to use for the benefit of the community; they insist on retaining the remnants and residues for their consumption. They are not necessarily malicious, and even offer us a plate-full if we wish to remain for the feast.

One might argue that there is a difference between abandoning a corpse for consumption, and a vehicle for scrapping, and yet neither of them retains any objection to being consumed in such a manner; the difference is strictly arbitrary;  in each case the upshot is purely a question of a sacrifice of resources, commonly in a community of want and suffering.

And racism: I would like to see racism vanish, but I am not betting on that happening soon, given what I see around me lately. But let us not despair: some people already are decrying speciesism on the principle that sauce for the Goose is sauce for the Gambian.

Abstractly and logically, values are ultimately arbitrary; in significance and sense, they are limited only by their context and capacity. Nothing about the concept of values demands that they should be beneficial in terms of health or reproduction, or even personal logic or survival, or the survival of one’s class or species.

Consider Umberto Eco’s fantasy novel Baudolino: the Cynocephalids are one of his imaginary races; they are warriors who believe that only by being killed in battle will they achieve eternal bliss; unlike the ideal Spartans however, they do not care to kill as many of the enemy as possible before they die, but beg the enemy to kill them first. There are several ways of looking at this, which is hardly a parody of sects based on religious dogma — no worse than say, the genuine history of the Peoples Temple in Guyana, the Heaven’s Gate debacle, the myriad so-called evangelists that parasitise public media ranging from regional radio stations, through TV, or celebrity worship in politics or in public media.

The thing is that values are fundamentally arbitrary. Nothing in the concept defines a value as good, bad, or indifferent for the individual, or for the offspring, or for the community or the species or for the species, the nation, the party or the religion or simple common sense or any taste in cooking or art or ideals.

And yet, innate patterns of behaviour in living organisms display some very strong tendencies that occur in recognisable form at all sorts of levels. We can generally attribute their ubiquity to the principles of adaptation by processes of natural selection. Such patterns are the basis for the observation that I emphasised above, namely that systems that implicitly oppose their own success generally are functionally bankrupt, and cannot rationally be supported. Eco’s Cynocephalids. If they ever had had material existence, would not have lasted long — and good riddance in my opinion. I could wish nothing better for the more pernicious forms of appeal to superstition in general in real life.

Conversely, though by the very nature of things there are more ways for things to go wrong than right, we find that behavioural systems that occur in nature tend to favour their own success in the long term in their favoured habitat, even when they do not always favour each individual that might be required to function as a resource instead of as a reproductive unit.

Certainly natural selection, and not only Darwinian natural selection, tends to wipe out entities smartly, when their behaviour according to their values is counter to natural realities, but there are indefinitely complex ranges of elaborations and complications, so much so, that there are wide ranges of difficulty in rationalising apparent exceptions: we find ourselves applying terms such as altruism and teleology.

The reason that large ranges of value types persist when there is no obviously extant function for them, is that they have been inherited from ancestors who did survive to pass on genes that favoured such values. Why should things not die or die out, if they disfavour their own survival or success, such as in addictive behaviour? There also is the question of whether every agent’s values are the same; they need not be the same at all: thoughtful readers of the New Testament might reflect on the resentment of the fatted calf when the Prodigal returned.

It certainly does not follow that because a particular behaviour pattern was of survival value in the past, that it must be of value now; whether currently pernicious behaviour was harmless Ts ago, or about 30 Ts ago, or even one generation ago, does not guarantee that it remains so, and humanity will need to use teleological strategies instead of relying on our modern environment to favour our hunter-gatherer or small-villager urges.

Consider our urges to mate and procreate to a maximum; we are long overdue for reproductive rationality and relegation of sex purely to its function of entertainment and companionship. Our dietary excesses reflect our ancestors’ constraints of desirable foods and scarcities, and the effects are caries, obesity, cancer, and cardiovascular ill health. Our habits that militate against lifelong learning and effort and thereby against longevity and long-term productivity, reflect the need to avoid dangerous or over-demanding activity even just a few centuries ago.

And suppose we decided to breed organisms, with or without a CES, whose one ambition were to be to be happily sacrificed once they were ready and the community desired it. Would that be ethical?

It feels like a bad idea at first sight, but it is not easy to fault it. The reason it seems bad is that compassionate humans would be well‑disposed to such creatures, and, as evidenced by our feelings to our pets and livestock, we prefer to pamper and comfort creatures that we like, probably cute creatures at that, rather than slaughter them. It accordingly goes against the grain to contemplate the Shmoo of Al Capp as dying happily to gratify humanity.

All the same, stop and think how we callously sacrifice plant crops. We have no way of knowing whether, or in what ways plants suffer our attentions. Fruit trees might not mind, but what about their nuts? What about onions that tearfully die seedless for our soups and salads? Or linen stems harvested for our fibres? Possibly they do not mind, though such evidence as we have, suggests that they mind as greatly as they are equipped to mind. Shmoos, and any organisms bred to revel in self-sacrifice to humans who breed them to propagate further happy and profitable generations, should be a lot happier than any cabbage that gets eaten before it has an opportunity to seed.

 

But it goes further: if you have read Immortal imperatives as I have recommended, and looked beyond our small-village perspective, and beyond our human genome, you will see options for coexistence between both distantly separated humans, the long‑lived Homo futurens anyway, and between their interstellar colonies; they equally well could coexist happily and profitably with engineered organisms of character and intelligence and goodwill, and with aliens hundreds of light years and Ts or Ps distant. I cannot think offhand of realistic conflicts of interest over such distances in time and space, but if our future community is to flourish in well‑earned mutual respect and integrity, even in love, then we should be able to resolve any such notional conflicts as sincerely and fairly as local conflicts, and a good deal more easily.

This goes further than personal values of suffering and pleasure, personal survival and concern for the group and hatred or rivalry for other groups. We have seen examples of values of negative benefit: harmful values, addictions, selfishness, cruelty. Such ranges are so wide and deep that I shall not pursue the topic; I simply urge that we should cultivate the values and the people that favour mutual benefit, both of individuals and populations, both material and emotional.

Virtues are largely associated with values, and both are context sensitive. Consider as virtues: snobbery, sloth, hubris, hypocrisy. If snobbery is the desire to associate with people one respects and wishes to live up to, that is at least harmless, and potentially a virtue. If sloth manifest itself as the avoidance of expenditure of effort, such as elaborate effort to dress or polish when one could other wise be sleeping or caring for some kindness or other, that is a virtue in my estimation. When hypocrisy is aimed at kindly avoiding offense, that seems good to me.

As for hubris, if it is reasonably intelligent, it is the basis of practically all dramatic advances in human history.

Conversely, think of love, loyalty, diligence, and humility; every one of them in the wrong context and the wrong degree is harmful, gratification to the parasite and the despot, and probably smug into the bargain.

Patriotism is a class of value, and, like any value that demands commitment to ideals, is a particularly treacherous class. As Bierce put it: “Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, as pitiless as the grave, and blind as a stone.”

Any values that are based on passionate loyalty are hazardous, because they tempt power seekers to attract support by threat or fraud.

Cheap ethics will always be hazardous, and in my estimation, unethical; one needs good guidance, good courage, and good sense.

In some of his stories, Isaac Asimov postulated cultures in which the very concept of “alien” ethically implied: “evil and despicable and to be destroyed unconditionally”, but here is where Darwinistic principles, and even post-Darwinistic teleological principles become relevant, whether the actuating values are conscious or not. Such an attitude creates a version of the prisoner’s dilemma, in which the collectively optimal strategy, (“strategy” in this sense amounts to a pattern of behaviour in dealing with certain classes of situation) would be cooperation, even if the superficial temptation is towards conflict or treachery.

The concept of that kind of strategy, I discuss in more detail in a later section, but the immediate question here is why we should want to fight peoples whose very nations might no longer even be remembered by the time we receive their signals, and would not receive our replies while both parties still survived or retained the opinions and emotions that they had cherished at the times at which they were expressed?

The concept of Berserkers, as imagined in SF novels in which certain agents are obsessed with the arbitrary desire to wipe out all forms of life everywhere cannot logically be ruled out, but it is hard to imagine the justification, let alone the infrastructure to support it. Even if any pathology of the kind were to arise, the news could spread at light speeds throughout occupied space, and suitable countermeasures could be prepared to hunt the agents down.

It is difficult too, to imagine the nature of commerce and husbandry in a community of indefinitely extended life-expectancies.

 

 

Material and abstract values

Du grosses Gestirn! Was wäre dein Glück,
wenn du nicht Die hättest, welchen du leuchtest!

You great star , what would your happiness amount to
had you not those for whom you shine?
Friedrich Nietzsche

 

In discussion of values so far, I have concentrated on emotional values and values of compassion in particular — in which the concept of ethical behaviour towards anything without a CES and without any sense of pain or grief could hardly make sense. If it comes to that, even the idea of compassion to anyone but oneself is not easy to justify in logical terms; for example, there have been long, and often passionate, debates about the logical semantics of terms such as altruism.

This essay is not intended to resolve those debates; they are not only counter-survival but boring, and I doubt that the disputants would be interested anyway.

Still, there are values that extend beyond the CES; Nietzsche was no favourite of mine, but he had a nice line in penetrating questions, even if his answers often went off the rails. Probably his prologue to “Also sprach Zarathustra” is his best‑known.

For us here, his most relevant question amounts to: “what does it even mean for something to have values if it has no CES?”

But his imagination baulked far short of contemplation of the future of humankind in the universe, or of humanity, in the community of Homo futurens, outshining his great star.

Even more to the point, what could values mean in terms of anything but the emotions of a CES?

Consider a few hypothetical examples in terms analogous to the sound of Berkeley’s tree falling in the forest. What could values, transcendent values, mean to the uncomprehending population that represents so large a proportion of Homo ephemerens?

Imagine a rubble pile several metres high, on waste ground. Some children get to playing on the pile, and tear down some of the blocks. Is that a loss to anyone? Does anyone care, as long as no child smashes his fingers?

Suppose instead that the children are playing on a mountainside, common ground that no one lays claim to; rolling rocks down, damaging wildlife. Does anyone care? Probably not much, even though there is some ecological damage, and the forces that had created the mountainside had taken ten Ps and the mountain had stood for several Ps thereafter. Is there nothing obscene about the fact that the children’s destructive efforts were faster than all the natural erosion combined?

Even so, no one would bother much about that either until someone or some property got seriously harmed.

But suppose that the children pushed a precious rocking stone of about 100 tonnes, till it tumbled down after Ps. Suppose there was someone hurt, and some property damage? Would no one consider the deed obscene, and the loss of the stone a source of grief? Would no one resent the loss of a tourist attraction?

