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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Shush. Don't be a nerd.
(I say, with complete self-awareness)
Anyway:
Epistemics
I wrote that after meeting this guy.
I'm not sure if the actual patient made a full recovery, but he wasn't even my patient. Not my circus, I just feel bad for the monkeys as one myself.
Like Sun pointed out, the existence of the self is the only thing that a sapient being can know for certain, but that doesn't mean that every sapient being will know it for certain.
As far as epistemics go, I think the point you're getting at is that decisions made under delusion can do more harm than good. But like you said we cannot be sure of our perceptions, and so every ethical action must be taken with the information we have, to the best of our ability; otherwise, how does one do anything? If ethics were dependent on accuracy of experience, and accuracy of experience is impossible to verify, you'd end up locked in an existential terror that you'll do the wrong thing, and you'd get nothing done.
The reason we help people with serious mental illnesses (and I'm assuming the following motivation is at least in part why you chose your profession, so correct me if I'm wrong) is because suffering is unpleasant, doubly so if it involves degrading the coherence of one's psyche, and we can see that suffering in others and decide that we want to do something about it. That is ethics in action, and it demonstrates all the requisite awareness needed for my framework to work.
When I say that "I exist", what is this "I"? Is it the mass of bodily sensations, emotional states, evolutionary programming, attitudes implanted by being raised in a certain culture, the society of the day, the historical moment in which this entity exists, subjected to and reacting to the ever-changing physical environment? Is it the screening manager put over this squabbling, shouting mass all demanding attention, the circus ringmaster over the monkeys that is called the "self"?
What exists? What can we say? A body moving through space, aging, fated to die. No more than this. What is the self? Who can say, who can know? Is the self a stone, or a reflection in the water that we mistake for the real thing?
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I agree that we must accept the epistemic uncertainty involved with being a computationally bounded entity without perfectly reliable sensory input or internal processing. But the point is that even if you do think that you're sane, from a pretty standard Bayesian perspective you could be wrong. Approximately 1% of people alive are schizophrenic or in acute psychosis at any given moment. That's the base rate, though you need to work through other things to achieve a reasonable posterior.
In other words, that's a pragmatic perspective, my point is that this is not safe to assume as a true axiom.
I have experienced cognitive distortions because of my depression, I knew that they were cognitive distortions, but I was powerless to change my perceptions or feelings. I consider myself perfectly sane, saner than most even. I am clearly not a solipsist, and my usual reaction to questions of metaphysics or philosophy is to read through them, shrug, and go on having a productive life. It's a low yield exercise I only do when I'm bored.
But that doesn't change things if we're going to do "real" philosophy.
Note that you said:
As a practicing Bayesian, that gave me a stroke.
Think of the dead you know. Where are they now? Where is that self-evident, knowably existent 'self' gone? If you've seen a dead body of a person you knew, you can see the change between "this is the body but the person is not there". Was it ever there to begin with?
Idk dawg, where do the photos on your phone go when you set it on fire? Dissipated into general entropy and set loose in the wider universe never to be reconstructed again. That's why I make backups, and intend to back up every part of me that can fit in a scanner.
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