Research:MDem/5.3r/1999 IBE - Revision history

Reversedragon: ethics has been nothing more than the study of the predictable

2026-05-16T04:14:03Z

ethics has been nothing more than the study of the predictable

← Older revision		Revision as of 04:14, 16 May 2026
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	Applying this observation back to the concept of moralities and the golden rule, we soon see that a principle such as the golden rule will be proposed as an Idea, but within the real world, the results of that Idea can only be computed through the interactions of the actual material objects it speaks about. Thus it is that a moral code turns human beings into its Turing machine.		Applying this observation back to the concept of moralities and the golden rule, we soon see that a principle such as the golden rule will be proposed as an Idea, but within the real world, the results of that Idea can only be computed through the interactions of the actual material objects it speaks about. Thus it is that a moral code turns human beings into its Turing machine.

			The big question that then follows after this is: if moral codes are ultimately a highly regular physical process, up to very nearly being a predictable computation, why is it that two groups of people breaking into different countable cultures containing different moral codes become so difficult for each other to understand and mesh together with? If the physical behavior of a given moral code is somewhat predictable, and the physical behavior of another moral code is somewhat predictable, then why do the two groups of people with different moral codes not suddenly realize that when both of their moral codes are more or less predictable in their own ways, there could in theory be predictable ways to get the two processes to merge back into each other using each other's rules of operation?

			To put it in simpler terms: Kant believed that if the Kantian categorical imperative was predictable, it would enable two areas of people both following the categorical imperative to merge together, because if one area of people consents to the categorical imperative and they are all following it, the first area of people will know that if they want to bring down the categorical imperative onto the second area of people, there will be no serious conflicts, because the second area of people already knows what the categorical imperative is and consents to it, and the first area of people knows what rules the second area of people is willing to follow. Of course, when there are two areas of people who both follow their own specific "categorical imperative", such that they each consent to their own locally but they are not known to consent to each other's, then an attempt to merge the two areas of people into one society will not go quite as seamlessly. The first group's ability to determine if the second group consents to their moral code and the second group's ability to determine what moral code is being brought down onto them will depend on how well each group of people first understands {{em\|the other group's}} moral code and the way in which the two behavioral processes overlap.

			This has ramifications for not just simple matters of morality that appears to be opinions, but also for the process of organizing workers into movements or proletarian citizens into materially-defined workers' states. A stated idea about how workers will behave and what they will physically be able to accomplish will only have an effect in the real world if it matches the physical abilities of workers to accomplish those aims, or in the case of conflicting parties that both claim to apply Marxism, will only have an effect when they accurately reflect the ability of members or allies of each party to do what is needed by other parties without violating their own stated rules.

			In one sense, all sufficiently repeated forms of behavior can be phrased as if they were moral rules, not because all repeated forms of behavior are inherently "moral" or "immoral", but simply because morality itself is indistinguishable from mere repeated patterns of behavior — in the end, ethics has been nothing more than the study of the predictable.

	[unfinished]		[unfinished]

Reversedragon: halting problem

2026-05-16T03:35:44Z

halting problem

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:35, 16 May 2026
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	The concept of a consensual society put together by a social contract makes some kind of sense when society is perfectly singular. But what if a society that was previously one suddenly divided in two? If a group of individuals inside a society suddenly decides nothing the surrounding society says is applicable toward regulating their behavior, what does the concept of a social contract even mean in that case? The intuitive thing to realize would be that once five or ten people break off from following the "universally-legislating" moral code of a particular countable population of people, there is not really anything stopping three of the ten people from spontaneously breaking off from the other seven. But, on the other hand, you also have no guarantee that every faction that breaks off from a larger population {{em\|will not}} stay together. It could be the case that fifteen people break off from a larger group of people but their moral or philosophical code is perfectly consistent, so they only remain together and keep gathering more members who all continue to keep the group stable. In the latter case, what has happened really was just a difference of opinion. Fifteen people all came together and decided on a {{em\|different}} moral code designed around reciprocity, which simply happened to be incompatible with the process that was already going but turned out to be fine by itself. How could any particular group of people tell the difference between these two cases, and tell if any particular moral code is materially stable and in that particular sense "valid"?		The concept of a consensual society put together by a social contract makes some kind of sense when society is perfectly singular. But what if a society that was previously one suddenly divided in two? If a group of individuals inside a society suddenly decides nothing the surrounding society says is applicable toward regulating their behavior, what does the concept of a social contract even mean in that case? The intuitive thing to realize would be that once five or ten people break off from following the "universally-legislating" moral code of a particular countable population of people, there is not really anything stopping three of the ten people from spontaneously breaking off from the other seven. But, on the other hand, you also have no guarantee that every faction that breaks off from a larger population {{em\|will not}} stay together. It could be the case that fifteen people break off from a larger group of people but their moral or philosophical code is perfectly consistent, so they only remain together and keep gathering more members who all continue to keep the group stable. In the latter case, what has happened really was just a difference of opinion. Fifteen people all came together and decided on a {{em\|different}} moral code designed around reciprocity, which simply happened to be incompatible with the process that was already going but turned out to be fine by itself. How could any particular group of people tell the difference between these two cases, and tell if any particular moral code is materially stable and in that particular sense "valid"?