By the time the vandalism had got serious enough, practically everyone would regard the deed as ethically unacceptable; even the children might agree in later life, when contemplating their own past.

Take the principle further: consider the loss of a great statue or building, with no one injured, and each of the events could in principle have occurred spontaneously; so how was there an ethical violation? If we felled the Eiffel tower, would such a tolerant attitude sit comfortably with the French?

The essence of that offence would lie in the fact of conscious choice and intention, not to mention conflicting values.

Why limit the concept to anything so large? What about say, smashing or burning a major work of art or architecture? Remaining in France, how about destroying Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace? Or in general, how about burning a great book of information or literature? Or the last photographs of someone’s beloved?

On a large scale, what about destroying an entire uninhabited planet, or stripping it of sea and atmosphere, to prevent its being colonised? Or just wiping out a particularly beautiful continent, on which a particularly fine civilisation was planned to arise?

Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s story “The Star” in which an entire populated planet was destroyed, including a great civilisation. The same explosion might have destroyed other planets, unoccupied, or without intelligent life, but ineffably beautiful.

In all those examples the loss or harm took the effect of destruction of something that some people might care about, or that was not really replaceable, or costly to replace.

In every major destruction there would have been losses to the unverse, triumphs of entropy.

It is entirely reasonable for one’s values to react very negatively to any such vandalism, irrespective of any pain or death. Any pointless increase of entropy could be against widely held common values; values that are consistent with progressive Darwinistic principles.

Entropy and information are confusing concepts at best. If you like you may read about some of its aspects at the related No Point essay, or google entropy and information. To get some idea of what functional information has to do with ethics, imagine a sugar cube, on which a genius has writes a message in food colouring for lack of handy paper. You don’t yet know what the message is, but you know it is very important, or perhaps at least very beautiful. Then he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack. You drop the cube to call emergency services — too late of course, but one must: . .

When you return, you discover that a scoundrel or a fool had dropped the cube into the hot water that you had intended for your tea, and as sugar does in hot water, it had dissolved. It is possible in principle to recover the sugar, and even the food colouring, but the message?

Now, in terms of physics, thermodynamics, the sugar solution, or the recovered food colouring plus sugar still contain the same amount of information, or even more, but you never will recover the message, and even if by magic you did find the colouring back on the cube, the chances that it would contain the same message, the same information, is effectively nil, and what is more, so are the chances of your guessing whether what you then saw was the original intended message. There is no simple way to calculate such a low probability, but it certainly would be physically immeasurable.

That act of destruction would be an example of vandalism, and if deliberate, would in principle be unethical. Such wanton destruction of the work of a dying genius would be a loss to humanity, not measurable in terms of sugar and ink; a horrifying loss, either intellectual or aesthetic, possibly both.

Now, imagine in similar terms the loss of a nation, or the whole species of humanity, preventing the emergence of Homo futurens, and according all the life and beauty on this planet. That could well count as being as great a loss of an ethical value as we could contemplate.

The very point of this discussion is to illustrate the consequences if we do not adequately prepare for the emergence of the best of our heritage. There is more to Homo sapiens than to a sugar cube. I discuss the concept in greater detail in  Immortal imperatives in the light of some of the ethical principles described in this essay.

Nihilists, certain classes of misanthropists and parlour moralists, disgusted by human waste, cruelty, and pollution of our planet, bewail our survival and say that the universe would be better without Humanity, but the view is partial and unsubstantiated.

I propose that the problem is not how to eliminate Humanity, but to offer Humanity scope to grow to capacity, and discuss how to grow that capacity.

A dunghill might stink and poison the soil beneath it, but that is no reason to eliminate dung, just to manage its cycling.

 

 

Parameters as Values

To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
Friedrich Nietzsche

 

As follows from previous points, we can see that events of any kind occur on a basis of the material nature and parameters of the universe, whether any CES is concerned or not.

We may not know what a CES is, but we can be confident that it is dependent on everyday matter and information: it can be snuffed out by killing the brain; it can be affected by assaulting the body; it can be anaesthetised or perverted by poisons or by hunger, vertigo, or physical influences in general.

Whatever the fundamental nature of the CES, its dependence at least upon information, if not its actual equivalence to information, is practically tautological: it is clear that different people’s CESs are different in many ways, and not merely different in their location in different coordinates, but also in differences of manifestation, of “personality” if you like. If the typical human brain, as seems likely, accommodates multiple CESs, then that too, would necessarily depend on the distinct existence of all those CESs, which apart from anything else rigidly implies information.

And values in minds are physical states, distinct from other states, whether as the parameters of states of components in a computer, or sensations of values in a brain with its associated hormones and activities.

Again, and equally significantly, the CES cannot pervert the laws of physics, nor parameters of information and thermodynamics. Wishful thinking to the contrary, reality rules, irrespective of spoon bending, mass suicides, and childish bouncing about on bums.

In our physical universe, if every planet with sentient populations, whether biological or technological, were sterilised, there would be hardly any visible effect on the course of events, any more than if all the naked flames on each planet were instantly extinguished. The same stars still would smoulder, shine, explode, or collapse; planets would rotate and revolve, without the slightest benefit or interest, according to the usual celestial mechanics, and combinatorial processes would emerge and proceed according to their internal states and parameters that would be as near to values as anything inanimate could get.

Accordingly, whichever ethical system one embraces, however nihilistic, cannot display any intrinsic virtue or interest in a universe empty of mind or values, and nothing superior to a mind‑populated universe. A mindless universe is necessarily in a null‑utility state, and will remain there until mind emerges, and lends it interest, value, parameters, or purpose.

Conversely we, humanity, by example and by introspection, can demonstrate the interest, purpose, and power of intelligence. To represent as imperfect and hence as dismissible, ethical systems that are based on intelligence and purpose, reduces to an absurdity, because that very rejection begins by rejecting its own basis of perfection or value.

And conversely, action in the light of intelligence and purpose, suffices as a basis for ranges of ethical systems and philosophies.

 

 

Calling Back the Anvil

Consequences are unpitying.
George Eliot

 

Actions are guided by choices between alternatives. The very nature of ethics in a situation in which there is no choice of action, is arguable at best. Imagine a conscious deliberate choice whether to drop a heavy anvil from a high building: that is a choice in ethics; but to stop the anvil by calling it back once you let it go, is ethically irrelevant. No choice of what to call, no matter how well-meant, will affect that anvil’s trajectory. On the other hand, while it still is falling, deciding whether to shout “Look out!” to warn anyone below, can be a decision in terms of ethics, whether ill‑intentioned or well‑intentioned.

Ethics, either your personal principles of what to do and what not to do, or the prevailing ethics as prescribed by local law, religion, or customs, cannot prescribe every decision in detail. Choosing to drop that particular anvil from that building, or not, was not the sort of thing to put into your little book of ethical decisions; an entry against harming valuable property could well belong there; so could risking people’s lives by wantonly dangerous behaviour. Reasonable intentions and expectations can guide actions, but cannot rationalise every possible conflict of values in advance. For instance, other things being equal, your ethics might oppose theft, but if you have no acceptable alternative, your ethics might prescribe theft rather than letting a child go hungry. One may be reduced to choosing the least unacceptable option. As for values themselves, I discuss them later in this text.

And ethical choice is not always a simple matter.

As a fictional, but poignant, example, a well-meaning character in a P.G.Wodehouse novel stole all of a friend’s money as a good deed: he bet it, along with all of his own money, on a horse in a race for which he had a hot tip; he wanted the winnings for the friend, who, foolishly in the opinion of the well‑meaning thief, had refused to bet. The horse came last of course, but the point is the difficulty of determining how far the behaviour had been unethical, whether sensible or not.

As a counter‑question: given that he was so sure, and valued his friend’s well-being so highly, would it not have been unethical to have neglected to steal the money for the friend’s benefit?

 

 

Entities, agents, and the CES of the team

i suppose the human race
is doing the best it can
but hell’s bells that’s only an explanation
it’s not an excuse.
               Don Marquis

The concepts of distinct entities and agents: “things”, and “doers”, if you like, are fundamental to ethics; you might read about them at Wikipedia: intelligent agents, or Google: intelligent agent. In a universe without distinct entities and active agents, it is hard to imagine what one might call “ethics” at all.

There are many “ifs” and “buts” that raise questions in any applied philosophy; some are academically trivial but troublesome, some just troublesome. Without concepts of pain, loss, caring, anger, or violation of values, questions of ethics can hardly arise.

Here I introduce the term of convenience: “CES”; it is my own initialisation for “Cogito Ergo Sum”. I say more about that in AI and I; here I just mention that it refers to what we might call subjective consciousness, the “mind” if you like, of any sentient or sapient agent. I conjecture without proof, that at least animals with well-developed brains do have such a thing as a CES, that the functioning of those brains is necessary for a CES, and therefore that neither a single cell, nor an unstructured mass of cells, can have a CES. I also disbelieve that machines that we have as yet been able to design and manufacture have any CES, however well they can perform on a Turing test.

But whenever there is only one agent involved, concepts such as the CES can hardly matter in terms of ethics, given that ethics is inescapably concerned with choice, — and if there is no one to care what someone does, then what could any choice matter? On the other hand, as soon as, and for as long as, there are at least two agents involved, there is scope for ethical concerns. The concerns could arise either between similar agents, in cooperation or in competition, or they could arise between agents that might differ greatly, but in mutually complementary relationships, such as being necessary to each other’s health, happiness, function, and survival.

Examples could include various forms of mutualistic symbiosis. They occur in general biology, social relationships, and in economics. Other relations are variously skewed; for example, a relation between a human with a life expectancy of several decades and a beloved, loving dog with a longevity of probably less than two decades, cannot in all respects be the same as between two humans of the same longevity, and in a lifelong relationship. Nor, if the relationship between a human and a sheep or pig, is it independent of questions of wool, mutton or pork. We similarly have relationships between citizens with lifespans of several decades and nations that last for centuries. From time to time the citizens actually must be sacrificed at short intervals, such as in wars or major projects. Similar principles apply to worker castes of ants and skin cells of humans.

Entire ranges of such considerations raise ethical concerns about the evanescence of agents in which there is no ultimate conflict of interest, but rather relationships such as between team mates. For example, your heart, kidneys, and brain all must function for each of them to survive.

And for the team to survive — in this example: you.

And as the notional team leader, you are ethically responsible for decisions affecting your team members, including such transfers as kidney transplants. Deciding on your own heart donation is unusual, but it is conceivable if done suitably responsibly.

