Ethics is humanity’s confrontation with the unifying cosmic conflict, the immutable expansion of disorder, or entropy. As the material universe harnesses the otherwise ineluctable drift towards chaos, as sentient life harnesses environmental data into meaningful information to exist, humanity harnessed a novel signal. I propose that humanity’s cultural myth began behind the insignia of our accents. Giving way to the enduring ethical tale of us versus them, and subsequently, good versus bad.
Mythology, considered as a whole, is the eternal story of humanity’s quest for self-fulfillment in the face of entropy, the universal tendency towards disorder […] a universal human quest for identity and individuation. [Addressing the] assumptions that define a person, a family, or a culture – with the informing reality that resides at the center of being (Leeming 1990, 4–6).
David Leeming in World Mythology
Ethics, including our moral and conventional norms, reify the largely abstract socially constructed reality we inhabit. Sketched schematically, it consists of psychological group identities that establish behavioral expectations, or trust, while reputations signal adherence to or violation of that trust.
According to the Free Energy Principle, sentient organisms are statistical prediction machines that minimize uncertainty (Friston 2010), I propose that our moral sentiments originated in the negative affect we experience when perceiving behavior that violates the harmonious expectations of a perceived cohesive group identity (Barrett 2016). Symbolic cultural identification, our novel Markovian blanket (Kirchhoff et al. 2018), gave way to the recursively complex boundaries of anonymized social labels (Hogg 2000).
Ethics serves as the latticework of culture (J. Henrich 2016), our original and enduring group identity demarcated with accents (Kinzler 2021). The promise and peril of a gateway beyond genetic kin selection and intimate primate sociality lies in our instinct for Shibboleth (Moffett 2019).
Socrates was essentially correct when he equated virtue with information and vice with uncertainty (Grayling 2019). However, the Reductionist ideology he inadvertently inspired often forgets that information needs context (Haig 2020). Ethics represents humanity’s uncanny power to invent novel interpretations, imagining the settings that gives our world narrative structure (Fisher 1985). Seeding our free will, civilization, commerce, speech, song, and stories.
Aesthetics before Ethics
The world is process. The thing that we thought was I is nothing more than a social institution. [Each] organism is a transactional interchange between the organism and the environment. It’s all one process, a unified process. And furthermore, from this process there has disappeared what we thought was solidity. What we thought was common sense, substance and stuff- it’s just pattern.
That’s why the Hindus call the universe the Maya. Which means the illusion. Don’t forget illusion is related to the Latin word ludere- to play. So the play. Big act. It also means magic. As in a conjuror’s creation of an illusion. It also means creative power. It also means art.
Allen Watts
Any theory of human behavior needs to address an age-old philosophical conundrum. This is how hominoids are at once distinct from, yet indelibly part of the natural world. Another age old relevant question is how sentient life arose from inorganic physical matter. We need, in other words, a persuasive story of who we are and how we came to be.
I believe two modern theories, Cultural Evolution (See J. Henrich 2016; Heyes 2018; and Tomasello 2003) and the Free Energy principle (Friston 2010), when combined with the phylogenic theory of humanity’s symbolic identity (Moffett 2013), can answer these foundational metaphysical questions with a compelling narrative. Offering a persuasive account of the origins of life and humanity’s place within it. A story that connects our physiology and psychology in the language of information and uncertainty.
However, for this story to reach a compelling conclusion it needs to account for an omitted theme. One that has concerned philosophers from antiquity to modernity, along with most 3-month-old human infants (Bloom 2013, 8). We need to turn to Socrates who, along with other philosophers of antiquity, focused on ethics as the essential answer to the question of humanity’s distinction. Specifically, his view of morality as information (Grayling 2019, 63–64).
Cultural Evolution answers the riddle of humanity’s distinction by pointing to our ability to accumulate knowledge and knowhow across individuals and over generations. The fruits of our compounding information stores are exemplified in our cooking and hunting skills along with the tools we use to execute them (J. Henrich 2016).
The Free energy Principle is based on a neuroscientific view of organisms as statistical prediction machines that minimize the cosmic drift of environmental uncertainty using sensory data, or information, around a demarcated identity using environmental information (Friston 2010). As cultural evolution addresses our escape velocity from the animal kingdom, while the Free Energy principle connects organic life with inorganic physical matter and chemical reactions.
I believe these theories both focus on information and uncertainty in a way that represents a paradigm shift in Western thought. After Boltzman and Shannon appropriated these two words from the vagaries of every day speech and rigorously converted them to precisely quantified scientific concepts, a range of other disciplines were subsequently inspired. Biologists sought to understand the natural world and Economists sought to understand our markets through the lens of information.
Both disciplines, however, applied old Reductionist and Deterministic oriented paradigms, prevalent in the West, or more precisely WEIRD societies (J. P. Henrich 2020), to the novel insights around uncertainty and information. The embedded assumption is that their is an objective set of information within agents and systems that can exhaustively explains complex structure and behavior. Genetic code determines the intricacies of the natural world (Gleick 2011, 307) and prices determine the intricacies of economic resource allocation (Friedman 2008). The implication is that the resolution of relevant uncertainty is possible, and carried out by a specified set of information.
Cultural Evolution and the Free Energy Principle represent a shift of attention from particular agents and systems and their corresponding code to the relevant processes that brought them about. It turns out that the vagaries of our language as it relates to information and uncertainty have been insufficiently represented in their scientific definitions. In order for information to exist it needs a subject. The informational signals that construct the substance of reality and sentient life rely on interpretations (Haig 2020). These constitute the boundary conditions and attractors that are the causal forces of systems and complexity theories (Noble 2017; Arthur 2021; Lloyd 2001).
Entropy, roughly a quantified measure of disorder or uncertainty, according to the second law of thermodynamics cannot decrease in a closed system. This would seem a counter intuitive starting point to understand how something as seemingly organized as the material universe and sentient life originated. However, the only closed system that exists, to our knowledge, is the universe itself. All other systems are not just open (Noble 2017, 64), they only exist in the eyes of the beholder. The physical, biological, chemical, and social laws that govern reality are fundamentally relative.
Material existence is largely the product of the iterative appropriation of existing structures. An existentially foundational process proceeds when Information meaningful in one context is appropriated to serve the purpose of a novel one. According to some physical information amounts to order, patterns that contrast with pure randomness, such as the randomness predicted by Thermodynamics second law (Hidalgo 2015, Introduction). This keeps with Claude Shannon’s strictly quantitative definition of information. According to others however, information is indistinguishable from its meaning. It is defined rather as the selection of one from a number of possible interpretations (Haig 2020, 242).
As gasses and dust collapse into stars they can then serve as a focal point for a new system. At lower scales atoms are constructed of quanta, molecules are constructed of atoms, and the chemical reactions of are appropriated to establish a cellular identity. This foundational level of biology can be modeled as an enduring protein building institution. Each biological level constitutes a novel use of interpreted information, each identity is a new story. Harnessing the bounded randomness, or stochasticity observed in Brownian Motion to exist and reproduce. Physical structures are an alignment of movement, a fixed pattern that exists with mutual attraction or boundary conditions. Biology represents a more enduring alignment of goals and purposiveness. While this may amount to the unjustified anthropomorphizing of other beings, perhaps we should instead recognize humanity’s teleology is unique in degree and not kind.
My theory is that cultural identification, the instinctual and learned sense of belonging to a social unit that extends beyond the typical primate constraints of intimacy (Moffett 2019), serves as our Markovian Blanket (Kirchhoff et al. 2018). Our unique version of the boundary conditions that facilitate existence writ large.
Culture established a new context for understanding behavior, distinguishing us versus them. We then created new context, integrating intimate bands into an anonymous tribal society with reputations. Policing behavior with the shame and outrage towards deviants and accolades towards heroic adherents that willfully align under a common identity. The context of culture led to the development of ethical meaning, our cognitive and emotional capacity expanded within this setting for humanity’s narrative structure.
Humanity’s Default Mode Network (DMN), active when we ruminate, engage in moral rationalization and responsible for our emotional construction (Barrett 2016), I believe developed much of its unique capacity when our ancestors began labeling the physiological affective response to the behavior of their conspecifics, i.e., their fellow hunter-gatherers within their designated cultural boundaries. Specifically, the surprisal, the prediction error that followed perceived deviations from the expectations established anonymized, cultural identity. We dehumanized the outgroup and vilified the disloyal among our ingroup.
Behavior was given a new interpretation, in the first wave our behavior was that of a typical primate, in service of a its own well-being, that of its kindred, and that of its social in-group of intimates. However, with the new context of culture, the new story of a dilated and anonymized identity, behavior adopted a novel interpretation. Our new story began behind the boundaries of Shibboleth and used morality, expanding to conventions and ethical norms to accelerated what at its core is a physical, chemical, and biological process of creative construction.