	~~<br/>~~		Before going any further, we need to make sure we understand the situation itself and all of the traditional ethical concepts that have typically been applied to situations like these.
	~~cultural relativism~~

	~~turing~~'s halting problem		One of the first breakthroughs formally recorded by ethical philosophers was the separation of morality from ethics. Morality is understood to be the various theories of Right and Wrong actions that are understood within particular local populations before populations divide. Ethics is at least {{em\|traditionally claimed}} to be the overall study of a world containing multiple moral codes: deontology, consequentialism, and several such specific, potentially-conflicting schemes for how to define ethical principles or testable propositions. In the "Soviet Union" scenario, the populations are technically divided into two different countable {{i\|moralities}}, which each may claim they are the only possible study of ethics that rules out others, but which are actually only localized philosophical tendencies inside the overall field of ethics.

			Sitting between the fields of ethics and anthropology is the concept of countable cultures. This concept has been somewhat fuzzy at times in different sections of the world's overall body of sociological literature; the entire concept of "culture" has been plagued by the problem of separating material social processes from the notion of abstract populational essences. For one of the simpler examples, how do you know you are in contact with Spanish culture, or Japanese culture? Do you look for things that are arbitrarily associated with that abstract entity, like the Spanish or Japanese languages? At a certain point, isn't this just a squishy, ill-defined heuristic, or some kind of bizarre socially acceptable version of national stereotypes? What if Japanese people spoke English, or Korean? What if you found the only person in Japan who was an expert on {{em\|Korean}} manhwa and will talk to you at length about the difference between "manga" from Korea versus Japan? Clearly, if the concept of countable cultures is to be useful, it has to be formed out of something other than abstract "cultural essences". This is a complicated topic, but in short, one way to fix the problem could be to identify "cultures" starting at human populations that already appear to be physically separate and then work inward to what kinds of social processes and cultural values inside the population might be contributing to keeping a particular group of people together or pushing two groups of people apart. Looking at things this way, we can look at the ocean physically separating Japan from Korea and then suspect that because the two populations are largely separate physically, they will have developed noticeably different bodies of local culture. This definition of countable cultures is much easier to apply to a scenario involving two very small groups of people and their small-scale interactions. When two groups of people break apart, they are for some reason forming into two countable cultures. This may be a largely physical process where culture is a byproduct of the interaction of material objects, or it may be a more complex process where culture sits both on the outside of social phenomena and on the inside where actual decisions are being made and interactions are being had. It might be helpful here to break down the broad concept of "culture" into two distinctly different kinds of social practices or understandings such that the different layers of "outside" culture (superstructural "illustrations" of material life) and "inside" culture (conscious, subjectively-processed forms of behavior which are common within a population) are no longer being conflated into the same thing.

			Within anthropology and particularly in modern-day "progressive" forms of anthropology, countable cultures are often studied through the lens of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism, despite its misleading name, is not a form of analysis which is relative to current cultural beliefs or traditions. Instead, the "culture" in cultural relativism actually refers to physical populations. Cultural relativism is a method in which events that happen in a particular population are studied specifically within the context of the geography and existing history of that particular population, including the ways that philosophy and education have so far been developed inside a population, but making a point to study the population without interpreting anything it does {{em\|through any specific set of cultural beliefs}}, including United States or European moral understandings, but also including the moral or spiritual understandings of that particular population accepted exclusively. Cultural relativism does not imply allowing people to believe mysticism, or even Idealism. To practice cultural relativism is to go to the U.S. state of Tennessee and ask what people already understand about biological evolution in order to present education on evolution in a format they understand rather than first making fun of the people of Tennessee for being creationists.