 

 

Sacrifice, Scaffolding and the Team

A society grows great when old men plant trees
whose shade they know they never shall sit in
Variously attributed.

 

The very natures of the relationships between cells or other components of bodies and populations, are fundamental to our existence as complex entities, but the greater the complexity of the body, or the community of agents, the more relationships other than mutual benefit emerge.

In essence, the very concept of complex structures entails the concept of component entities. The concept of component entities implies in turn the concept of possibly conflicting interests. For the sake of the interests of the complex structure, we need to deal with the logic of the teleology of the success of the structure.

A functional system may be atomic, meaning that it comprises no relevant component subsystems; a bacterium, a single cell, might be an example. Or it may be tomic, meaning that it does have component subsystems, such as a human, comprising many cells, or a mob, or a nation, comprising many humans.

In a viable tomic system, it is generally the case that such a system can exploit certain ecological niches more successfully in at least some respects, than atomic rivals can.

It need not follow that every component member of a tomic system has the same function and structure; for example, once mature, a human gut cell will differ drastically from a brain neuron, and a human goalkeeper in a football match could not generally swap positions with a striker.

It also does not follow that the component members individually occupy as favourable positions as each other: different castes in social insects have different life expectancies and different diets as well as different duties, and the same is true of human ranks and functions in human military formations, such as fighter aircraft pilots and mechanics.

In a tomic system, it commonly is not practical for component roles to swap in the interests of the components; this is where the teleology comes into the equations. In nature, distinct castes commonly include sexually reproductive roles; for a worker or soldier to stick to its assigned role is generally a better reproductive strategy in teleological terms, than trying to produce its own offspring. This means that cells do not always act in their own simplistic best interests.

Under particular circumstances, the implications for members of a tomic system, include concepts of sacrifice and of what I call scaffolding.

Examples of sacrifice might include soldiers who place themselves at risk in fighting for the community. Other types of agents amount, so to speak, to consumables: cells with necessarily temporary functions, such as those of epidermal keratinocytes and gut mucus cells, literally must be sacrificed to function, but that does not mean that their functions are trivial: when they fail, or the consumption of the agents fails, the effects can be painful, disfiguring, or deadly. Consider such examples as: vitiligo and pemphigus.

Scaffolding is what we see when some cells form a structure that is necessary, but a structure that must be removed when its function has been completed. One example is a placenta; it is unwanted after the birth is complete, and accordingly must be shed. Other examples are parts of an embryo that do not occur in the adult; they must be shed, reduced to vestigiality, or recycled on schedule after their function has been completed; if they fail, the effect can be wasteful, harmful, or deadly, and if they persist after their function has been accomplished, that may be no better.

In contrast to scaffolding, cells of some other bodily components ideally persist life‑long; some kinds of brain cells last all our lives. Compare the zygote that gave rise to the organism, with a living brain cell of the mature mammal. From the point of each cell in the body, it had survived an unbroken sequence of divisions all the way back to the first fission of the zygote, and had been more or less the same cell before and after, The only exception, arguably, would be gametes after each first meiotic division in the adult body, and synkaryon formation in some tissues. Each of every one of the millions of disposable gut cells we shed daily, could make the same claim until it gets digested.

We see similar abstract patterns throughout the multicellular differentiated forms of life, in which structures of cells perform different functions, some of which are in some sense sacrificial.

But not in every sense. And not even in every sense of “sacrificial”, which would suggest altruism. But there are several senses to the term “altruism”, not all of which of which suggest suffering for the sake of another. For one thing, in biology, suffering is irrelevant to a deed of altruism. Altruism intrinsically entails a penalty to the selective Darwinian fitness of the altruist. In those terms the sacrifice of the epidermal cell in favour of the parent cell that remains to produce yet another keratinocyte involves no suffering to the shed cell, because it is not equipped to suffer, and the only way it differs from the sibling cell, is its situation nearer the outside. If we had magically swapped them at the end of the cell division, it would have no difference because the two cells were no different. Each of them would have seen itself as the parent cell. The differences between the two cells only begin to appear during cell maturation.

Not only does the sacrificed cell not suffer any greater selective penalty than the surviving cell, but if both cells were to survive, both would suffer a reduction in selective fitness, because the sacrifice of the cell contributes to the selective Darwinian fitness of the reproductive organism. So we need not regard the sacrifice of the skin cell as altruistic.

The principle of self-sacrificing dedication of non-reproductive cells to scaffolding functions is universal among multicellular organisms with distinct organs. Not all our cells end up as reproductive cells because it pays to dedicate part of each generation, sooner or later to be discarded, to assist the others. The myriad ways in which they do so in nature are breathtaking.

Compare say, typical slime moulds with fruit trees; the first new generations of the mould cells hatch from their spores as separate amoeboid cells, and feed on bacteria and wastes till they can feed no more. Then they split and continue feeding and repeat the cycle till they run short of feed and detect that their pastures are overpopulated. After that the cloud of individual cells, that so far had behaved like any other population of anonymous microbial cells, begins to stop feeding and instead each one seeks the company of cells of its own type.

This continues till all the cells in the cloud scrum into a slug-like mass, each seeking to get to the top of the pile. Their competitive motion results in the slug moving across the surface until the top of the slug is clear of the rest. When that process has gone to its conclusion, the tip forms a mass of spores that remains till it dries out and the spores blow away to populate greener pastures.

The main mass of the slug’s discarded scaffolding cells dries out and remains behind for recycling; but those cells have no regrets. They never had had any CES to waste pity on.

Unlike any slime mould, a fruit tree never passes through any phase of a cloud of undifferentiated cells; it begins as a single zygote in a fertilised reproductive structure that grows into a recognisable fruit, a scaffolding structure that supports the dissemination function of the seed. A fruit such as an apricot has an elaborate life cycle, still without any CES as far as we know, and the tree does not get sacrificed in producing that seed. As the poet Ramanujan pointed out in a slightly different context: you sometimes can count every fruit on a tree but never all the trees in a single fruit. Each apricot fruit forms a seed and surrounds it with a hard shell that protects the seed.

But the protection is not the point of reproduction, it simply provides the next generation, the seed, with means of transport for dissemination.

For that purpose the hard shell of the unripe apricot is covered with a nasty, poisonous, indigestible green coat. This grows till the cells and the fruit are of the right size, and then the outer cells begin a process of senescence that will end in death, but first it breaks down the cells into non-toxic, digestible, fragrant, tasty, conspicuously coloured, pericarp; the part that typical frugivores seek out to eat, generally dispersing the seed in the progress. The very nature of processes of maturation of scaffolding cells, or of woody tissue or ripening edible fruit, or fragrant flowers, generally implies senescence and impending death in contribution to the life and function of the organism. Every cell in the plant started out with a full complement of the genome, but no cell in the pericarp of the apricot in any sense “minds” dying for the sake of the seed; an individual cell can hardly have anything like a CES, and none of its struggles to stay alive can be permitted to interfere with its scaffolding function.

 

 

Meta-teams

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools
and the beacons of wise men.
T.H.Huxley

 

Now, depending on point of view, every member of any population of Homo ephemerens, might be seen as an item of scaffolding, a cell of the population so to speak, or more precisely a meta‑cell, a cell of cells, serving in the population that is preparing the culture for the early emergence of Homo futurens.

Personally, in any role of scaffolding, or as an ancestor, or whatever I might be, I do in fact happen to have at least one CES, but at my current age I am running out of either innate or external resources for my own survival, so I might more cheerfully prepare for the future that I value. CES or no CES; I attach no value to my remains after the CES has left, so I hope Homo futurens some few millennia into the future, can make the most of my heritage.

This idea of being merely part of the ladder of creation, instead of its peak, seems to offend those people who labour under the delusion that each member of Homo ephemerens is the eternal crown of creation; in fact, many humans seem to regard their own body and mind as too sacred to attempt to improve.

I do not understand why it was necessary for me and mine to have CESs, or to suffer pain and other unhappinesses, but since I was not consulted on the matter, I must put up with it, and the rest of the universe will have to put up with me till my scaffolding and component members get recycled.

 

 

Hives of minds

“I don’t say thar’s no such thing as luck good and bad;
but it ain’t the explanation o’ success an’ failure not by a long way.
No, sirree, luck’s just the thing any man’d like ter believe
is the reason for his failure and another feller’s success.
But it ain’t so. When another man pulls off what you don’t,
the first thing you got ter believe is it’s your own fault;
and the last, it’s his luck.
And you jus’ got ter wade in an’ find out what you went wrong,
an’ put it right, ‘thout any excuses an’ explanations.” ”

But, Rocky, explanations aren’t always excuses,
and sometimes you really have to give them! “

”Sonny, you kin reckon it dead sure thar’s something wrong
‘bout a thing that don’t explain itself;
an’ one explanation’s as bad as two mistakes —
it don’t fool anybody worth speaking of, ‘cept yerself.
You find the remedy; you can leave other folks put up the excuses.”
Percy Fitzpatrick            Jock of the Bushveld

 

It seems almost incontrovertible that a healthy two-headed or conjoined twin has at least as many CESs as heads; but at the same time it is not clear how many CESs an “everyday” brain in a single skull would have, the distinct CESs working in parallel, and not constantly conscious of each other. It is altogether possible that proverbial “hearing voices” and “internal dialogue” experiences really represent functional activities of brains, activities that proceed more or less independently, but occasionally impinge on each other.

Here I refer not to schizophrenia‑related psychoses, but to healthy variations in ordinary mental processes. The activities may be functional as a factor in the brain’s capacity to multitask.

If so, such mental processes probably occur in some form in nearly every functional brain. It even is conceivable that some kinds of mental retardation are the effects of too few internal CESs in one brain.

Or a brain might have no CES at all: a sort of philosophical zombie; it might perhaps in some ways be sub-functional, if only we knew what the function of a CES might be. It need not follow that the presence of CESs in the brain is necessary for full function, though it might be for all I know, but conversely some cerebral dysfunction or insufficiency might prevent the emergence of a CES in a particular brain, and dysfunctional effects commonly do not occur in isolation.

One way or another, we might be able to diagnose many classes of dysfunction, but the absence of a CES is not clearly among those. What roles would loyalty, affection, trust, or enmity, play in ethical decisions, especially between CESs that are aware of each other? Some conjoined twins grow to hate each other.

There are serious problems, both practical and philosophical, to definition of the relationships between CESs, and their role in personal identity. It may seem fairly clear, as far as anything in that field is clear at all, but when there is an intimate relationship, either by communication or by physical attachment, it is not clear how many CESs are involved, either within, or between brains, or how.