Others have pointed to morality as a driver of our cognition (Dunbar 2009; Haidt 2001). We spend a great deal of time gossiping, in addition, the nature of our post-hoc rationalizing is consistent with the claim that our powers of abstract causal construction were significantly motivated by moral practice. However, they too often take an overly reductive view of our brain. They too neatly bifurcate our instincts and cognitive capacity, in a way that modern neuroscience, as visible with Active Inference does not.
The model of the triune brain has been falsified and proved misleading to our understanding of sentient life and humanity’s distinction (Barrett 2020, 17). Viewing instead the brain and nervous system as embodied, continuous with our bodily functions helps to see how morality cultivated both our sentiments and cognition.
Additionally, these theories, and the other researchers that take them at face value, focus too often on our dealings with intimates and genetic kindred. Missing, I believe, the true novelty of our moral sentiments and cognitive capacity.
Morality is able to promote cooperation amongst our conspecifics by cultivating the instinctual identification with symbolic social members. Reputational signals carry relatively little currency among those with abundant evidence of our behavior compared to those who might encounter us only in passing. The cultural conspecifics who we may need to engage with yet the only information we have of them are the anonymized signals of accents, uniforms, and gossip.
Mark Moffett claims we gained phylogenic distinction largely by forming anonymous societies (Moffett 2019). The labeling conspecifics as in versus out-group not only benefited us by directly increasing our social group size but also, I believe, provided a gateway into our moral, cognitive, and behavioral capacities, by creating our first narrative paradigm. Our ability to inhabit socially constructed settings that modify behavior by giving it new meaning.
Erich Jarvis asserts that high vocal production range is seldom seen in the animal kingdom due to adverse selection pressure from the predators whose attention an unusually pitched aria would acquire (Jarvis 2006). Suggesting our originally restricted voices served as reliable signal of provenance, initiating a cultural identity that stretched beyond kin and intimates.
Thus the signatures of our meekness became the insignia of cultural identification, both in a literal fashion as denoting our expanded social unit, but also in a figurative sense as a possibility for why we find the singing voice so beguiling. Combined with generalized behavioral norms that stemmed from our ethics, this also points to the origins of speech as well as song.
Many animals display altruistic behavior towards kin, fewer create fictive kin, fewer still imagine intimacy using symbols. Humanity imposes and internalizes behavioral constraints behind insignia. Our accents were the first symbolic boundary conditions and attractor of our ethical system. A system that laid the foundation for the web of institutional levels of identity, woven across cultural insignia that gave rise to our speech, commerce, song, and stories.
Central Paradox of Morality
Virtue itself, [Socrates] said, is knowledge. He thought that if one knew the right thing to do or be, one could not do or be otherwise; vice is ignorance, and ignorance makes vice possible. This means that the good life is the life examined and chosen; the ‘considered life’ (Grayling 2019, 63–64).
All organisms seek individual utility. Whether searching for food, shelter, social companionship or sex, single celled bacteria and the great Apes all seek what is in their own best interest. Humanity, according to Socrates, is doing likewise with morality and, more broadly, ethics. Given that morality represents humanity’s highest ideal, the attainment of moral virtue is simply a matter of information discovery, while vice represents uncertainty.
It is good to be morally good, so the only task is to find out how. This assertion points to a modern truth. Given that all of life is a quest for information, in a modern technical sense. Organisms ingest raw data through their senses and convert it into information necessary for their endurance.
Homeostasis relies on bodily predictions, computed on data inputs. It is the conversion of data into information within the context of the organism. Humanity is able to survive in its unique way only by sharing, acquiring, and processing streams of information related to its increasingly complex civilization. First and foremost an organism needs to avoid harm. For all morality’s complexity it to revolves around harm (Schein and Gray 2018). Reputations, the moral evaluation of behavior is humanity’s unique information stream.
Socrates, along with many other thinkers, understood that however highly we regard moral practice not only do its origins lie in something beyond itself, the lifeblood of morality is our instincts, passions, and sentiments. Although he did claim his wisdom primarily lied in acknowledging his ignorance, he did claim to know one subject well.
[T]he only thing I say I understand is the art of love. […] I know virtually nothing, except a certain small subject – love, although on this subject, I’m thought to be amazing, better than anyone else, past or present.
Socrates
What Socrates, Nietzsche, Smith, and Zhungzi understood, and what Plato and many other WEIRD thinkers often miss, is that morality is premised on feeling, not reason. This is the way that morality and ethics more broadly can be properly understood as information conceptually consistent with the Free Energy Principle and its Active Inference view of sentient organization as predictive models, and with Cultural Evolution’s view of human achievements are a result of the accumulation and distribution of knowledge and knowhow.
I believe the most relevant sentiments and passions that created and are master to our rational cognition, are founded in make believe. Virtue is virtual. Our belief in morality lies in our ability to psychologically inhabit an abstract community. One that inspires a sentimental attachment. Faith in cultural identification fostered the governance mechanisms, the symbolic codes of conduct necessary for its persistence.
This means that ethics is grounded in aesthetics, our social world is grounded in a morality that requires inspiration rather than strict rationalization and defies a strong bias in WEIRD thinking. Ironically, however, the limits of this bias have been charted more precisely than by WEIRD scientists themselves.
WEIRD Analytical Hubris
Plato appropriated Socrates’ eponymous inductive method of rational inquiry along with mathematics to understand morality and truth more broadly. Arguing against the sophists who claimed that morality and truth were strictly relative concepts that pertained to specified context.
The Ancient Grecian tradition of pursuing objective truths using the language and tools of mathematics stretches as far back as Pythagoras, who employed his skills in geometry to explain the previously ineffable pleasure of music by reducing it to numbers and ratios.
Greek cultural [initially] revered what we call nowadays Orphic thought […] and believed songs processed powerful magic. The rise of Pythagorean music theory, circa 500 BC, changed all that by conceptualizing music as a rational science of sounds that could be describe in mathematical terms (Gioia 2019, 49–57).
According to Joseph Henrich Western Civilization, or WEIRD Societies display a unique ideology that contrasts with the more gestalt, holistic orientation of the other settled societies of the globe. This partially explains why these philosophical figures of antiquity loom so large in the minds of WEIRD people.
The belief in the limitless power of rational inquiry and scientific analysis led to Descartes’ Reductionism, where he asserted truth lay in the isolated parts that constitute systems, from clocks to stars, from animals to people. An ideology that led to Newton and Laplaces’ Determinism.
Though they differed in their scientific conclusions, these revered thinkers of Western Civilization shared the common conceit that all objects can be reduced, understood and predicted. Although Reductionism is defined at times more broadly to mean simply that larger things are caused by properties and interactions of their smaller parts (Haig 2020, 311), sticking to the strawman definition is useful in diagnosing a flaw in Western thinking.
The ironic culmination of this flaw are two selfish theories that became prevalent and influential during the 20th century. Biologists reduced the complexity of life to a selfish genes and Economists reduced the complexity of our market system to selfish individuals.
An important take away of these theories is the marginal role of sociality and specifically, human morality. If all phenotypes are reducible to genetic code, as the Neodarwinists theory claims, than all social organization is motivated by the degree of genetic relatedness, or kin-selection. If all of humanity’s economic value is quantified in a price system, as implied by Neoclassical Economics, then there is little need for a moral or ethical framework.
However, these selfish theories are most persuasive as Reductio ad Absurdum. They prove that nature along with the social reality of our nations and markets are irreducible to genes or individuals. The Reductionist boon to our understanding of life, the cosmos, and ourselves provides the conceptual language that allows researchers now focused on complexity and systems to enrich the templates of their theories (Lloyd 2001). The boundary conditions and attractors that permit the conditioned rising of the emergent structural patterns of our subjective reality follow from analysis of static equilibrium models of nature, society and human civilization.
As naive as their original authors were, those that followed through on the implications of their assumptions arrived at useful falsifications. The new interdisciplinary field of complexity theory is enriched by the ruins of reductionist thought. The universe and life are not deterministically encoded. They are an interwoven in a dance of biological levels, economic institutions, and psychological identities. All observed systems are irreducibly complex and enabled against the backdrop of increasing universal uncertainty.
The absurdity of the selfish gene theory helps emphasize that the biosphere is not the sole product of a privileged individuated gene. The biosphere is awash in teleology, goal oriented behavior that contextualizes environmental data into meaningful information. Dennis Noble emphasizes the ubiquity of selfishness, or relative purposiveness throughout the biosphere. For every level, there is a goal.
A level is a functional entity with goals and natural ability to achieve those goals. The level of a cell, for example, exists because cells are integrated functional entities with properties that emerge as the interactions of their component parts within the constraints exerted by the cell as a whole. Emergent [properties that include] circadian and cardiac rhythms. These emergent properties not only characterise what a cell is, they also constrain […] the component, e.g. molecular, parts to conform to the goals of the cell. It is through these meaningful constraints that the behaviour of the whole can be said to display natural purposiveness (Noble 2017, 176).
