Cogitism is my personal moral framework, developed and refined in my free time. I believe that this specific combination of ideas is novel and useful. I know it's pretty arrogant to claim a novel moral framework, especially considering that before today I was the only person who has been reading my own work, so I'm making this post to get adversarial eyeballs on it. While I'm aware of similarities with other rational moral frameworks, I believe that Cogitism is distinct in grounding value in the nature of consciousness itself rather than in preferences, utility, or consequences. Have fun tearing it apart!
(Edited to include the full essay text)
A Brief Clarification on AI Involvement
People often care very deeply that the involvement of AI in the production of a work is stated upfront, myself included, because the extent of AI involvement in a project and what shape that involvement takes provides useful context for its legitimacy. As a result I feel it is important to disclose and contextualize the involvement of such tools in this work as early as possible.
Over the period where I developed these ideas, much of that development took place in chats with LLMs (Claude, most often), which I used as a sounding board for my ideas. In these chats I gave these models explicit instructions to check my work and reel me in whenever it thought it saw a flaw in my reasoning. A lot of the time it's wrong in the analysis, and a lot of the time that's because it doesn't understand what I mean, but explaining why to the machine and getting it to understand tends to help me think through the problem more clearly than I could otherwise.
The ideas, words, and phrasing in these essays are my own; I am writing this after having solidified and used these ideas privately for half a year. AI models did not write any of this for me. In short, LLMs only had a hand in the development of these concepts as a really complicated, talking rubber duck.
Cogito Ergo Sum
There is only one fact that any individual can know for certain, beyond even the tiniest echo of a doubt: I Exist. Without first acknowledging one's own existence it is impossible to make any logical conclusions or form any stable beliefs about anything in the universe. If you did not exist, you could not think, and so it follows that thinking is itself proof of your own existence.
Of course, this is not a particularly original concept; the phrase "Cogito Ergo Sum" was first coined in the 1600s by the French philosopher René Descartes. However, despite the concept seeming self-evident and being relatively well-known in the modern day, I believe the reasoning is worth laying out here explicitly to ensure the foundations are solid.
Cogito takes care of base reality, but a moral framework cannot be constructed only from raw truth: to decide what one "should" do, a person needs to make value judgements, and for value judgements to be possible one needs to value something. As a result, Cogitism makes one additional presupposition: that the self, the only verifiable truth, has value.
These two fundamentals, the truth that "the self Is", and the belief that "the self Matters", make up the bedrock of Cogitism. From here we can begin to build a fully functional moral framework.
The Quality of Existence
We've established that the self exists and that it has value, but without the tendency for the self to change it's impossible for one to derive any direction from these principles; if nothing you do helps or harms the thing that holds value, then nothing you do holds any moral weight.
Luckily we know that the self has a tendency to change; simply by thinking and observing the self, a person can establish the knowledge that the self is plastic, and that one can sharpen or dull the fidelity of thought by taking different actions within oneself.
If thought is the quality that proves the self, and thinking can get more or less difficult moment to moment, one must presume that thinking could degrade to a point where the self could dissolve, or otherwise cease to exist.
Because the self is our basis for value judgements, and it is possible for the self to end, it stands to reason that any action which brings us closer to that end (incoherence) is negative, and any action that takes us further away from that end (coherence) is positive.
The Reality of the Environment
So far we have only operated within the limited scope of the self, but moral frameworks must account for interactions with reality outside the self. So, how do we prove that the environment exists in a way that matters?
Invoking "Cogito Ergo Sum" only proves the existence of the self, as an observer of one's own thoughts, so it stands to reason that any stimulus that cannot be directly proven by Cogito must be outside it. If external stimuli can be shown to affect the quality or coherence of the self, they must be real, as things that do not exist cannot have an effect on things that do.
By reflecting on oneself while interacting with perceived reality, a person can observe that the self does indeed change due to external stimuli. Thus, there must be a reality outside the self that is relevant to moral discussions.
Note that under this model, the specific ontological nature of reality does not matter. Whether the universe is a simulation, the hallucinations of a Boltzmann Brain, or truly the lowest and most fundamental "reality" that can exist, the fact that the environment can change the self means that it is real in the ways that count to us.
Consciousness and Value Outside the Self
Now that we have established the existence of a world outside the self, a person can observe that they exist within, or at least linked to, a mind and body. One's mind can be seen to have emotions, desires, and impulses, and the body can be seen outwardly expressing these things.
Going further outside the self, a person can see that they exist in a world with other bodies, built similarly, presenting similar emotions and expressing similar desires. Because we know our observations are caused by real phenomena, and because these other bodies are so similar to our own, one must presume that there are other selves present within those foreign bodies and minds.
One cannot deny that these other selves have value under the same principles by which we derive our own value, because confirmation of their existence and moral relevance was reached through the same observation and logic that confirmed our own existence. To do so would call into question the methods by which we assigned our own value, and in doing so, we would degrade our own coherence.
Because of this, all other selves determined to have moral relevance through these or similar methods must hold the same or similar value as the self under our moral framework. This means that despite Cogitism being rooted in the value of the self, self-sacrifice, selflessness, and altruism are coherent under this system.
Keeping all of our principles and observations in mind, and generalizing to allow for beings dissimilar to ourselves, we can derive a singular aim to act as an ethical north star and guide moral discussion:
To Preserve And Enhance The Stability And Coherence of Sapient Consciousness.