It is quite conceivable that the human brain is just an example of a hive, a medium that supports a colony of CESs, and that our everyday perceived consciousness is no more than a question of which CES the Salience Network elects to expose to our primary conscious attention at a given time.  Craniopagus conjoined twins might present illustrative examples, especially if parts of their brains are shared, parts of the thalamus in particular. We do not even know whether the location of a CES might wander from one part of the brain to another, or whether CESs in a brain might split or fuse, like vortices in a turbulent fluid.

Or whether brains in communication could share any CESs.

Or whether we could managing consciousnesses shared between large numbers of people.

Information does funny things.

Such connection between CESs may be seen as more or less intimate: in principle, separate brains in separate bodies, that make identical connections, might be seen as parts of the same brain, but if we connect parts of the same physical brain by high‑speed artificial communication, those different parts might in principle behave like the partly separate brains of a craniopagus conjoined twin, complete with matching CESs, assuming that we may neglect the absence of hormonal communication. In a single brain an idea or a solution to a problem or an original line of thought, pops unbidden into the mind, possibly after hours or days. The effect may be excellent, or troublesome, even clinically problematic, but in this essay clinical states are not under consideration.

If remotely shared identity proves to be a genuinely CES-like constitution, then it raises several questions: if the latency of communication is less than say, one tenth of a second, and the neural bandwidth is great, and the length of the communication is small, one could hardly tell subjectively whether there is more than one CES involved at all. In fact, it might be possible to combine multiple agents into a shared CES. Variations on the theme have been hypothesised in F&SF, such as by Eric Frank Russell, and my own Millisecond soliloquies.

The concept of shared consciousness is challenging at best.

However, when such a connection involves slower links, difficulties arise. Two brains connected with a latency of a few seconds might do well in cooperating on an intellectual problem, either technical or aesthetic; it would be much like a telephone conversation, but such a team would be totally unable to control, say a vehicle that demands rapid reaction. Moderately delayed reaction is not necessarily a disadvantage in systems such as games of chess by exchange of postcards — in fact it might be a desired consequence of a limitation.

On the other hand, in a situation when parts of a CES, or CES‑like structure, are separated by minutes or hours, such as between planets, then certain types of communication involving coherent thought and coherent responsibility largely fail.

Of course similar things can happen in the one brain: humans often say things like: “I wish I had understood that three minutes (or Gs) ago”, and the reasons might be ethical or opportunistic, such as in staircase wit. Anyone living a problem‑solving life would have experienced such delayed “Ahah” moments, sometimes months after having almost forgotten the problem. But that is not the same as one’s usual interactive communication, and one cannot base transactional activity on it in the same way.

The very concept of control at long range or after long delay has been troublesome for millennia. A ruler who dispatched an army to fight in a distant country, simply had to do so on faith, and often disastrously. Long-range trade, rule, taxation, and similar exchanges, created concepts such as remote ambassadorial functions in diplomacy. The decay of the status of the ambassadorial function has largely resulted from improvements in communication facilities.

As remoteness of contacts between agents increases to hours within a solar system, or Gs between adjacent solar systems, or many Gs  or Ts between moderately separated solar systems, or Ps between more remote agents, the nature of contact, never mind the function of contact, would change. And the ethical and practical subtexts could change beyond recognition too, as discussed in Immortal imperatives.

 

 

Functional Teleological Ethics in Responsibility and Rights

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority:
still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
John Dalberg

 

Whatever decisions are based on personal value judgements, they might not be acceptable to the community. The function of any legal body in any community, typically is to establish, implement, and maintain, an ethical system, and as a rule, one that is widely acceptable to most people, on the basis of impartiality, compassion and equitability.

Commonly such a system should be formulated in documents such as constitutions, bills of rights, or religious prescriptions.

Ideally, in the context of this essay, such judgements should be equitable, meaningful, and constructive, but a crucially limiting principle of any viable structure is one that I already have mentioned, and still see as fundamental to our topic here: the Fundamental Teleological Ethical Assumption.

An ethical system that ensures its own demise cannot in the long term be better than a historical object of contempt. One cannot rationally support an agent that, in our terms is functionally bankrupt, one which is fundamentally non‑teleological, purposeless, and represents no concept of value, or is incompatible with our own ethical values.

For example, there are many diseases and their vectors that are deadly, disabling, and agonising, but objectively of great interest and intellectual beauty, and yet, in our common values, which we should be only too happy to wipe out.

FTE, Functional Teleological Ethics, is related to versions of Utilitarianism, Consequentialism, and similar branches of the philosophy of ethics, but their respective apologists differ so radically that I do not closely associate this version with any of them. This is not because of any personal taste for dispute, but because the context is material, namely: the future of our heritage, our species, and our future associates.

For details on such concepts, in case that context sounds too mystical, or too grandiloquent, I again refer readers to the essay on: Immortal imperatives.

When faced with choices, we act according to compulsion, exhortation, information, deception, or any values on which FTE might be based. There always is room for disagreement about choices, probabilities, and the desirability of respective outcomes, but such considerations are all we have to go on, whether in medical treatment, political leadership, industrial management, or enterprises in general.

In particular, in any clash of values, the function of whichever legal system or constitution might apply, is to resolve clashes and enforce reigning standards according to their resolution in the judgements of rival parties, or legal powers, or customs or prejudices of local society.

Responsibility is a concept that varies according to the relevant ethical or moral code. It varies according to various kinds of action or of one’s part in particular events or identification. It varies according to the transitivity of responsibility.

It is all one large subject, too large for this document, but one example might prove illustrative of one kind of dilemma: a certain Buddhist zoologist wanted the skeleton of a monkey, but his faith forbade him to take life. So he took the monkey to a friend who was of another persuasion and asked him to do the killing. The friend did, and the Buddhist went off happily.

This might satisfy some people, but there is room for at least a little cynicism. If the Buddhist had not asked his friend to inject the monkey, the monkey would have lived, unless the Buddhist had administered it. Since he had in fact performed the act of requesting the monkey’s death, by which act of legalistic quibble could he claim innocence of the death? Would his future reincarnations have been affected by his passing on the responsibility to what he regarded as in effect a heathen?

Just something to think about: . .

 

 

Rights, Responsibilities, Obligations, Law

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right;
the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms
to anyone who will take it of me.
T.H.Huxley

 

Concepts of rights and responsibilities in these terms are not primitives; they imply commitments and obligations of all functional parties to the community, whether members of authorities, or individuals in the community, or possibly conflicting components of the community (such as religions or legal authorities or functional agents).

Rights and responsibilities amount to commitments of the community to enforce classes of demands by members of the community, either on their own behalf or in support of entities unable to make their own demands; e.g. the community might be committed to protection of a child or animal, or an asset such as a community building, from disapproved acts.

The the roles of any parties in an FTE, need not necessarily include moral or emotional considerations; sometimes choices are enforced only by the nature of situations and prescribed categories of preventions and reactions. Such considerations would apply just as strongly in dealing with conscious, intelligent, educated, responsible agents, as in dealing with machines, minor children, inanimate objects, animals etc This implies that concepts of rights and obligations apply more generally than commonly is realised, in the prescriptions of ethical systems.

Practically any action with ethical relevance must affect multiple parties or entities within a community. From this it follows that it hardly ever is possible for any action to affect absolutely no‑one but the agent. That fact justifies commitment of the community to wide ranges of legal systems and imperatives, and in practice, there always will be scope for as yet unforeseen laws. Sooner or later the need for new laws will crop up, commonly in consequence of technological or industrial developments, and commonly the need is not recognised in advance. Then either new laws get drafted, that generally are ill-conceived because the nature of the need is at best partly misunderstood, or existing laws are rationalised to fit the new need.

Conversely, any community enactment that inequitably or trivially affects no one but the party targeted, cannot logically be regarded as ethical; it does nothing to benefit the community, and it is an imposition on the victim. A hypothetical legal system that forces someone to eat fish on fridays, given that eating fish revolts him, would be very hard to justify as being sufficiently important to the community to be worth enforcing. Conversely, enactments forcing standards of personal hygiene, safety, copyright, or health could well be justified in terms of the interests of the community, whether the perpetrator appreciates them or not.

Whether new or not, or applicable or not, or rational or not, unenforceable or pointless legal enactments, not only are drains on community resources and satisfaction, but also vitiate respect for, and obedience to, community authorities and mores. This amounts to betrayal of the community and its members; drafting of legal constraints is a more serious, and demanding matter than most people realise.

Law in this sense of this essay is essentially any non-trivial system of ethical imperatives, ideally a structure of FTE that has been explicitly stated, recorded, enacted, and enforced. The concept of “justice” is not essential to the concept of either law, ethics, morals, or sin, but can be defined independently into any system as required. Justice as such is not deeply considered in this document, except implicitly in terms of equitability. Law enforcement ideally is to ensure that actions against the powers that support the legal system, or against members of society that support the system, are made sufficiently counter to the values of members of society, that such actions are sufficiently rare to pose negligible threat to the comfort and well-being of the community.

The origin of laws is no discipline to dwell on here, but de facto laws may have emerged according to needs arising in natural populations. Study of group behaviour in intelligent animals presents suggestive examples.

 

 

Ethics, Aesthetics, Emotion and Motivation

Peripatus, though a lowly organised animal, and of remarkable sluggishness,
 with but slight development of the higher organs of sense,
with eyes the only function of which is to enable it to avoid the light —
though related to those animals most repulsive to the aesthetic sense of man,
animals which crawl upon their bellies and spit at, or poison, their prey —
is yet, strange to say, an animal of striking beauty.
The exquisite sensitiveness and constantly changing form of the antennae,
the well-rounded plump body, the eyes set like small diamonds on the side of the head,
the delicate feet, and, above all, the rich colouring and velvety texture of the skin,
all combine to give these animals an aspect of quite exceptional beauty

Adam Sedgwick

As I already have mentioned in a slightly different context, I also assume that without a CES, the idea of pain is meaningless and that accordingly, the concept of ethics in dealing with such a device is meaningless in terms of suffering or emotion. In dealing with responsible parties, such as owners or authorities in terms of values however, ethical concepts certainly do take on some meaning. The question of the subject’s sensitivity to physical suffering may fall away, but other negative values are possible, such as grief, loss, fatigue, and in general, any reduction of desired values.

What might they have to do with compassion?

Much the same depending on the involvement of the CES. Expose an AI device to any of them, and no matter how loudly it is programmed to lament or to rage, we have no basis for any assertion of any suffering that makes sense in human or animal or even botanical terms.