Dennis Noble
The absurdity of an economic model that relies on selfish and omniscient individuals foregrounds the importance of uncertainty, social information and institutional identification that gives rise to the necessary wisdom for the innovation, growth, and prosperity we observe in our economic system. These same forces also give rise to the negative expectations and mistrust that results in recession, inequality and stagnation. The market is a social institution bound within humanity’s greater ethical values, constraints, and attractors.
The reductive misconception reached a fever pitched during the twilight of the last century. Its persistence however has prompted at least three former economic philosopher kings, central bankers, to speak out against it its continuity:
Markets are essential to progress, to finding solutions to our most pressing problems, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. Market are social constructs, whose effectiveness is determined partly by the rules of the state and partly by the values of society[…] Individuals and their firms must rediscover their sense of solidarity an responsibility for the system. (Carney 2021)
Humans, uniquely, produce artefacts of extraordinary complexity and are able to do so only by the successful development of networks of trust, cooperation and coordination. Market economies function only by virtue of being embedded in a social context. Sensible – adaptive – public policy and business strategy cannot be determined by quantitative assessments of policies and projects, made by an industry of professional modellers using probabilistic reasoning (Kay and King 2020, 17).
Selfish theories in the end provide the relevant boundaries of our moral practice. Game theory, originally used by Reductionists to demonstrate the challenges of cooperation among selfish agents, in the end demonstrated that the potential gain in the achievement of cooperation represents the interdependence evident in any complex system. The game is won, in short, using information. Just as primates coalesce using individual intimacy, just as cells exploit the protein connexon to communicate their internal milieu through gap-junctions, humanity solved its prisoners dilemma through the information provided by information (Levin and Dennett 2020).
Oliver Scott Curry specifically uses Game Theory to confirm the widely held philosophical starting position that morality is a tool for cooperation (Curry 2016). According to Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray we solve this prisoners dilemma with an instinct to to guard potential victims against intentional harmful behavior (Gray, Schein, and Cameron 2017). They also contend that morality is adjacent to conventional norms. Together with the assertion from Paul Bloom and others that moral sentiments are present in young children suggests that not only are we more than the selfishness of our genes and our material preferences (Bloom 2013) , our morality and human achievement is continually in conflict with temptations to overgraze the commons.
Morality, the a set of informational signals that establish behavioral expectations facilitating the profitable cultivation of social commons, is fundamental to our humanity. However, for anything to qualify as information it fist needs a context. Although the value of information content can be quantified it first needs to be qualified.
The Subjective Whole
[A]ll that exists consists of interpretations. We cannot establish any fact, “in itself”: it may even be nonsense to desire to do such a thing. “Everything is subjective,” ye say: but that in itself is interpretation. […] The sphere of a subject increasing or diminishing unremittingly, the centre of the system continually displacing itself; in the event of the system no longer being able to organise the appropriated mass, it divides into two (Nietzsche and Ludovici 2019, 166).
Nietzsche
Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deidra, inspired the same Reductively oriented civilization to question the quest for objectivity. They recognized the limits of traditional scientific analysis and rational inquiry based on reductive conceits. Favoring instead Holism and other philosophical orientations that contrasted with Reductionism in focusing on the process by which objects come to be rather than the objects as they are and happen to have become. Finding that information, understanding, and the reduction of uncertainty depends entirely on the observer. Meaning itself is crucial for the existential reality we inhabit, yet it is not objectively true. It instead represents the interpretation of emergent subjects.
This philosophical orientation spawned new fields of science, including one that focuses on the most perplexing of subjects known to exist, the human mind. Psychologists have since forced the Western World, or more precisely WEIRD societies, to confront the recurrent themes of individual perspective. Researchers from existing and novel fields were encouraged to shift focus from the pursuit of existing structures to the process of construction. Cybernetics, inspired perhaps by the holistic movement but also by humanity’s own practice of constructing machines and mechanical homeostats have insisted that what emerges in the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Mark Moffett, a biologist who was significantly by psychologists in recognizing the social organization in the animal world. Often beyond what his reductionist oriented colleagues tend to acknowledge.
[T]he idea of describing societies in terms of membership, with its implications of ingroup and outgroup, which I adopt from psychology, is unconventional in biology. My colleagues routinely have an aversion, rarely mentioned explicitly, to talking about societies (Moffett 2019, Introduction).
According to Moffett while social units do not optimize on cooperation, they do achieve a level of ‘rudimentary cooperation’ by surpassing the minimum threshold that in-group members are not allowed to harm one another. Primates solve a natural prisoners dilemma, specifically using individual intimacy. Apes and Bonobos inhabit social units that are constrained by the number of conspecifics each individual primate can remember.
[S]ociety is a discrete group of individuals amounting to more than a simple family — more than one or both parents with a single brood of helpless offspring — whose shared identity sets them apart from other such groups and is sustained continuously across the generations. (Moffett 2019, Section I)
According to the Free Energy Principle a primate social unit is a Markovian Blanket. Using the information of individual intimacy to bind otherwise disparate agents under an organized whole. In Dennis Nobel’s perspective of Biological Relativity, a social unit represents a distinct level of organization (Noble 2017, 176) .
Moffett goes on to assert that humanity parted ways from our early primate relatives using accents to demarcate conspecifics. Given early hominoids were meek prey fleeing ferocious predators of the Pleistocene our vocal range was limited. Erich Jarvis asserts that high vocal production range is seldom seen in the animal kingdom due to adverse selection pressure from the predators whose attention an unusually pitched aria would acquire (Jarvis 2006).
Suggesting our originally restricted voices served as reliable signal of provenance, initiating a cultural identity that stretched beyond kin and intimates. Thus the signatures of our meekness became the insignia of cultural identification, both in a literal fashion as denoting our expanded social unit, but also in a figurative sense as a possibility for why we find the singing voice so beguiling.
Not only does the vocal variation exhibited in operas and choirs represent the cooperative gain that followed a shared identity and prompting our upward march through the food chain, it also represents the selection pressure we place on one another. Katherine Kinzer has emphasized the harmful and powerful legacy of our shibboleth (Kinzler 2021) . We are more psychologically prone to course-grain our conspecifics with accents then any other audible or visual markings, including race and even gender. Hence we likely evolved, at least early on, to reserve our trust for those whose accents were reliable insignia.
The Infinite Dyad
We all live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains. Nothing in physics or chemistry determines that you’re leaving the United States and entering Canada […] Studies show that wine tastes better when people believe it’s expensive. Coffee labeled ecofriendly tastes better to people than identical, unlabeled coffee. Your brain’s predictions, steeped in social reality, change the way you perceive what you eat and drink. You and I can create social reality with other people without even trying, because we have human brains. To the best of our knowledge, no other animal brain can do that—social reality is a uniquely human ability (Barrett 2020, 82).
Shibboleth provided, in this view, the earliest instance of what psychologists call a social group identity. According to Michael Hoggs we latch onto group identities with greater eagerness in times of uncertainty (Hogg 2000). Given that uncertainty is the foundational conflict in the drama of life and reality itself, the social group identities we collectively construct serve as a powerful element in humanity’s existential arsenal.
However, the fact that these group identities are symbolic in nature they are inherently vulnerable to intentional deceit, lackluster affirmation, or simply authentic ignorance. A constructed culture therefore needs reliable reification. This is where I believe the Socratic notion of virtue with information, or more importantly, vice with uncertainty, proves remarkably prescient.
Lisa Feldman Barrett frames humanity’s emotional experience using Active Inference, the same neuroscientific view used in Free Energy. Framing the brain and nervous system as statistical prediction machines that resolve uncertainty (Barrett 2016). Our emotions are not, as Plato envisioned and those that abide the classical view of emotions still maintain, reflective of hardwired circuitry. They are constructed from a more generalized feeling of affect used by many organisms to budget bodily resources.
We leverage the Default Mode Network of our brain and nervous system to symbolically label these lower level feelings. As we tagged our conspecifics as out versus in group, we created the cognitive capacity to acquire and share a cultural taxonomy of the 4 dimensional gradient of our affective experience. Better understanding our interior as well as exterior worlds. I believe the starting point for what is indeed a universal trait of humanity, our rich emotional lives, began with moral outrage.
Our moral instincts are an outgrowth of a social instinct shared with our primate relatives. While Apes and Bonobos achieve what Moffett calls rudimentary cooperation, i.e. not harming in group members, humanity took its solution to the prisoners dilemma a few steps further. According to the Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM), another application of psychological construction to human epistemology, our moral instincts seek to minimize perceived harm (Gray, Schein, and Cameron 2017).
It is a system of establishing norms based on the likelihood of harm, particularly by a willful agent against a vulnerable victim. Curry’s Theory of Morality as Cooperation (MAC) and TDM both leave open questions around whose victimhood we prioritize enough to incur the cost of moral outrage. Applying punishment is costly in terms of time and energy but also it can impose physical harm towards oneself. Yet humanity does instinctively absorb this cost.