Cogitism In Short
In short, Cogitism derives its conclusions along the following lines:
By Observation, The Self Exists ▶ The Self Has Value ▶ By Observation, The Self Can Change ▶ Stability And Coherence Are Positive, Degradation Is Negative ▶ By Observation, An Environment Exists Outside The Self ▶ By Observation, Other Selves Exist Outside The Self ▶ These Other Selves Have Value ▶ To Generalize, All Sapient Consciousness Has Value ▶ One Must Preserve The Coherence Of Sapient Consciousness
It is my belief that in this way, Cogitism presents an ethical and moral framework built entirely from the nature of consciousness, through observations that any person can make, and it does this with no appeal to any tradition or authority except one's own awareness of the self.
While not made explicit in this essay, Cogitism can apply to beings outside the scope of humanity. Animals, which can be determined by the same methods to have internal experience, qualify (just not as strongly). In the same vein, extraterrestrial life and artificial intelligence can also qualify given that certain criteria are met.
It is my intention to expand on these concepts and to dive deeper into the various implications of Cogitism. These explorations will take the form of additional essays published to my site, and crossposted here if and when they're relevant to TheMotte.
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Notes -
@reo's comment made a good start and I just want to jump in and echo that "The Self Has Value" is doing a phenomenal amount of work for what amounts to a stipulation. It begs any number of absolutely vital questions, not least the validity of the concept of 'value' which at least needs to be defined before serving as such a critical building-block.
Really, I don't think I can comment on what follows that part without knowing what you mean by 'value'. And, cards on the table, I suspect that I'm gonna have problems with your definition.
That said I'd like to commend you for coming here and putting your thoughts out to the world for vetting. I think you've probably come to the right place, though I'm not sure the particular people who could serve you best will see this thread.
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i have a problem with "I exist". what is the "I"? where is it? is it entirely built upon something which is there in a group of cells or atoms or has it come from somewhere else? Like what some other traditions claim to be - individual consciousness is part of the Universal Consciousness (like Advaita Vedanta). You need to explain if the self is some real, separable entiry or a convenient fiction the thinking tells itself.
Another thing: the self who thinks, and judges, and values things is not derived from just that bag of atoms bounded by the skin. It has inherited all the values from its upbringing, culture, education and then made up of that. Since your Self has been shaped by external values, the moral conclusions it reaches are not derivations from first principles - they are built from externalities.
This takes us into the problem of Ship of Theseus. If you replace each atom of your body with another, does your Self remain the same? What will happen when all those replaced atoms are placed similarly in front of you? which one is the real You? Where is the limit between You and the external World? Is the 10 year old self the same as the 30 year old self? is the thinking of those two selfs same? what is the common ground that binds the self and thinking and their values? And which Self, the 10-year Self or the 30-year Self, your framework wants to preserve? And is the transition between them a moral success or failure of your framework?
I have not even gone to the next step of "The self has value". Because that takes us into an Is-Ought problem.
Another comment because hey why not:
"Cogito ergo sum" has always struck me as too generous. We can grant that something exists which (for the moment) believes itself to be ourselves, but that's not necessarily the same thing as our concepts of ourselves. I have been penguins, and so on, in my dreams.
Being is, and this conscious experience is the only access we have to it -- but as you say, that's a far cry from this thing I call 'me' existing in any meaningful sense. And that's before we get to questions about our memories, capacity for reason, or ability to observe ourselves.
from Burton Watson - The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (Book 2, last passage).
The point being "I" is not stable between a dream, when it was butterfly, and the woken up form of Chuang Chou. So, one cannot latch on to that unstable "I".
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FWIW this is close to my understanding as an Orthodox Christian as well, what with God being the seat of all consciousness. Our temporal existence is the ultimately-successful process of uniting with Him, though our perception of that is locally-limited for our protection (expulsion from the garden because in our current state the full perception of God would destroy us). David Bentley Hart, certainly one of the most prominent contemporary Orthodox thinkers, says fairly often that modern Christian understanding isn't Vedantic enough and we should be looking further into it. More and more I find myself quietly convinced of panpsychism.
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Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
I am approving your post. However, I am doing so with some hesitation, because it intersects kind of an ongoing concern, for which I will, with apologies, partially hijack this thread to mention.
This is a discussion site. The sidebar explicitly invites posts more-or-less like this one: related to philosophy, submission statement, appropriately outside the CW thread, etc. However new users with zero posts or comments here, pitching their blog rather than engaging directly, raises questions about the extent to which this is a discussion site as opposed to a click-farm for geek links (it would for example have counted more in your favor if you'd simply reproduced the entire blog post here, but submission statements are also, strictly speaking, okay, and of course better when linking other people's stuff you don't technically have permission to copy). In the era of ubiquitous generative AI, the problem is further complicated by our aim of being a discussion site for sapient users.
The mod team has not (yet?) really worked out a consistent response to this. We do have some interest in new users, it's healthy to the site and helps advance the foundation of the rules. So I'm approving the post, but I make no guarantees as to whether similar posts (from you or other fresh-rolled accounts) will be let through in the future. For whatever it is worth, if you had posted this after participating in discussion elsewhere on the site for a while, I'd likely have approved the post without further comment. Users with an established posting and comment history are an easier call and continue to be encouraged to post. This is a reputation economy!
Which raises the question, in the age of AI, what if users are sapient but not sentient? People are already eager to argue that their particular chatty-bot model which helps them out so much at work and in life is totes a thinking, intelligent entity.
That's as maybe, but I damn well deny they have feelings or experiences, no matter how much they pretend to be a person. Maybe in future, the test to post on here will not be "Are you sapient?" but rather "If I dropped a book on your toe, would it hurt? Do you even have toes?"
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