Of course, we have very little cogent basis for diagnosis of subjective suffering in living creatures either; denial of suffering in humans exposed to harm when under suitable pharmaceutical treatment, is hardly better than suggestive. But against that, we have reproducible evidence that functional humans not only behave similarly to physically abused animals, but assert subjective suffering as well.

That is not formally absolute proof, but it still is more persuasive than most denialists would volunteer to demonstrate their indifference to.

Consider the category of destruction of valuable things, of increased entropy, increased noise, without increased aesthetic or functional information. For example, the shattering of a gem or a sculpture or a living planet or a unique copy of a poem or theorem or a work of art or a fine piece of engineering all have negative values. They differ qualitatively, but all demand ethical rejection as far as may be.

Do not lose sight of the fact that ethics deals with all relationships, not just personal pain or binary conflict. There are such things as multi-party conflicts of interest. If for example I persuade the owner of a wooden carving that we should burn it, that might seem to be nearly neutral in ethical terms, but if the act would upset the artist or art lovers, it would be proper to include that consideration in the ethical equation as well.

But so far we are looking mainly at evil as negative or shrinking values; the opposite also can be real. Joy or pleasure can be just as real as suffering or grief, and our ethical duty to increase and propagate positive values by the creation of things happy and beautiful, and of various types, can be as great as the negative values of loss and sorrow. And all demand ethical support and propagation as far as may be.

To surrender all those treasures to sterility or destruction or sterility in surrender to nihilism in a universe probably without life to support CESs to appreciate them, even if AIs recorded them, seems to me obscene, and could well raise ethical difficulties, likely to conflict with principles of FTE.

And common sense.

 

 

Conflicts of interest within the body

We were living in trees when they met us.
They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us,
as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift,
Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas
while we followed the March of Mankind
Rudyard Kipling

 

What are the limits to consciousness within a body? For example, could a living thyroid or a gut have a CES? Would a skin cell? How about scaffolding cells in the web of tissue between embryonic fingers? They are no less complete than any other cells in the embryo, so why should they not wish to survive just as strongly as cells of heart, or brain, or gonads?

Why?

Because if they are not suitably shed at the right stage, the child will be born with misshapen, imperfectly functional fingers. In contrast, in a dolphin, that very webbing is retained and remains functionally necessary for the survival of the organism, not just as scaffolding for the formation of the organ.

Scaffolding or not however, the tissue still does not contribute its own cells to the next generation, but if it did not contribute its merit to the survival of its generation, copies of its own genome would not be passed on. Conversely, the dolphin body with its flippers, like the child’s body with its fingers and without their scaffolding tissue, may be expected pass on those genomes if nothing goes wrong.

Would the CES of such a tissue have values? Beware! It is a treacherous subject. For the soldier dying for his country, it might make reproductive sense, but for his CES it would be simplistically counterproductive. The human CES, whatever its Darwinian origins, has its own values, and many an individual would sooner sacrifice his reproductive and social interests in favour of the short‑term survival of his CES.

Even within one body there can be conflicts of interest; the fundamental fact is that as creatures of Darwinistic natural selection, our ancestors were selected for their successful pursuit of rewards that were relevant to their environments. Rewards that were harmful in excess, demanded parallel selection of avoidance of excess. We sought warmth in the cold, but learnt that heat could hurt; the entire nature of pain and satiety are among our inherited warnings against excesses as being among the threats we must avoid.

However, some things simply did not occur frequently enough to play a part in natural selection. Opioids, nicotine, salt, and tropane alkaloids for example simply were not commonly attractive enough for excessive use to be a problem in the wild. They would be so rare in the wild, that natural selection would have no basis for maintaining a mechanism for satiety or repugnance protect the organism from indulgence or over‑indulgence at all.

In established communities however, such traps for anyone overindulging could emerge in quantities harmful to addictive personalities and physiologies.

Access to excessive quantities of foods too, was typically episodic and regional, so that there was little selective pressure for developing physiological controls; obesity was a survival factor in some communities, and a mark of distinction in others.

In general, such examples could be seen as conflicts of interest within the body. The chocolate and sugar variously tempt the body and brain to consumption, and satiety caps it, though often too late to prevent caries and obesity. Addictive substances may stimulate pleasure centres, without capping stimuli to protect the body from harm.

And it is for our ethical systems to supply the deficiency, often in the forms of moral norms.

 

 

Keeping the gate

The first condition of human goodness is something to love;
the second something to reverence.
George Eliot

In the adaptation and evolution of an entity, whether that entity is a loose team such as a colony of ants comprising specialised castes, or whether it is an integrated structure of variously specialised cells such as the body of a large animal or tree, the concept of the CES, the dignity, sensitivities, or the very lives of the team members, count for little. Even in modern human communities the specialisations of cells are not where it ends; different jobs, professions, even hobbies and successive roles as one grows and learns throughout life, are associated with responsibilities, rivalries, status, and privileges of entire humans and of professions that cannot be fully equitable; they affect personal satisfaction, dignity, longevity, and health. Some examples amount to parasitism and con games. Beyond slavery and gender, consider the roles of miners and of soldiers as lauded in Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome”:

 And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?”

Horatio was satisfied to die for his values, and the examples should be regarded as metonymy anyway, but for a virtuous soldier to be willing to die for something as materially valueless as ashes and gods, or as inert and sterile as temples, seems inequitable in comparison to the Consul and City Fathers living on as fat‑cats after his death if he did not survive. It is not as though they were of biologically separate castes in which the soldiers were sterile, with nothing to lose, and the consuls were breeders to be sheltered for the good of the species.

But on occasion, human social structure depends on such inequitability, and would fail without it. In some ways the same is true of most Metazoa. In the human epidermis, consider a basal cell that divides to produce two cells, one of which remains a basal cell to divide again and again, while the other becomes a keratinocyte that will die and be shed as part of the function of the healthy body: at the point of division, the cells generally are not differentiated; at that point the question of which is is to fill which role, is not intrinsically meaningful, CES or no CES; which cell is to go and which to survive is a matter of situation, not personal values or identity.

Cells that resist that system would either die soon anyway, or, if they survive long enough to form a cancer, would commonly die eventually, along with the organism.

Nature, reality, causality, is unsentimental about emotional values such as love, pain, and personal values in general; though those are the values that are foundational to ethics. They are purely emergent aspects of intrinsic functions of the teams that achieve effects that isolated cells and tissues and organs and limbs could not.

We see similar principles in beehives and termite colonies; the defenders of the colony die in performing their protective functions. Honeybee soldiers die after stinging. The sting goes on pumping venom, and the dying bee keeps trying to sting while still alive, which distracts the enemy and improves the odds that still armed defenders will succeed in getting their stings in. As for termites, some species of termite soldiers literally explode their guts, producing a sticky slime that hampers, discourages, or kills, ants attacking the nest.

 

 

Possession, Ownership, Property

“Gimme that back, B’rer Bear! It’s mine; possession is nine points of the law!”
“So I’m taking possession, B’rer Fox: all nine points;
you can have the other point!”
1960s comic; source lost.

And recounted by Socrates:
Dionysodorus: Do you own a dog?  
Ctesippus: Yes.
Dionysodorus: Has the dog fathered puppies?
Ctesippus: Yes.
Dionysodorus Do you beat the dog?  
Ctesippus: Yes.
Dionysodorus Then you beat your own father

Concepts along these lines, and the related controversies, fill whole libraries, to the extent that one cannot but suspect that most of it is nonsense, and most of the rest is at cross purposes, hardly even dealing with the same things that the words suggest. I have little to say about it, so that little is what I’ll say.

Firstly, the semantics of the verb: “to own” is messy, and in many languages it is ambiguous and self‑inconsistent. In particular, it can easily be confused with more than one kind of relationship. As appears in the epigraph, the relationship between “my” father and me, is not the same as the relationship between “my” dog and me. So let us avoid that semantic trap and refer only to the relationship between owners and possessions.

The essence of the relationship between ownership to a possession is neither generally intrinsic to the owner nor to the possession.

What possession primarily amounts to is commitment by relevantly appointed authorities, to support particular, relevant classes of action by the owner concerning the possession. It also may support particular classes of action by the possession concerning the owner, and of third parties concerning either or both. It need not imply that such classes of action are identical for all participants or for all objects.

Generally all such items should be consistent with the principles of prevention, restitution, and rehabilitation (PRR), consistently in turn, with common or statute law, as discussed below.

In connection with the theme of this essay, most of this section has ultimately to do with the greater advantage of the emergence of Homo futurens, without inequitability to any party.

 

Preservation of legal systems

 

Having given out all the virtues that He had made, God made another.
“Give us that also,” said His children.
“Nay,” He replied, “if I give you that, you will slay one another till none is left.
You shall have only its name, which is Justice.”
“That is a good name,” they said; “we will give it to a virtue of our own creation.”
So they gave it to Revenge.
Ambrose Bierce

 

For practical reasons social structures depend on imposition of definitions of ethical values that the govern the behaviour of societies and individuals. Without such values and their imposition, it is hard to justify any definition of “society” at all. They might variously be formal or informal, and the formal definitions and impositions we might refer to as legal systems.

For largely historical reasons, formal and material definition and enforcement of a legal system are necessary for the survival of both the system, and society in general. Such definition and enforcement typically are referred to in terms such as penal law. Penal law deals with criminal activity: action in conflict with enacted or common law, action considered harmful to the community or members or interests of the community.

The term “penal” literally relates to punishment, but the concept of punishment is not essential; in fact, in this discussion it is arguably a tertiary distraction.

Note that the concepts of “penal systems” and of the proverbial “social contract” differ in various societies, and accordingly vary as time passes. Even within the recent history and geography of Homo ephemerens, societies in their implicit or explicit contracts, have varied almost beyond recognition, both between and within communities. Examples abound in the history of slavery, war, social classes and castes, and in times of plenty and of famine or disaster.

Historically, there seems to be no promise that our current, most smugly vaunted, legal systems of rights, equitability, and constitutions, and their political cousins of aristocracy, democracy, theocracy, despotism, and a job lot of their sisters and their cousins and their aunts, constitute anything like a final word. I will not be present to see what follows them, but I am fairly confident that if Homo ephemerens is to graduate into any hopefully progressive system of government or legal stability suited to Homo pertransiens, it will have to include incorporation of equitability, shared commitment to a stable or growing freedom from want in the context of stable property of various forms, and mutual commitment to the well‑being of each other, subject to the interests of the communities and their environmental resources.

Whether that in turn ever will graduate into an effectively universal, cooperative, stable system, idealistically and practically adhered to by Homo futurens, I do not know.