I believe we solve our prisoners dilemma, that we win the theory of the game by establishing the trusted boundaries of social institutions. We inhabit a superordinate Markovian blanket, an abstract biological level of organization, or a psychologically constructed identity. This blanket is typically drawn in cognitive science around an individual’s skin. We homeostatitically maintain an individuated structure within a physical environment. However we operate within other levels. As Krichoff, Friston and others note, a Markovian blanket can range from the level of a cell to a socially defined net. In our case, I believe, we step up a wider, in principle, boundless net with culture.
The Cultural Identification that enables our practice of depersonalization, and more grimly, dehumanization, allows the more general practice of what Hoggs and other social identity theorists call entitization (Hogg 2000). The skill we gained in reducing people to a label allowed us to generalize this practice, initially labeling emotions, and going on to label ingroup members as deviants and group behaviors themselves as the work of deviants.
Schein and Grey, proponents of TDM, note that while harm minimization is an important component of moral norms, conventions remove this component but keep the other elements in tact. Allowing us to create rules that do not prevent direct harm but are of great utility. Allowing games, rituals, markets, political governance, etc. This iterative cycle of norm creation and visceral and ultimately codified enforcement led to our system of ethics.
Insignia of Speech and Freedom of Song and Stories
This system permitted the generalization of behavioral norms and rules that was applied to a wide range of cultural practice, from cooking, to sex, from hunting to child rearing. It was also applied to our original cultural insignia. Language follows from these essential components of identity, symbolic attractors and abstract constraints.
Given that language is a set of semantic and grammatical rules applied to vocalizations. I believe speech was preceded by our moral sentiments and ethical constraints. You need not have a word for a moral violation to label it, moral norms can, albeit with greater effort, be taught to young children through gesticulation and tone. The same may have been true for our ancestors. However it does need sentiments, and sentiments need instinctual attachment.
Of all the cultural institutions that arose from our ethical system and malleable symbolic identities religion of course stands out. Candace Alcorta and Richard Sosis distinguish humanity’s religious rituals from non-human rituals specifically using the combination of our emotions with abstract symbols (Alcorta and Sosis 2005). However religious and other institutions of human mythology are a subsets I believe of more foundational institutions. Singing and storytelling take firm precedence.
The psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister writes that ‘Life is change that yearns for stability.’ Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger . It’s a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, constriction, release, unexpected change and moral outrage. Story is a thrill – ride of control (Storr 2020, 206).
Walter Fisher, motivated in part by refuting the rational paradigm, i.e. homo economicus central to Neoclassical’s selfish theory, promoted the idea of a narrative paradigm. That humanity communicates fundamentally using stories. It is our most instinctual and persistent form of undrestanding our world. This is not just a historical fact that follows our phylogeny, but given the work of David Haig, it follows an existential necessity.
We need context for rationality. Rationality is only meaningful given observed, stated, or inferred assumptions of goals and values. Goals need not, and indeed cannot remain stable a dynamic environment. Our instinctual sentiments can be rational if they are pursuant to the context of an organisms proximate goals (Barrett 2020, 24). Inventing context, turning cultural archetypes, reputational identities, into specific characters is the practice of story telling (Storr 2020). Just as shibboleth instinctually imagines intimacy stories do so with greater complexity and a higher degree of abstraction.
The powerful yet fantastical notion of the primacy of virtue did indeed earn humanity its distinction. Humanity cultivates the commons, turning tragedy into triumph, or at least a comedy, with morality. Ranging from our visceral sentiments of range towards those who overgraze communal pastures or, more precisely, harm the vulnerable amongst the community within which we identify, to the cognitively refined codes of ethics we install around our coveted religious, civic and economic institutions. Uniformed judges and police officers, robbed monks and priests, marketing brands and packaged labels, all are product of our social ethical framework. Giving us a lasso on the central existential conflict that extends to all sentient beings and reality itself.
Paradox of Entropy & Morals
Plato argued fiercely against the Sophists, a prevalent school of thought, who claimed morality as primarily relative, i.e. that what is morally good is what is good for a specific community. He instead took the view of moral objectivity, what is morally good for one person is good regardless of which community or culture this person belongs. These two poles have persisted as the Western World’s framing of moral philosophy, culminating in the moral philosophies of Kant’s deontology that contrasts with Stuart Mill’s consequentialism (See Greene 2013).
It is tempting to conflate Socrates and Plato, given the latter used the former as a mouth pieces in his philosophical dialogues. However one way to distinguish him is by what is known as the Socrates Paradox. During his famous Apology, he says:
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; where as I, as I do not know anything, so do not fancy I do.
Socrates
What this quote gets at, combined with the notion that Socrates equated virtue with information and vice with uncertainty, is that there is an element of morality which is both unknown and unknowable. It correctly calls out a truth, albeit one with not obvious explicitly implications for moral judgement, of our moral practice at a metaphysical level.
This is that morality is rich with what appears as paradox. From a naturalistic and evolutionary perspective, its purpose is largely to divine the true intentions of conspecifics, yet the authenticity of an agent’s character is muddied by the anticipation of threats and punishments that are also fundamental to moral practice. Additionally, morality is notionally a set of objective behavioral preferences that seek to optimize cooperation, however this cooperation is relates to a particular community and the challenges faced therein (Curry 2016).
This paradoxes emerge in our attempt to apply reason to our passions. Morality is at its core a feeling, a sentiment. A sentiment that motivated our rationality. I believe it operates in a way very much inline not only with Pan, our nearest extant relatives in the animal kingdom, but is adjacent with an emerging existential metaphysics. Ethics is contiguous with the themes of existence. We can better understand the apparent paradox of morality and its understated relevance by looking towards the story of our universe as told by the science of heat, language, and the emerging interdisciplinary field of complexity.
Subjective Illusion of Objects
Active Inference, Predictive coding, and other similar neuroscientific theories of sentient life places the expansion of uncertainty at the heart of understanding sentient life. Morality, and ethics more broadly, can be usefully framed likewise under this similar cosmic backdrop.
Our ethical system is a set of inspirational insignia and behavioral constraints that relate to the welfare of a specified set of individuals, a community, yet they rely on an illusion of objectivity. The object is the abstracted culture a given moral agent inhabits. The same principle of locally bound laws applies to our solar system, atoms, matter itself, and single celled bacteria and multicellular organisms.
The universe began as a unified, singular, and organized mass. Following the big bang matter and energy have since been on an immutable drift of increasing disorder, or uncertainty, towards an inevitable chaotic equilibrium. This is the statistical mechanical view of the second law of thermodynamics. This drift however leads to the central paradox of entropy, a paradox that gives way to the complex structure necessary for the origins and evolution of life, including humanity’s practice of cultural evolution.
One answer to the origin of complexity is surprisingly simple. There are forces between objects. Some forces – like gravity and the opposite poles of magnets – attract, while others – like the positive poles of two magnets – repel. If we could turn the clock back and distribute the matter of the universe evenly, the particles would immediately start their dance of attraction and repulsion. As they do so they inevitably form networks of interactions. No particle would initially be in a privileged position, but as they attract each other they would congregate to form clumps. Once that happens we break the symmetry of a perfectly uniform universe. Those clumps would form initially as clouds and then as stars and planets.
There is a continual ‘becoming,’ described by some philosophers as conditioned arising. These are processes with ever more possibilities arising, because each arising forms the conditions for many others (Noble 2017, 74–75).
As matter and energy disjointed, where the location of any given part of what was once a unified whole became increasingly uncertainty with respect to others, certain parts became more closely associated with others. Some material began to stick together while others were repelled. Particles with enough attractive cohesion formed the boundary conditions that served as a bulwark against their more excitable counterparts. Giving way to structure, or so it seems.
the arrow of complexity—the growth of information—that marks the history of our universe and species. Billions of years ago, soon after the Big Bang, our universe did not have the capacity to generate the order that […] we all take for granted. Since then, our universe has been marching toward disorder, as Boltzmann predicted, but it has also been busy producing pockets that concentrate enormous quantities of physical order, or information (Hidalgo 2015, Introduction).
Complexity, with its paradoxical implications on the direction of cosmic uncertainty is born of the lodestones and boundaries that emerge. Asteroids, planets, stars, and galaxies are all thermodynamic systems that resist the pull towards uncertainty, yet due so as a sort of illusion. The structure that appears requires perspective. The emergence of subjectivity lies in the unequal drift towards the inevitable chaotic end state. Dust collected along the journeyed descent only constitutes structure at a given perspective.
The only objective universal truth, according to this world view, is the immutable drift towards chaos. The only material structure, the only reality, is interpreted, it is subjective. Boltzmann first discovered entropy using the subjective attributes of volume and temperature. What he found essentially, however, is that volume and temperature are simply statistical descriptions of what is happening at a lower, more fundamental level. Particles are moving and shaking, when they find common attractors or bound behind constraints they appear at least as physical structure.