			There is one last interesting concept worth throwing in here, which has not been commonly talked about within the fields of ethics or anthropology at all, and instead comes from the field of computer science: Alan Turing's halting problem. Before modern computer processors were invented, Alan Turing envisioned a simple computer which could read strips of instructions, called a Turing machine. The instructions available on these "tape machines" would be conceptually similar to BASIC, or assembly language. The programs might be able to do things including set bits to 1 or 0, combine bits with "{{Caps\|And}}" or "{{Caps\|Or}}", hold values in an accumulator variable, add or subtract binary numbers, or most interestingly, go to particular labels or functions within a program and do them again. Any programming language which includes loops or "{{Caps\|GoTo}}" instructions inherently starts becoming harder to predict, because you cannot just read the source code of a program from the first line to the last line and guess how long the program will run purely by how many lines it has. This is ultimately the kind of thing that leads to Turing's halting problem. Given two Turing machines where one simply computes the result of a program and the other one has to compute how long the program on the first Turing machine will take or whether it will keep going indefinitely, mathematicians have so far concluded that there is no single algorithm which can generally tell whether every kind of program will halt. Some limited categories of programs do have algorithms that can predict them, but not every program. From here, the question is whether moral codes could in fact be similar to programs running on Turing machines. The "substrate" that computes the results of a moral code is somewhat different from any kind of digital computer — it is the spontaneous social links or lack thereof between the individuals who each perform behaviors. There is something remarkable about social links, as we have seen by fully expanding the golden rule: assuming social links are not conceptualized as stable ongoing relationships they either contain particular behaviors or cease to exist, meaning that when the intermediate chain of people inside the golden rule stops, it is conceptually similar to a computer program which would circle back to a particular label either continuing to loop or halting. Thus, in a very strange sense, the material process of society operating in the form of a particular countable culture composed of loosely-linked individuals taking individual actions is almost like a kind of computation. If people are not computer programs literally composed of simplistic logic and math statements, how can this be?

			Here, it is instructive to go back to Marx and Hegel. For Hegel, physical objects were the embodiment of abstract ideas — noble territories sending representatives up to the layer of the king simply meant that the Ideas behind the local-states had fit coherently together and the kingdom was a coherent system of ideas. For Marx, kingdoms could only be formed because material objects collided together in various processes, such as noble territories fighting over land within warring states periods, or the victories of various nobility pushing peasants into feudal manors. Said another way, whenever Hegel might identify two "Ideas" about to collide with each other, Marx asserted that actually, these Ideas could only resolve each other in the material world. The nature expressed within each Idea actually sat within a material object, and only the characteristics of the material objects could interact together to produce the results of various ideas.

			Applying this observation back to the concept of moralities and the golden rule, we soon see that a principle such as the golden rule will be proposed as an Idea, but within the real world, the results of that Idea can only be computed through the interactions of the actual material objects it speaks about. Thus it is that a moral code turns human beings into its Turing machine.

	[unfinished]		[unfinished]

Reversedragon: social contracts

2026-05-16T01:39:45Z

social contracts

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:39, 16 May 2026
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	== The chemistry of metallic rules ==		== The chemistry of metallic rules ==

			Within traditional writings on ethics, law, and "freedom", it has generally been assumed that the concepts of "a society" and "our society" are the same thing. When Kant writes about the way to achieve perpetual peace, or Rousseau writes about the concept of society being built on a social contract, they each assume that the act of studying one society, the single society they live in, is enough to understand the entire process of how people form republics and how all republican societies function.

			Ever since about 1800, this has been a catastrophically wrong assumption.

			The concept of a consensual society put together by a social contract makes some kind of sense when society is perfectly singular. But what if a society that was previously one suddenly divided in two? If a group of individuals inside a society suddenly decides nothing the surrounding society says is applicable toward regulating their behavior, what does the concept of a social contract even mean in that case? The intuitive thing to realize would be that once five or ten people break off from following the "universally-legislating" moral code of a particular countable population of people, there is not really anything stopping three of the ten people from spontaneously breaking off from the other seven. But, on the other hand, you also have no guarantee that every faction that breaks off from a larger population {{em\|will not}} stay together. It could be the case that fifteen people break off from a larger group of people but their moral or philosophical code is perfectly consistent, so they only remain together and keep gathering more members who all continue to keep the group stable. In the latter case, what has happened really was just a difference of opinion. Fifteen people all came together and decided on a {{em\|different}} moral code designed around reciprocity, which simply happened to be incompatible with the process that was already going but turned out to be fine by itself. How could any particular group of people tell the difference between these two cases, and tell if any particular moral code is materially stable and in that particular sense "valid"?

			<br/>
			cultural relativism

			turing's halting problem

	[unfinished]		[unfinished]

Reversedragon: formatting

2026-05-15T23:50:41Z

formatting

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Reversedragon: formatting (partial)

2026-05-15T22:51:51Z

formatting (partial)

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Reversedragon: archive revision created 2026-05-15T13:25:27H; copy markup from penguin-banana

2026-05-15T22:41:24Z

archive revision created 2026-05-15T13:25:27H; copy markup from penguin-banana

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