But it had better.

What we have at the moment still is, at best, cobbled together for what we are now, and grossly abused at best. If we can develop it into a state of stability, then we very likely can shed the parts that deal with conflict and inequitability, but that remains to be seen — by our descendants at least.

The three major functions of such law, in particular as the topic is relevant to Homo ephemerens, I describe as: “Prevention, Restitution, and Rehabilitation”. I refer to them here as the initialism: PRR.

·       Prevention takes priority because successful prevention of criminal activity, or anti‑social activity in general, commonly is in the best interests of society and the most economical in various senses. Hypothetically perfect prevention would make all else redundant. Prevention could be physical, psychological (say, by threat or education) or by whatever is most likely to be effective, acceptable, and affordable to the community.
For example, if it were generally agreed that a particular genetic configuration were contributing to mental values that promote counter-productive behaviour, say pathological panic in social situations, then voluntary genetic engineering of future births in selected lines, no doubt at the request of the prospective parents, might be regarded as an added measure for prevention of social harm, much as an in vitro fertilisation doctor of today would discard a zygote with a Duchesne dystrophy in favour of a healthy zygote.
By the future time that anything so sophisticated were contemplated however, the standards of genetic engineering would have to be beyond anything we are likely to be able to debate sensibly in this century.

·       Restitution refers to such measures as ideally would, as far as practical, mend harm and loss to any parties affected by actions or negligence in violation of accepted laws or standards. Such harm or loss would include damage to insensate elements such as material resources of the community in general, including individuals. All costs, as far as practical, should be met by the relevant perpetrators, but also, insofar as community neglect or incompetence or circumstances contributed to the harm, the community should make good the costs as far as might be practical.
This field of discussion is indefinitely large, filling whole libraries, because it is inseparable from questions of  criminal harm, civil harm or deprivation, such as debt, and social duty such as military or assigned civil service. But one way or another, the general aim should be to serve the community as far as it is practical to do so,  by serving, and thereby securing the committed allegiance of community members, to the degree that eventually, an injured member would yield personal restitution rather than disproportionately penalise the community, or indeed fellow‑members of the community.
This is not either a matter of pure sentiment, or pure opportunism. I see it as social lubricant and insurance, incentive to behave as best rewards and satisfies both the individual and the community, when both individual and community might see the situation metaphorically as “could do no more, and could do no less”.

·       Rehabilitation is whatever practical means can be applied to prevent or dissuade the perpetrator from future acts against the community, and without burdening society with pointless retaliation or resentment. It also raises the question of the nature, concept, and relevance of guilt. Whether punishment or elimination of the perpetrator is appropriate to minimisation of the costs to the community, or respective members of the community, is to be determined in each case on its merits. Effective rehabilitation ideally would leave the culprit willing to continue as a desirable member of the community, and the community willing to accommodate the culprit as a valued member. That may not in each case be practicable, and then the community must consider the alternatives. Rehabilitation also ties in closely with restitution, blame, debt, and in particular with social responsibility, and guilt in law.
The point of rehabilitation could be seen from two points of view: either a moral debt of society to the culprit, to accommodate him as a satisfied member of society; or, from the rest of society as demanding that the culprit repay whatever costs society had invested in his upbringing and support, or at least desist from unacceptable parasitism or sabotage of the system that they are building. It is not realistic, nor satisfying to demand small mindedly that every penny spent must be effectively expended, or metaphorically, that every millimeter of a scaffolding shaft play a positive part in advancing the building. Economising carries its own costs that must be allowed for in budgeting, and a society that can aim for the sky cannot pause to justify every triviality. But where the support or constraint of an enemy of society is sufficient to accommodate a conforming member, there is room to consider the dissenter to be an unjustifiable expense — to be shed, much as the growing embryo might shed a cell that cannot be tolerated between two growing fingers.
Such items are beyond our scope to discuss in detail, but they clearly cannot be justly assigned when an event was not within a perpetrator’s ability to avoid, control or foresee. In this sense, the significance of the concept of “guilt” is largely alien to most familiar penal systems; dealing with the perpetrator is to be aimed at prevention of repeat offences and mending all forms of harm from the relevant offences, as far as is practical. Whether retribution or education or any other measures would be appropriate would be a matter for the penal authorities to diagnose and prescribe. Accordingly, in a competent social structure, it might be admitted that a perpetrator had been unable to avoid an unacceptable event on account of drunkenness, or because it was too fast to for him to control. However, he would have to show that the drunkenness while driving was unavoidable (say, forced upon him) otherwise it would fail as a defence, and might be an aggravation. Or if the reason were the inability to react in time because the control were because of multiple CESs interacting to slow a reaction to say, more than a second, the relevant question would similarly reduce to why the perpetrator was in control if that could have been foreseen. Responsibility also ties in with transitivity of guilt and of responsibility, as already mentioned in the section on Functional Teleological Ethics in Responsibility.

It is worth noting that atonement plays no significant role in any of these, unless one counts apologies in appropriate circumstances.

In case readers assume that the foregoing discussion adequately covers the essence of the topic, I refer them to this linked parable concerning a notional crime. In essence, a number of perpetrators independently and without cooperation all attempt the murder of the same person, but none of them is successful. The victim eventually dies anyway, though he would have survived had it not been for the combination of ineffectual attempts on his life.

The presumption of the nature and relevance of guilt in most forms of penal law fails in its logic in the face of this challenge, but the PRR can deal with it fairly comfortably. The key is to separate PRR from concepts of blame, guilt, and justice, particularly justice, as Bierce brilliantly characterised it in the quote in the epigraph to this section.

As Bierce pointed out, humanity deeply confuses justice with revenge. In rational ethical philosophy the objective of punishment for its own sake is irrelevant except as a component of the third element of PRR in terms of its functional social merits. In currently widely accepted social values, the ideal is to treat all members of society compassionately and equitably, and minimise the costs to the community as practically, far-sightedly, and reasonably as may be.

Compassion and equitability are not fundamentally logical imperatives, but they are aspects compatible with, and widely of the essence of Darwinian principles underlying the operation of social structures. Their Darwinian nature does not prove that compassion and equitability are “right”, but their nature is an attribute that is necessary for their long-term resilience, in line with the principle of rejection of opposition to our own success.

In Darwinian progression, certain behavioural principles, conscious or not, independently or coherently have survived natural selection for tens of Ps at least. Play activity for development of skills without injury not only occurs widely and apparently independently, but often is recognised across boundaries, not only of relatives, but between species of biological orders. Puppies, children, rabbits, lambs, and others commonly recognise each other’s play signals. Imprinting of family and social relationships, inhibition of predation on one’s own species, recognition of possession and avoidance of inbreeding vary, but they are common in nature and sufficiently so, to be automatically recognised as righteous values in human relationships and in legal and moral codes. Compassion and equitability are examples.

There are practical limits to such social and legal principles however, especially to their treatment as absolutes, and there is no necessary compulsion to be guided by precedent unless the analogies of the acts and circumstances of earlier cases are direct and compelling. In particular, in rehabilitation, precedent can only be compelling if it is clear that what worked before can be expected to work again.

This leaves us with the question of what to do when the cost of continuing to attempt rehabilitation, or to control or tolerate continued antisocial behaviour, is too expensive in terms of what it deprives other people of. For example, to torment a violent criminal by locking him up, whether he is mentally or physically able to control his actions or not, for expenditure of resources sufficient to conceive, raise, feed, protect, and educate multiple valuable members of society, and with no pleasure to the criminal even, makes less sense than eliminating him. It even could be classified as treason to society.

Opposers of the brutality of retributive justice might expect to approve of PRR principles, but they should not jump to conclusions; the fact that PRR need not mention retribution, need not imply that retribution is forbidden, only that it would not be resorted to if the responsible authorities assessed it to be necessary and effective in a given case. In fact, nothing in the PRR principles denies execution as a proper expedient if no better measure presents itself. In fact, it might be explicitly prescribed in particular circumstances; suppose that someone had kidnapped a child for his sexual gratification, and was cornered and demanded that he be left to his pleasures, or he would cut the child’s throat, counting down ten seconds from now — 9,8,7,...

For the sharpshooter to hesitate would be betrayal of the child, the community, the principle of PRR, and common sense.

On such a basis the parable of the guilt of the hapless attempted murders is trivial: start with the P of the PRR. It is too late to prevent the death of the victim, but the question remains for the authorities to decide whether it is too late to prevent subsequent anti‑social acts by the perpetrators, and by which measures to do so if necessary. There then would be the question of whether anyone was in a position to demand restitution, and if so, from whom and in what form to exact the restitution. Finally, there would be the question of which measures would be appropriate to apply to the rehabilitation of the criminals, whether punitive, or alleviating. If it were decided that they were beyond mending, and would pose an indefinite threat and without prospect of rehabilitation, then it would be necessary to contemplate the best method of disposal.

Bearing in mind that the roles of members of Homo ephemerens and  Homo pertransiens may be that of scaffolding for the establishment of the immortal population, they should have no hesitation in so living their lives as to promote it. Refusal to do so would amount to betrayal of at once the past of the population, who had lived and died for it, and the present population who are living their lives in their scaffolding role, and the future population who maintain the purpose and and substance of universal civilisation.

Of course, dissenting members of the scaffolding might resent this, but then they could hardly justify any claim for special consideration as material enemies of the system.

 

Social Contracts and Strategies

Systems run best when designed to run downhill.
John Gall

 

 

Bear in mind that the primary intent of this document is to explore ways to establish Homo futurens in indefinite prosperity, expansion, and security, with flexible adjustment to changing or unpredicted circumstances. This is best done by wide and deep comprehension of the target system, which might be of arbitrary complexity. The agent thereby is in a position to identify, not the most complex, but the simplest and most economical objectives and solutions to challenges.

By way of illustration, in my youth I encountered a group of labourers trying to rescue a cow that had fallen into a cement farm dam. They had failed repeatedly for an hour or so before I arrived, and everyone, including the cow, was increasingly weary and despairing.  Possibly superfluously, I grabbed a handy piece of wire netting waste, and dropped it into the shallowest slope of the dam floor to improve the footing, and led the cow onto it. I then led her out single‑handed with no need for lifting or assistance. Including finding the possibly unnecessary netting, the rescue effort took perhaps two minutes.

There are many examples of problem solution along such lines, including various social problems, and problem identification and analysis commonly are crucial to problem solution; a friend of mine told me that he felt humiliated when on a train journey there was an unaccompanied little boy sitting opposite a burly man who was obviously severely retarded. After some time the man began shouting at the child, threatening him for sitting opposite him. My friend was just deciding to hit the man if he attacked the child, when an old lady said urgently: “Sonny, sonny, come and sit here next to me!” The child did, and the man subsided.