According to physicist David Haig the requirement of subjective interpretation is analogous to Derrida’s assertion as it relates to literary theory.
Shannon information quantifies the reduction of uncertainty for a receiver observing a message relative to other messages it could have been. The larger the set of possible messages, the greater the reduction in uncertainty. Perhaps a better formulation would be to say that information measures the reduction of uncertainty of an interpreter observing one thing rather than other things it could have been. […] Information has meaning for an interpreter when it is used to achieve an end. The proximate end of the interpretative process is an interpretation of the information (Haig 2020, 242).
Matter acts as information if it reduces uncertainty, i.e. invokes one path among alternatives. The physical presence of shared meaning gave way to the chemical synthesizing that laid the foundation of self-reproducing systems. The origins of life lie in dichotomous, love and hate relationship with earths most life bearing substance, water.
According to the hydrophobic-polar model monomors that were the former curled inward in a aquatic environment, forming non-convergent structures that harassed the central pardox of entropy, complexity (Guseva, Zuckermann, and Dill 2017). The interesting structural formations that harnasses the morphic nature of water. Liquid-liquid phase seperation, the synchronized line dancing of water molecules into different chemical states decreases entropy in these proto cellular environments (Brangwynne et al. 2009). Even before membranes served as a physical boundary condition.
Cultural identification allows humanity to impose structure around its social milieu. Interpreting our conspecifics initially as us versus them, and subsequently as good versus evil. Morality and group belonging are our interpretations. Just as the law of gravity is contingent on a planetary subject that falls within a star’s orbit, our ethical norms apply to our subjective cultural identification.
Although many have asserted the power of cultural evolution, our ability to acquire and share knowledge across individuals regardless of kinship or even intimate connections, and across generations by passing out memes through song, stories, and written speech, however as Cecile Heyes notes many of the explanations its origins simply point to learned and not instinctual behaviors.
Heyes herself points to morality, along with Lisa Feldman Barrett’s constructionist view of emotions as a possible starting point (Heyes 2018, 220). In my view most have failed to connect cultural evolution with the psychology of group identification. It is this psychology that I believe offered the seedbed of moral sentiment, language, and practice.
Moral Cognition
Morality represents a perplexingly broad field of human thought and experience. On one hand it has engaged the best minds since the dawn of civilization. On the other hand it is perhaps the most universal of all human experiences. No other animal seems to engage in this distinctive practice, as we would intuitively define it, yet we exhibit moral preferences as early as scientists manage to confirm.
This gives credence to those enlightened members of antiquity, including Socrates, who suggested that morality is the cause of our distinction. Specifically it is an independent phylogenic driver of our cognition, empowering our ability to embody the abstract identities central to our social existence. My claim that morality primarily served this function is made clear by looking at the boundaries of morality, who is and who is not the object of our instinctual altruism.
At 3 months old we avoid morally deviant puppets, at 6 months old we even reprimand them for their bad behavior (Bloom 2013). At 14 months we share food altruistically. At 2 years old we begin to distinguish between conventional rules,(Warneken and Tomasello 2009) like those of a game, and moral universals like not harming an innocent victim. Morality researcher Paul Bloom suggests that certain elements of our moral practices, what we might call early or proto moral sentiments are instinctual, genetic, as opposed to learned:
What I am proposing […] is that certain moral foundations are not acquired through learning. (Bloom 2013, 8)
What I believe is the most important revelation Bloom points to are the limits of our kindliness. Our generosity knows bounds:
[C]hildren show little spontaneous kindness toward strange adults Now, some of the studies […] do find kind behavior — such as helping — toward adults who aren’t friends or family, but […] adults in these studies aren’t actually that strange. […] My bet is if there were no prior positive interaction at all — if the adult were a true stranger at the moment that he needed help — then there would be little or no spontaneous kindness on the part of the child (54).
Given the evolutionary pressure against strictly random altruism, it is not surprising that we have some mechanism to establish trust, to direct our willingness to incur the immediate costs of cooperation while awaiting its uncertain future benefits. Bloom suggests that the origins of morality lies in the relations of our intimacy. This might be broadly true, given that we evolved from creates at least closely similar to apes and bonobos, both of whom exhibit prosocial behavior. However what he and others do not appreciate is the inherent constraint around cooperating only with a group of intimates.
Richard Dunbar suggest that elements of moralizing behavior play an important role in the phylogeny of our cognition (Dunbar 2009). His Social Brain Hypothesis points to the amount of time humans spending gossiping. Yet he also suggests that the relevant social units are confined to intimates. Not only do you have to explain then, why human societies manage to exceed Dunbar’s number of 150, this theory needs to explain why the remainder of Pan never achieved human level cognition, despite that they also inhabit similarly large societies.
Joseph Henrich, who posits the Cultural Brain Hypothesis, emphasizes two pathways that explain how we began the auto-catalytic marched towards civilization and abstract cognition (Muthukrishna et al. 2018). One is the Knowledge and know how path way, the view that we leveled up our cognition by socially selecting for those among us that could acquire and share knowledge across individuals and over time. The practical information acquired, manipulated and passed on in a cultural environment made it worthwhile for our ancestors to develop ever larger brains (J. Henrich 2016, 300–305).
The second pathway involves managing the cost incurred in supporting the cognitive processing of cultural knowledge. Pair bonding and extensive interpersonal, and intergroup relationships allowed us to support the longer gestation periods and also enabled our ancestors to manage the socio-cultural environment that sprang around them.
He points to kin-selection as the pathway that achieved both the social units that acquired the necessary knowledge and also set the rules that dictated the norms, including encouraging extended family members to care for infants. Many agrarian societies include extensive kin based institutions, i.e. clans, that promote cultural cooperation.
Henrich draws on the Selfish Gene theory, i.e. that indivuals are genetic vessels and hence cooperation at the level of the individual is attributable to genetic relations, to explain this level of social coordination. Kin Selection is captured in the quip from proponent J.S. Haldane that he “would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousin”
However, many of the kin-based institutions he describes are arbitrary, they are essentially a cultural fiction. Used to create the illusion of connection rather the direct evolutionary of preference for genetic kinship, gene-culture co-evolution relied on a separate pathway that favored not only similar genes, but genes and gene expressions that favored social in group primate members. Importantly learning to distinguish outgroup members, and also empowering the heirarchy of insitutions. Any primate social unit by definition, extends beyond a single genetically related brood. This means that there has always been an element of group selection that followed more broad identification.
The Social Brain and Cultural Brain Hypothesis each have their merit, yet fail to sufficiently emphasize the relevance of the individual ability and tendency to identify with the relevant cultural social unit itself. The unit whose boundaries gave way to the moral sentiments and emotional construction process at the heart of our cogntive and psychological capacity for civilization.
The greatest error that follows from failing to acknowledge Moffett’s notion of Imagined Communities is the notion that our moral signals evolved to inform our social intimates. Hanson’s interpretation of Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH) is correct, it does imply a type of motivated conniving at the center of the moral arms race that led to our cognitive capacity. However, if this signaling was primarily motivated to allow our ancestors to exist in anonymous societies, as Moffett asserts, then our signaling is at least cossetted within a band of intimates. Intimates, who would be less susceptible to moral trickery and deceptions. They have, after all, direct evidence of the integrity of our moral behavior.
My theory is that the policing of intimate band members to ensure coordination with the greater tribe, curring favor with the greater tribal society and earning the subsequent political currency for the collective band and/or the band leaders, carried our initial negative affective surprisal of in-group harm into full blown abstract sybmolic morality.
Not just about the Gene
Kin Selection within the Cultural Brain Hypothesis and gossiping among intimates in the Social Brain hypothesis are solutions to the question of how natural selection allowed the phenomenon of altruism, particularly how humanity itself seems to have, at least at times, avoided the Tragedy of the Commons. Garrett Hardin demonstrated the danger of resources that lack properly specified property rights, positing that a shared area for pasture would be difficult for selfish actors to maintain without some form of external behavioral regulation. Each member of the community has an incentive to over graze to benefit their own cattle at the expense of others, with the result that the pasture becomes overused and ultimately unusable. No one benefits.
However, what these conclusions miss firstly is the fact that the problem of cooperation and altruism persists throughout nature, and at all levels. Although these theories understand the importance of information in understanding the organization at the center of sentient life and the biosphere, privileging one source of information misses the ubiquity of information in the natural world.
The same problem can be illustrated using the Prisoners Dilemma, where each of two prisoners has an incentive to cheat on one another, giving up their erstwhile confederate to the police even though they would be better off if they both stayed silent, if they both privately cooperated. This problem, though framed as turning on short run and long run gain, and the problem with selfish interest, can be thought of instead using a lens of information.