Now, there are all sorts of possible scenarios to such a situation. Hitting would have been useless after the event; expostulation would have meant nothing to the man’s mental equipment; dignity would have been irrelevant, but the lady in question recognised the essence of the problem and applied the simplest, fastest solution with the greatest effect and the lowest cost to all parties, irrespective of whether it was in violation of the right of the child to his seat.

Operative problems, especially social problems, whether confrontational or technical, whether between humans or confronted with physical challenges, or between individuals and groups, or between multiple groups, are not always simple; in fact they commonly are not definitively soluble within given situations and periods. However there is a common aspect, often a Darwinian concept, that might be regarded as a sine qua non for indefinite solution or navigation of such situations.

The concept is the fundamental games theory of a Darwinian strategy. The word is not equivalent to the usual sense of “a plan for dealing with a particular challenge” (“If only I can fool this opponent into thinking that I intend to...”) but the settled routine procedure for such situations. For example, in confrontations one could always capitulate or retreat if challenged (the “Dove” strategy) or always confront or issue a challenge (“Hawk” strategy) or confront at first, but retreat whenever meeting resistance (“Bully” strategy).

When a population has achieved a strategy that will remain indefinitely viable in the face of all foreseeable attacks, including infiltration of its genome, we describe the product as an ESS (Evolutionarily stable strategy). An ESS is something of an ideal concept, because there always is some future threat that could be imagined or could emerge to destroy or pervert it.

The important objective here is to strive after a strategy that will remain indefinitely viable in the face of all foreseeable attacks. Realistically, for any defence, there is some attack that can circumvent or overpower it. The entire field is of great importance in biology, and in evolutionary studies in particular.

For example, the defence of  musk oxen against predators, by forming a tight circle, horns on the outside and calves inside, was pretty much invincible for perhaps hundreds of Ts, until they encountered humans with dogs and missiles. These new enemies could exploit their very defences.

But, within reason, the ESS remains an important principle. Conceptually the concept is so important that it can be extended to social contexts in the form of what I call the SSS. (Socially Stable Strategy). In our connection the SSS would be a social structure and code of conduct that would render a community immune from attack or corruption, including from external influences, internal conflicts, and intellectual developments.

So far humanity has achieved nothing of the kind, in spite of the various isms and acies that have been vaunted from time to time. No SSS has been proof against the likes of idealisms such as communism, capitalism, democracy, dynasticism, imperialism, religionisms and despotism. Such regimes in turn rarely outlast a few generations, and even the exceptions eventually succumb to their internal vulnerabilities; these include infections such as nepotism, demagogueries, parochialism, and nationalism: they largely reflect the residual toxicity of family‑ village‑ and nationality‑based adversarial attitudes.

Specialists in power‑seeking abound in humanity, and each successor repeats the delusions and blunders of various of his predecessors. That is understandable, but what is harder to understand is that the subjects tend to swallow the same old propaganda as before: the divine right of rulers and inferiority of aliens and the like. I suggest that those attitudes actually are innate, inherited from ancestors whose families and villages had depended on loyalties and greeds that in modern civilisation have decayed into maleficence,  

One would think that once populations were reasonably educated, they would be less susceptible to such naïve adversarial indoctrination, but it rolls on, generation after generation. The one constant factor seems to be actual stupidity — one remembers remarks from the likes of Medawar: “people who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought”, or the even more mordant Mencken with his: “when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost.”

Plainly those writers and thinkers, and a few like them, see the lack of intelligence and suitable education as the operative problems, but of course, there is more to it, including our inherent Village mentality.

None the less, if a few dozen generations of the type of selection and education that I propose in Immortal imperatives could scrub our minds of those poisons and instill the necessary scepticism, compassion, and functional teleological ethics, we might hope to see new forms of society that come closer to an SSS. They might listen more critically to problem analyses and evaluate performance. Baby‑kissing and invective against stock images of enemies or rivals would need to be of a very high standard to carry much weight; an intelligent population would appreciate Will Rogers’ reflection that: “The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.” The fellow without the telescope would fail to interest the intelligent public, and the one with the telescope had better demonstrate his competence at using it and reacting to what he sees in it.

Similar arguments apply to strife, competition, or debate between societies, so the likes of Homo futurens will need to make adequate progress in managing and formulating solutions to classes of problems in dealing with other, possibly rival, possibly cooperative communities. The Prisoner’s dilemma is possibly the most notorious illustration, but it is one of many, and of many different kinds.

The social contract is not an isolated two‑way relationship, but affects the whole of society at multiple levels and in various directions; to regard it simplistically is incompetence and betrayal, not only of the community, but of each member of the community. It is an old concept, but remains inescapable. What it comes down to is that instead of partisanship within a community, every individual, and every sub-population should feel that contributory membership of the community is more profitable than either parasitism or opting out, and that helping fellow members should be no less rewarding than helping family members, and protecting the community more important than either.

This should be implemented in the genetic control of the emotional makeup, as well as inculcated into the education system. It should apply to the highest and everyone else in the community, and not in the form of parades and anthems, but in intelligent comprehension and mutual understanding.

No more reliable, long term, security for a community at any level, or its legal principles, could exceed that of making it follow principles that are stable in practice, both physically and legally, because of being logical, practical, rewarding, and secure against external threats.

It might sound artificial and too abstract for the world we occupy, but where and when do we want to see humanity end up? If we are to do better than the Tasmanian aboriginals we shall have to work our way up into a status and functionality along the lines I described in Immortal imperatives.

Note that the concept of an SSS need not at all imply stasis or reduced effort in everyday life, only that society would be stable against invasion or replacement. There is nothing preventing models such as Red Queen conflict or cooperation from being indefinitely demanding of attitude, effort, and evolution.  Homo pertransiens could be indefinitely at indefinite effort at various regions within or between galaxies.

Such situations should be possible indefinitely, but as I ask here, and shall ask again: “can we get there from here?”

 

 

Instilling and Securing the Principles

 

Human history becomes more and more a
race between education and catastrophe.
HG Wells

 

An interesting reflection is on the difference between the options in sentient organisms as opposed to mechanisms, for establishing and maintaining commitment to the principles of legality and ethics, the balance between personal and interpersonal values and commitments to stated principles and imperatives.

A mechanism whether AGI or even AGI-CES, that is to say, sentient in a high degree, should in principle be an agent that could be assembled, and, when nearly complete, could have a brain, or equivalent, installed, principles, values and all, and with little scope for alteration of those values and principles.

It might be argued that to call a brain, or equivalent, with little scope for alteration, “sentient” is questionable, but there is little scope for arguing that it differs from either instinctive, or rigidly instilled values or principles in an organic brain, whether installed abruptly or gradually, whether directly or in a process of development in a growing brain.

Nor does it follow that because a part of the mental content is firmly, even rigidly, fixed, or nearly so, that the brain cannot be sentient; there still is scope, possibly far greater scope, for learning other material, or even for qualifications of the rigidly defined content, or its applications.

In contrast, sentient biological agents are largely organised from scratch; from when the embryonic brain begins to function on its available structures. It has to pass through multiple stages of development and function; this amounts to metamorphosis or even hypermetamorphosis. Not only could one argue that the personality of the growing organism passes through different stages and forms, but the fact is that, although  some of those stages might be creative, possibly beneficially so, are what emerges is not fully predetermined. It might in fact be harmful, pathological, even sociopathic. There is no reason to presume that such noisy variation would generally be beneficial; chaotic development without feedback tends to be more harmful than beneficial.

This situation must rely on the quality of the education to steer or correct the quality of the product, and the process can be variously destructive, compared to the standardised construction of the engineered products.

As long as pioneering colonies established by AGI devices will be responsible for raising larvae of sentient Homo futurens, including their education, both technical and ethical, we may be confident that the education would begin from a sound basis, and that the new generation could rely on their foster-generation of AGIs to maintain its integrity, but they could not rely on either a mechanical installation or rapid instillation of standardised minds.

This implies non‑uniform, non‑rubber‑stamped product. To what extent, and in what way, that non‑uniformity is good or not, is hard to say, but it is even harder to see how a healthy degree of non‑uniformity could be other than enriching for the individual and the community.

From the very nature of the structure of any functional brain, it is impossible to define it and its operation precisely, so it correspondingly is impossible to deny the possibility of beneficial variation even in a “new-born” synthetic brain, let alone a synthetic brain of a considerable amount of experience.

That in turn does not mean that such experience would in any way degrade the intellectual quality of the brain or the value of the experience in the context of the instilled ethical standards, any more than in the mature brain in a Homo futurens.

 

The Future is the Territory, not the Map

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine.
Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can suppose.
J B S Haldane

 

The essential point of this essay is to supply a point of view from which we can seriously ask ourselves whether we have a future, whether we are to continue as a mockery of Homo sapiens in a slough of futility in our present role as Homo ephemerens.

Am I over‑dramatising?

If that is what you think, then I have Ts (or a couple hundred Ts, depending on who is counting) of Homo ephemerens to show; what do you have that you can show in contradiction? Cycle after cycle of three steps of progress up and two steps slipped back?

Or much, much worse.

Well, one out of three is not so bad, is it? One needs a long view, a little patience, a little tolerance of half‑work — there is always a next time, isn’t there?

No.

Not for Homo ephemerens.  We risk, not only sliding back into a new dark age, but a dark age after destruction of the resources necessary for us to lift ourselves out and back into civilisation.

We do not have much breathing space. If we cannot manage our resources to meet our needs for progress within the next few centuries, we never will achieve a future for our next stage of humanity. Homo futurens. We will be destroying our heritage, our past as well as our future.

And that is a matter of values, a matter of ethics, a matter of morality.

And if I can move the right people to prepare to approach the perils and needs of that future, by pointing out the sense and sensibility as a matter of ethics, that will be beyond my hopes.

But I cannot let that stop me.

 

 

Can we get there from here?

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made Richard Buckminster Fuller

 

This essay is not a recipe. It deals with intentions and fears and hopes. Without ethics and reason we will get nowhere.

I discuss the nature and prospects of our practical options and incentives in another essay at  Immortal imperatives

You might find it long, but even if skimming it only leaves you with a feel for the territory that at present is not even on anyone’s map, it will be well worth it.

As maps go, that map is still at the hic dracones stage, but every little helps; as Charles Babbage put it: “Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.”

Even getting someone to think about how to find the territory is better than leaving people to think that they are already there.