Although morality represents a unique human solution to the problem of behaving altruistically given the uncertain promise of future gain but certain and often immediate cost, it is one that echoes to sentient organization itself. According to Dennis Noble and others, life itself would not exist if formerly distinct matter failed to coalesce and cooperate in service of high level goals. Cells can process infromation such as the rays of life to determine the function of genetic material producing the Circadian Rhythm. The cells of the heart are in a coordinated network.
Multi-cellular organisms only exist, for example, because formerly free wheeling, independent bacteria were subordinated into a cooperative, interdependent unified distinct organism. Michael Levin and Daniel Dennett framed the solution using information. At some point nature happened upon the protein connexon, that allowed cells to share their internal milieu, the data or information of their inner workings and thus remove the ability to cheat.
The cooperation problem and the problem of the origin of unified minds embodied in a swarm (of cells, of ants, etc) are highly related.
The key dynamic that evolution discovered is a special kind of communication allowing privileged access of agents to the same information pool, which in turn made it possible to scale selves. An important implication of this view is that cooperation is less about genetic relatedness and much more about physiological interoperability (Levin and Dennett 2020).
The protein connexons can be viewed as a data share, or in Hardin’s hominoid focused commons framework, as watchful spying eyes that proliferate over our communities. Concepts that we call trust and reputation allow us to solve what scientists technically call, iterative game theories, to overcome the information gaps that challenges cooperative behavior and allow for the profitable yield of sustainable commons.
Mark Moffett makes a equivalent argument in explaining social organization across the biosphere from insects to primates. Ants use chemical signals to distinguish in and out group members while primates use individual intimacy. Each primate must possess knowledge of Although the goal of the social units is not to optimize cooperation, meaning that all agents do not possess the same goals. Many often intensely compete. However this competition is constrained, a constraint that amounts to cooperation. i.e. by first doing no harm.
The probability of future gain while working with a trusted intimate or a respected member of the community, that is, one with a favorable reputation, or the member of a group or clan with a favorable reputation increases. In sufficient rolls of the socio-evolutionary dice, this creates a better ecological and ultimately material pay off in the fullness of time using moral information.
The natural problem that morality solves is uncertainty. Uncertainty relates to not just their fellow community members but which community they belong to, the values that their community espouses, and what these values imply about their future behavior.
Primatologist Chris Boehm notes that our egalitarian morality has roots in what notionally appears as unremarkable primate social behavior. A diminutive ape can approach a more ferocious competitor feeling simultaneously afraid and enraged. This dual affective experience becomes the seedbed for political coalitions (Boehm 2012).
The plurality of subservient agents to coalesce under their shared feelings and impose together what they were unable to do individually. The group alpha ultimately subordinates his or her behavior in deference to the multitude out of the social governance that is outgrown from the seemingly simple substrate of what we hominoids would call conflicting emotions. Acknowledging that taking on an alpha would likely incur a large cost yet not doing so would incur, over the longer run, a greater cost allows for more complex social behavior. This pan complexity, Boehm suggests, is adjacent to the egalitarian mores practiced by their more meek relatives.
The element that is often missed I believe is that these moral concepts achieve cooperation by affirming a shared identity. Under this view the problem is not me versus you but who is serving their own interest without conflicting with the broader interests of the community. Even communitites of Apes and Bonobos are able to embody the conflict of immediate and long run concerns by existing in an intimate band. If all these resources serve unified body, a boundlessly broad family, one within which the relevant moral actors reside, there is not necessarily a violation of self interest.
In order to reap the benefits of cultural evolution, where we share and acquire knowledge across space and time, we needed to expand beyond our intimates. That was our only route to defeating the ferocious beasts of the Pleistocene that stood comfortably above us on our food chain (Jarvis 2006). Fortunately for us, this, selection pressure gave us a reliable signal of our provenance. Giving us the accents to identify one another. Morality served to ensure that group members behaved, reputations offered additional pressure to abide the illusory, or psychologically tethered group identification.
Psychological Structure
Nietzsche understands modern science and even more our technology as the triumph of the Socratic understanding of reality. The human capacity to know is here made the measure of reality. What is real is equated with what we can grasp or comprehend. But we can grasp and comprehend only what has a certain hardness and endures (Harries 2015, p 5-6).
While the dialectic method Socrates employed to uncover the essence of moral virtue managed to inspire a civilization to pursue rigorous scientific inquiry for understanding morality and knowledge more generally, others began to recognize the limits of this method and science generally. Nietzsche, for example, examined old works of art, namely Mythology, to inspire the development of psychology as a discipline that has since offered new insights into the basis of morality and human distinction.
Freud took a page out of Nietzsche’s book and looked to mythology and form the basis of psychoanalysis. Existentialist philosophers were inspired by Nietzsche and others to to explore deeper questions of identity. One notable Existentialists was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was influenced by his work as a child psychologists to adopt a holistic view consciousness (Bakewell 2016, 332). The field in psychology that ultimately offers the most promising solutions to the moral questions that concerned both Nietzsche and Socrates are in the field of Social Identity Theory.
Psychologists have discovered that our abstract sense of purpose, the way we uniquely make sense of a confusing and chaotic world is through group identification. These social labels turn out to be foundational to humanity in a way that bridges the gap between cultural evolution and free energy. Michael Hoggs, asserts an Uncertainty Hypothesis, noting that we rely on groups more strongly in times of uncertainty.
[T]he reduction of subjective uncertainty is a powerful human motive that is particularly well satisfied by the self-categorization and depersonalization processes now believed to be responsible for social identity phenomena and group conduct. Uncertainty motivates self-categorization and psychological group formation: it “drives” people to join groups (Hogg 2000, 223).
Group identification offers a resolution to the gap in Henrich’s causal pathways that chart our journey to Cultural Learning and an acculturated brain. Henrich’s biggest challenge in explaining the chicken and egg problem of cultural gain over child care costs is his claim that larger social groups that formed initially in response to climate and predatory environmental threats.
the narrow evolutionary bridge across the Rubicon I’ve constructed begins with a large ground-dwelling ape who is forced to live in larger groups (by predation) in which at least some members of both sexes have evolutionary incentives to pair-bond (J. Henrich 2016, 312).
The solution for this problem I believe lies in social labels, the idea that we grew our group size prior to increasing density. This is the central claim of Mark Moffett, who was inspired by psychologists such as Hoggs to apply the idea of in versus out-groups to the animal kingdom broadly. He claims we initially course grained social groups, both phylogenetically and ontologically, using accents.
Given that our species spent most of its development following the last common ancestor we share with pan, in sparse fission-fusion communities, we needed some way to inhabit a larger social group before developing the ability to live in a denser environment that only follows agricultural societies, and does not include extant hunter-gatherer communities. Group identification also fills the gap in Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis. Our ability to share information and cognitively process information across time and individuals began with our ability to symbolically identify with an anonymized group.
These large social group consisted of nested groups of smaller intimates. Each intimate band had incentive to police its members to demonstrate abidance towards the superordinate, cultural identity. Ensuring that its intimate band could participate in teh cooperative gains afforded by its greater resources.
My conclusion, in brief, is that, at least as far back as their divergence from Pan, our ancestors never lived in strict family groups or any other kind of compact society offering regular face-to-face interactions between all members. Nor did they ever form open social networks. They were fission-fusion species that evolved, by simple steps, from societies bonded by the recognition of individuals to societies differentiated by labels. The boundedness of society membership wouldn’t have changed during this transition. But times of scarcity and sparse populations might have helped precipitate the evolution of sharing between societies far beyond the generous levels typical of the closely related bonobo, with its equally closed social groups (Moffett 2013).
Other animals engage in social units beyond their kin and intimates, and other animals are able to use signals. We stumbled upon a set of signals that allowed us to remain in the hinterlands while earning the benefits of a dilated social units would earn. We could, in other words, begin to inhabit greater extended networks, learning from one another, protecting one another from conspecific, predatorial, and environmental threats before making enough social and economic progress necessary for higher density living.
Support of this hypothesis is found, in addition to his own research, in Laura Kinzler. She notes that accents are used shockingly early in our development. Noting babies, even in the womb, display a preference for accents they were familiarized with in utero:
[B]abies enter the world equipped with a vague sense of what their mother tongue sounds like. They are born with a preference for listening to this native-sounding speech (Kinzler 2021, 102).
It is also supported by Erich Jarvis, who asserts that vocal production range is generally limited due to adverse selection pressures. Despite its utility, it makes all organisms, except those comfortably atop their respective food chains, vulnerable to predators. This implies that given our ancestorial meekness our voices would serve as a reliable signal of provenance. The origins of Shibboleth lay not in an arbitrary preference for familiarity but as a reliable marker of group identification.
Associating with similar sounding conspecifics in turn led us out of our humble place on the food chain. Ultimately increasing the vocal production ability we exhibit today. However in order to work our way out of the bottom of the primate barrel we first needed to address potential, deviant free riders. Doing so would offer us not only power over our vocal range, a power we would be loathe to allow our compatriots to fully adopt, but also the power to set specified constraints upon our vocals. Giving rise to a useful communication tool. Language is frequently cited as humanity’s most powerful tool in accelerating adoption. The question is what gave our ancestors the ability to adopt, modify, and share the conventional constraints necessary to began speaking in the first place. Here to I believe morality is promising candidate.
Dyad Labeling
At its heart morality relies on the appropriating of the basic principle for sentient life to avoid harm (Schein and Gray 2018). From an Active Inference perspective in order for any organism to maintain its blanketed identity (Kirchhoff et al. 2018), its internal homeostatic state it needs to acquire resources and avoid harm. Humanity’s moral sentiments projects this instinctual harm avoidance outwards. We identify with others and employ our cognitive powers of prediction and identity affirmation onto others. More specifically, on to those we identify as us.
The story thus told implies that cultural symbolic identification was our first practice of the powerful art of psychological entitizing. Our first cultural memes were us versus them, and then good versus bad. Once we labeled our moral talisman we subsequently created a process for bucketing behaviors. Those behaviors that led to harm towards the in-group were labeled accordingly, a label associated with negative affective valence. These labels themselves would come to invoke our righteous ire. This is in line with the Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM).
This labeling was not only the start of morality but the start of our inusual emotional and cognitive capacity. Given studies that demonstrate that moral reasoning amounts to rationalizing an instinctually held position supports this notion (Haidt 2001). However much admiration we may have for our powers of abstract rationality, as Hume noted these powers are slaves to our passions.
Our primal moral passions and rationalizing that promoted group harmony and encouraged individuals to acquire positive reputational labels gave way to its more general forms. As researchers of TDM note the three part template of willful perpetrator, harmful behavior, and norms emerges instinctively in children and are later generalized by removing the first element. Conventions are generally harmless, but still enthusiastically enforced behavior norms that are adjacent to and grow out of our moral sentiments. Together these templates for behavioral constraint gave our ancestors the ability to structure the social complexity that set us apart.
The Sound of Institutions
The use of symbols to dilate our social units, symbolically identifying with conspecifics and then establishing symbolic moral identities allowed our ancestors to construct institutions effectively around arbitrarily complex goals using arbitrarily complex norms and constraints. Once our ancestors cooperated to climb the top of their food chain their vocal production range would no longer need to be constrained (Jarvis 2006). Save for the motivation to continue using Shibboleth as a signal of provenance.
Still, we know became able to, at least through practice, practice the art of singing and the prose of the spoken word. Language, sketched schematically, are simply vocally produced sounds that follow a shared conventions. We became instinctual storytellers, building structures with shared imagination. This ranged from religion, economics, and most importantly to storytelling and songs themselves.
The clearest example of the power of adopting insignia and social labels, or the employment of our ethical system to allow social complexity is mythology and religion.
[T]he critical element differentiating religious from nonhuman ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols […] We suggest that such symbols evolved to solve an ecological problem by extending communication and coordination of social relations across time and space (Alcorta and Sosis 2005, 323).
Religion distinguishes itself by binding our affect to symbols. Thus propelling our normative framework, yielding a new identity and the behavioral values that followed. Religious practices are like emotions, ubiquitous across cultures yet each particular practice takes on a culturally bespoken form. Nonetheless they are varying solutions to similar objectives using similar cognitive tools.
Cultivating the Commons, a Comedy
[Employees] perceive the organization’s goals as their goals – which is precisely what identification means. “We” and “they” are fundamentally important pronouns in the language, and an individual’s conception (varying from one time to another) of who “we” are defines his or her frame of reference in making decisions (Simon 1992, 78).
Another conspicuous example of humanity’s ability to construct illusory identities held together with a system of ethics is the marketplace. Adam Smith, an early economic influencer, very much saw the discipline he helped found as an outgrowth of morality (see Smith and Wilson 2019). His second book on the Wealth of Nation was very much a sequel to his first on Moral Sentiments. Although he was careful to distinguish between the wide breadth of concerns and priorities an individual can at any given time maintain, he saw our regard for others as inextricable from the marketplace. Despite this however his comment about a Baker’s self-regard as been appropriated to justify at times a literal interpretation of the infamous Neoclassical model of a selfish rationality.
Next to Dawkins theory of the Selfish Gene the Neoclassical model is perhaps the most influential modern Reductionist Theory. It frames of our economic system on a set of reductive assumptions. While it incorporates notions of uncertainty and information it does so with a bias towards reductionist thought. The economy is assumed to consist of rational individuals in possession of complete information, fully specified contracts and privatized property rights, competitive firms, and most importantly selfishness. Economists have long known the Neoclassical Model to be false, but have found it useful as a starting point and sufficient model for certain markets.
What they often fail to do, however, is stress that the neoclassical model is most useful when understood as Reductio ad Adsurdum. Relaxing the rigid assumptions of Homo Economicus not only provides template for understanding these otherwise obscure institutions and their influence on growth, recessions, firm organization, and other features of our economic system, they also provide a uniquely rigorous tool set for understanding the original concern of their disciplines founders, morality.
Although private property is a cornerstone of our Free Market capitalist system as specified by the Neoclassical model, it is subservient to and can only conceivably exist within the boundaries of social capital. Paul Romer’s theory of endogenous growth, built upon by Daron Acemoglu and others (Acemoglu 2009), propose the causal factors of growth by highlighting externalities. The favorable, positive spill overs of technology and education that increase the return on capital.
The boundaries that allow the privatization of property only produce profits because they are movable. California’s Silicon Valley became host of the digital revolution rather than Massachusett’s Route 128 due to the difference in efficacy of privatizing technical innovation. Specifically, the ability to prevent technical spill over in the latter location prevented the cultivation of the region’s cultural tech savvy commons (Saxenian 2000).
Douglas North has emphasized institutions, not as specific organizations as the term is often used, but as humanity’s ability to cope with the most fundamental market failures of the paridgmatic Neoclassical Model. He pointed to the psychological capacity and tendency to join tribal units is the same that causes us to join firms, trade unions, schools, fraternities. The organizations fundamental to economic system and modern society.
However North drew an important distinction between the organizations themselves and institutions. What matters more than the particular organization itself is humanity’s capacity to inhabit organizations. Naturally adopting the constraints and the subsequent goals:
Institutions [are] the constraints that human beings impose on themselves
He goes on to explain the core role that institutions play in our economic system and society writ-large by perhaps unwittingly using the more common synonym of entropy:
The major role of institutions in a society is to reduce uncertainty by establishing a stable (but not necessarily efficient) structure to human interactions (North 1990).
This points to the central market failure that accounts not only for areas of the market traditionally out of the focus of Neoclassical model, but allows us to understand its initial formation. This is the assumption that all agents possess full and complete information. Economists have focused for sometime on the relevance of uncertainty to their discipline. Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes, for instance, distinguished between the concepts of Risk and Uncertainty. Risk essentially represents an uncertain outcome but one that can be modeled, or priced. The chances of a hurricane over the next year, life expectancy, the earnings of a stock in the next year or so. Knight saw that privileged information allows firms, and workers, to enjoy profits above marginal cost.
George Akerlof and Kenneth Arrow noted the power of asymmetrical markets in used cars and healthcare respectively (Akerlof 1970; Arrow 1978) . However, there is always asymmetry. Producers know more about their own goods and consumers know more about their preferences. As a first order approximation at least. Information is, in a sense, the whole game. The only problem with Keynes overturning Sey’s Law and the traditional focus on scarcity was that he did not take the implications of uncertainty far enough.
On the positive side of the economic ledger, knowledge is the source of economic growth. The Physicist/Economist Cesar Hidalgo has recently noted that the entire economy is a question of information. Innovation is simply new information. The ability to produce goods and carry out services is a collection of knowledge and know-how. The resolution of uncertainty is the carrying out of economic production, the increasing capacity to resolve information is innovation. Whether in goods or services, producing or distribution, all is knowledge (Hidalgo 2015).
Economists laud Ronald Coase as the second coming of Adam Smith but his status is not entirely earned. His focus on Transaction Costs as the solution for the existence of firms is at best partial. The true motivation for the creation of a firm is to create an identity. One that acts as a focal point for employees, consumers, and other businesses. Herbert Simon noted per his quote above.
Gary Miller noted likewise. Finding how the Neoclassical model falls short, even theoretically, in explaining the presence of firms. Selfish individuals would simply be incapable of running a firm, or even agree on its direction (Miller 2006). Firms are in truth, contiguous with what North labeled as ‘Informal Instiutitions’ of less structured societies. The economy is shrouded in uncertainty and we use our psychological group identities as signals to navigate our way forward. Marketing brands, anonymous and intimate reputations, regulatory approvals, all these enable agents to organize and effectively operate in our economic environment.