As I see it, we already have many, many beacons, those left by wise men, in which they confess their confusion and frustration, and by the rest, who variously assert that they do know the way, or that we already are somewhere in particular, and uniformly demonstrate by their words, and deeds, and footprints, and their graves, that they do not even know what they do not know.

 

 

Outgrowing the kindergarten

For progress there is no cure.
Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for
the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration.
The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an
 intelligent exercise  of day-to-day judgment.
John von Neumann

 

As it is, I see only one ray of hope, namely the first hint at genetic engineering of our descendants in the next few centuries. At least a sizeable proportion should be seriously intelligent, and long‑lived enough to be hard to fool, and to see clearly enough that there is more profit to life than just parasitism of the human community.

If that happens, (and I admit that the odds are long) Homo futurens might get a foot in the door.

I discuss the topic in the Immortal imperatives essay, which is a long document, but its essence includes the following items. They concern the principles of ethics relevant to our future, which are radically dependent on such points as these:

·       The planet is limited; this is a matter of simple arithmetic, and anyone denying it needs to be innumerate as well as dishonest. Malthus is not mocked. Even his dates are only out by a couple of centuries, a triviality, even in terms of Western history.

·       So the human population too, is limited, much like the rat population, but if we wait till its limitation is constrained by overpopulation of the planet, the effects will be horrible beyond belief, and most likely terminal.

·       Given existing technology, it is possible to limit the human population humanely and healthily by equitable means, at the same time increasing human fitness and well‑being, physical, mental, and economic.

·       In the process longevity could increase indefinitely without creating a population problem, and intelligence together with longevity.

·       The necessary increase in general intelligence and scale of foresight and ethical responsibility should constrain political abuses to beyond the fears or imagination of current political parasites; just try to imagine  playing the Golden Statue game with a population of grownups, when even your own troops are intelligent and educated.

·       The process also should lubricate the ethical shift that humanity needs, both adapting to new dimensions of technology, and shedding the twin diseases of family‑scale and village‑scale perspectives that increasingly poison our views and emotions, our politics, and the scale of our projects. We could raise the scale and nature of feasible and attractive projects beyond anything as yet contemplated, either on‑planet or off, using resources currently not worth even academic assessment.

·       The projected existence of our species would increase accordingly on scales not yet realistically explored

 

Consider the ethical considerations of such concepts in those connections, particularly in the light of the future of humanity.

·       Do we, should we, include the survival and growth of our descendants, our heritage, our creations, among our ultimate values?

·       If not, then which values are worth respecting at all?

·       But if we do, it is over time for us to wake up and do something to create “something new under the sun”.

 

 

Something New: Ethical Vaccination for Righteousness

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion,
because religion makes men virtuous.
So I am told; I have not noticed it.
Bertrand Russell

 

For some one to 30 to 100 Ps, depending on who is counting, the question of ethics on this planet was not asked, because there was no one to ask or conceive it. To be sure, until some 10 or 20 Ps ago no one as far as we can tell had enough brain to have any inhibitions against harm to their own species and to possible mutualists. By 10 or 20 Ps later however, many species, largely vertebrates, had developed enough intelligence and sensory apparatus to avoid eating or killing or fighting “things like that”, and species with inhibitions like that tended to go forth and multiply in various ways forbidden to cannibals, even though various evolutionary strategies specifically relied on cannibalism.

Then, some Ps ago, as far as we can tell, some species developed enough intelligence to exercise skills in systematic cheating, bullying, familial and parochial preferences, and predation: quite human in fact.

And those skills enabled them to achieve many things that we have discussed, things that advanced the prosperity of the communities in villages, towns and local nations, and to wipe out lines that were too disturbingly human.

All those developments were variously connected to concepts of ethics, and later of wisdom, before there were any explicit concepts of philosophy.

So far not too bad, but as nations increased in size beyond what individual citizens could recognise or understand, they began to deal with people they did not know. Picking on unfamiliar people followed naturally, especially those who were visibly unfamiliar in appearance and behaviour. At that point the virtues of village cohesion developed into the evils of racism, personality cults, politics, gullibility towards strangers who knew what to promise before moving on, and the evils of ecclesiastics and arbitratores elegantiarum, often self‑appointed.

Our major social evils emerged among mentally limited, short‑lived people who spent most of their lives learning barely enough to equip them to function as dupes of exploiters, dying uncomprehending in battle or slaving for those better equipped to get rich, or whose parents had been better equipped, or who in turn were willing stooges and catspaws for higher ranking manipulators of their generations and regions. Such things led to elaborate alienation between various dimensions and levels of classes and cliques. We are left, not only with strife between sports teams, provinces, and nations, but also brands, professions, political parties, and levels of authorities.

Fragmentations and interconnections of interests are beyond comprehension of outsiders; they commonly involve conspiracies and resentments that may prove deadly; consider Kipling’s “Ballad of the King’s Jest”:

Heart of my heart, is it meet or wise
To warn a King of his enemies?
We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King

And there we sit. With no prospect of improvement forever. Our ethical principles are products of the accidents of our social evolution. Strangers to ourselves and others.

So far anyway.

Our horizons have been claustrophobic, on this planet or off, and even now, our prospects are diffuse and remote.

In Immortal imperatives I hint at a hope, new under the sun during the presence of life on this planet: realistic hope of personal immortality, plus powers to bear it. Unless we destroy ourselves we could have immortality in 30 Gs or so — practically overnight after hundreds of Ps.

And literally, vitally, imperative: without personal immortality, humanity as a population will die.

With our current mental limitations, a 30 Gs lifetime would be hell: futile tedium, but advances necessary for longevity would include increased functional intelligence. That might sound like hubristic wishful thinking, but in their day, so would novelties such as the stirrup, the horse collar, chemistry, knitting, the bow, transistors, electricity, the plough, nuclear physics and vaccination.

And a population with a slow turnover, a life expectancy of Ts, a good brain and memory, should be immune to social systems with the isms and acies that have lead humanity by the nose for some 39 Gs. The Barnums, the con artists, the Stalins and Hitlers have led nations on Twain’s principle of:

“H’aint we got all the fools in town on our side?
And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”

Such parasitisms emerged mainly from a plentiful supply of suckers, naïve for lack of comprehension, experience and memory. The last thing the parasites want is an intelligent population with indefinite memory capacity. Their nightmare would be good communications plus attitudes on the lines of: “if a man does thee once it is his fault; if he does thee twice, it is thy fault — and I remember thee from once ten thousand years ago, and so do my friends...!”

For anyone in a role dependent on public support in a population of such a nature, to base a questionable project, let alone a deception, on equivocation, let alone lies, would be professional suicide. This is not so much a moral reflection, as a consequence of practical game theory. According to Robert Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation: when it is probable that they will meet again, independent agents choose to cooperate rather than cheat. This concern is the  professional’s “Shadow of the Future”.  Cheats cannot afford a high probability of being called out in competition, or cogent exposure to a competent, sceptical public with indefinite memory. That Shadow would be a lasting horror. To keep politicians nearly honest, nothing could beat a public with a grasp of law, rights, technology, logic, and economics, plus memory of all claims for the last Ts or so.

Call that a vaccination against unrighteousness, an essence of the role of Homo pertransiens, every one a brick in the edifice of humanity.

If the functional life expectancy of an educated population of people intelligent enough to handle it were measured in millennia or longer, that should lend some conviction even to social systems as flawed as democracy or capitalism. Notionally it might even work for communism (“From each according to his capacity...”). The chances of a dishonest politician getting into office at all would be tenuous, and as soon as anything showed him up, even in the indefinite future, he would be on the skids, unlike various nominally democratic leaders of today, not to mention dictators. Furthermore, even if not expelled he would be alive to face the future, the failed industry, the fallen building, the fouled ecology, and especially the public affected, who would remember who had foisted it on them. And they would not be friendly to any statute of limitations in the next Ts, nor inclined to protect his future reputation.

In a population of intelligent immortals, ethical conduct would be a principle of social survival, whether in business, professional life, or politics; sacrifice of one’s reputation would be sacrifice indeed. People rarely have anything to good to say for physical immortality, but it should enforce permanent standards of ethics less compromising than anything in history so far.

Such things also would influence the nature of long-term business ventures. Concepts and consequences of bankruptcy and debt would differ from current standards. Deals and projects common in Homo ephemerens businesses separated by borders and oceans, would differ from those separated by parsecs and millennia. The business or political parasite with a bad reputation for dishonesty or shortsightedness would be worse off than one having earned a name for driving a hard bargain. In such a society the idea of lapsed debts, either criminal or fiscal, would probably be regarded as nonsensical.

This might sound obsessively vindictive and small-minded on the part of Homo futurens, but it simply would be a natural effect of the nature of the society, comfortably open and secure, with trust of the other party being the natural consequence.

Compare that with the situation in Homo ephemerens during the last ten or twenty millennia or so. With minor temporary aberrations, nearly our whole politics, and half our businesses, depend on lies, secrecy, intimidatory litigation, and quibbling after the event. An early communistic quip was that a capitalist would sell you the rope to hang him with, and that really has been no exaggeration in recent decades. Traitors often hardly bother to deny their dealings; they have faith in public amnesia within a season or so. Commonly, if their scale of operation is large enough, they may have no problem attracting fellow crooks as accomplices after a financial disaster. For ephemera the shadow of the future holds few terrors; those who deny abuses, wastes, destruction of resources, self‑aggrandisement, oppression, and who base policies on criminally irresponsible quackery, commonly will have died or retired before the crows come home to roost. We see about us leaders whose incompetence and self‑gratification have within a couple of years caused something over a million deaths in their country within a year or two, with hardly a peep out of anyone when they are voted into office again.

For Homo ephemerens the opiates of the people are shortness of life, shortness of memory, oblivion of the logic and facts of reality in wishful thinking, and of the need to use and develop them. Reflexive rage to shout down warnings of needs is easier than education. One hears of the cycle of public amnesia being driven by a cycle of some two to four decades as the “village elders” die off, but in practice, in our current situation of continuous floods of public information and disinformation, a realistic cycle is more like two to four years.

These are features that Homo futurens should counter naturally as part of their necessary attributes.

And our ethics?

They are worthless if they are not our guides, and our guides are worthless if they do not reflect our realities, and we are worthless if we cannot shape our realities into worthwhile futures new under the sun. If one thing is clearer than another, it is that as Homo ephemerens we are doomed; our one hope as a species is to shed our larval skins as Homo pertransiens and to emerge as Homo futurens, with not just a future, but more futures, more adventures, and more scope than anyone reasonably could have foreseen for us on the most optimistic assumptions.