The most straightforward yet consequential presence of uncertainty, and its primacy before any other economic principle including scarcity, is in the productive potential of an infant. We can even go back before a human is conceived and ask ourselves what is the total economic output of an unborn human. This is not just unknowable it is meaningless, that is, without the relevant context of a human life. A modern life may include resources to empower the infant and child to acquire the relevant information to participate in an economy and one day become productive. Just as knowledge of your communal conspecifics allows everyone to enjoy a bountiful commons, the social capital that exists in an economy is fundamental to its function. As Francis Fukuyama notes it is prohibitively expensive to run an economy without social trust (Fukuyama 1996).
They often fail to properly evaluate the signals institutions provide. Labor unions, regulatory agencies, universities, firms, and of course, culture, all give way to an orbit of interpreters. Potential employees. Although Robert Hanson and Bryan Caplan understand the use of signals, their model of our moral and ethical signals derives in part from Homo Economicus and part Richard Dunbar’s Social Brain hypothesis (See Simler and Hanson 2018; and Caplan 2018 ). They miss the economic importance that anonymized signals institutions provide.
As humans we need signals to set the course of our lives and select between a myriad of social patterns set before us in modern market economies. Even our consumption and health outcomes are determined by social signals. If goods are positional, as Robert Frank Asserts (Frank 2005), the years we spend spend in aspiration to become socially cooperative contributors likewise relies on the interpretation of a variety of social signals. Moreover the balance of uncertainty lies on potential employees, not on employers. Hence it is potential employees, those who attend universities and join trade unions that have the greater influence in the make up of institutions. Barring their potential and actual constiuents the boundaries are influenced by the wider culture and political economy.
Modeling the economy as a complex and dynamic system, as Brian Arthur advocates (Arthur 2021) , I believe requires the inclusion of the boundary conditions and attractors of humanity’s ethical system. We are are inspired to acquire vocational titles, university degrees, union membership, acceptance into sororities and fraternities. Doing so we constrain our behavior in line with the organizational dictates and associated norms.
We cooperate with others at work because we identify with the organization to which we are employed as Simon noted (above), but we also cooperate because we want to be, and want to be seen as, a good person. We establish networks using institutional brands to ensure trust. Sharing credit on projects, mentoring new employees, sharing private information with colleagues, even ones with whom we are not intimate, all is facilitated by the ethical system we inhabit. Even though distrust is reasonable given the temptation to do so, humanity overwhelming defaults in the other direction. Offering trust even in defiance of what in hindsight may have been irrational to do so (see Gladwell 2019).
Song and Stories
Any ethic, whether social, political , legal or otherwise, involves narrative (Fisher 1985, 3).
Water Fisher
[B]eauty expressed by the artist […] ought to induce an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity […] called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved. […] Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in an esthetic whole (Joyce, Knausgård, and Deane 2016, 101).
James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young man
Although economic and religious institutions are the ostensible determinants of civilization they are simply a more elaborate riff on the most significant cultural institution that followed from the establishment of our ethical system, story telling. Psychologists have long recognized that we employ stories, called a narrative paradigm, that allows us to structure our otherwise uncertain environments. Walter Fisher drew on the work of other psychologists and theologians to contrast the rational paradigm of the reductionist to better understand humanity’s distinction. In so doing arrived at a better understanding of the universe as well.
The narrative paradigm insists [that] human communication should be viewed as […] stories competing with other stories constituted by good reasons, as being rational when they satisfy the demands of narrative probability and narrative fidelity, and as inevitably moral inducements
By “narration,”I refer to a theory of symbolic actions – words and/or deeds- that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create or interpret them. The narrative perspective, therefore, has relevance to real as well as fictive worlds, to stories of living and to stories of the imagination.
Neither “the facts” nor our “experience” come to us in discrete and disconnected packets which simply await the appropriate moral principle to be applied. Rather, they stand in need of some narrative which can bind the facts of our experience together into a coherent pattern […] (Fisher 1985, 2–3).
In view of the Free Energy Principle, the awareness of the inveterately changing nature of all in existence, including one’s own identities would paralyze any sentient being given the fundamental requirement of certainty. The way we resolve this is in narrative.
We constantly seek to understand the world and our place in it, we author our own stories in a web of other stories. Vera Tobin has recently written extensively on the use of surprise in both genre fiction, that follows constructed traditions to establish expectations and subsequently surprise the reader in a quasi agreed upon fashion, and also how this represents a broader tradition of story-telling generally. She points specifically to the neuroscientific view of cognition as a prediction tool.
[I]f the predictive-coding model of [the brain and nervous] systems is correct, both surprisal and surprise are an important part of the texture of experience. They reliably influence our expectations and sense of what is likely or unlikely as we move forward in time, both with respect to how we learn to understand the physical world around us and as we are enculturated as readers of specific texts, viewers of specific films, and consumers of creative works within a certain genre (Tobin 2018, 92).
Stories are thus a way for us to understand our place in the world. As the rhythm of each piece of music is the experience of an audibly woven tapestry each story is the structure that makes sense out of events in an otherwise uncertain world. Our stories help us shape our pasts and our future as well by addressing the questions of identity. Joyce not only understood this as the purpose of art but used it in his own work. Serving as a literary critic and practitioner alike. As Knausgaard notes in a recent introduction to Joyce’s work.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man […] deals with identity, or more precisely the way in which identity arises, the events that shape us and make us who we are […] we are born into a family, and by virtue of who it receives and relates to us, we become manifest to ourselves and to others. We learn a language, and though it does not belong to us alone, but is shed by all members of the community it is by means of our language that we understand and express ourselves and that which is all round us. With the language comes a culture, of which, whether we like it or not, we become a part. Our circles widen, we start school, and the process of our socialization becomes more formal. We learn about the language, our culture, and society, and to that first identity within the family a new layer of national identity is added.
Karl Ove Knausgaard in a Forward for A Potrait of the Artist as a Young man
Freedom of Will
Socrates established the incomplete but prescient view of virtue as information by beginning with the premise that the attainment of a just life is the best a person can achieve and hence desirable. Moral wisdom will ensure moral practice. It’s good to be good! So just discover how. The objection to this view, for instance, by pointing out many folks know what is in their best interest but lack the motivation to fulfill it, misses the point.
Even when we willingly delve into vice, whether grabbing a slice of cake or indulge in an extra cocktail, we are using information to affirm our physiological identity. This is the full implication of concepts such as Homeostasis and Allostasis a the heart of the Beysian brain and the more ambitious Free Energy Principle. Sentient organization relies on identity construction and affirmation using environmental information. This happens at the individaul, family, and group level throughout the biosphere. Morality is humanity’s unique reminder that we are more than our physiology, and can identify with others beyond our kin and intimates.
The truth is that the universe is shrouded in uncertainty. The only objective truth known to humanity is the inevitable descent to a chaotic equilibrium. Knowledge itself is the constructed illusion of emergent subjects. Our novel cultural units are the context that supply the requisite meaning for ethical information. The instinctive belief that our behavior has meaning is grounded in the web of social identitites of our culture. Moral value is the shared belief that behavior has a greater meaning.
I believe the metaphysical truth of morality, in the language of systems and complexity theory, is overcoming the illusory boundaries of existence. That is central to humanity’s expansive emotional capacity including the universal experience, as Socrates and Nietzsche both intuited, of love. In this perspective, love represents an expression a metaphysical condition of reality. Who we choose to sentimentally identify with constitutes acceptance of the fundamentally illusory nature of what seperates us in the first place.
The constraints and attractors that partition the underlying material energy of the universe, dividing some and binding others, represent the universal properties of the observable universe. It is an existence that at its core involves becoming. The rhythmic recursion of creation and destruction. Beneath this cycle, behind these existential partitions, however, lie unity.
WEIRD To Wu-Wei
Ethics is a bridge across the physiological illusion of identity, a system of constraints and attractors that have the power to bind us to other humans with whom we are not realted, intimated, or often even acquainted. Yet morality itself was founded an illusion. One more mutable than the typical existential boundary conditions of steady state dynamics and organic matter. As sentient organism seek to minimize harm behind on the physical boundaries of their membranes, exoskeleton, and skin, humanity does under the arbitrary partition of cultural insignia.
The interdisciplinary field of complexity and systems theories amount to an emerging philosophy. One that shares a great deal in common with non-western Philosophies, including Ubuntu, an African concept sometimes translated, perhaps to emphasize its departure from Descartes: I am because you are.
It also aligns with Zen and Chan Budhism and Taoism. The ideal of Wu-Wei, according to Ted Slingerland, is a Taoist ideal where one reaches an embodied harmony. Both within onself and thir environment. It relies on being part of the greater good, and playing faithfully and instinctively playing the role you happen to embody in the interests thereof. Slingerland notes specifically that this directly confronts the WEIRD ideological bias that often says otherwise.
[The West] tends to portray rational thought as the essence of human nature, and reasoning as something that occurs in an ethereal realm completely disconnected form the noise and heat of the physical world around us. This view is strongly dualistic in the sense that the mind, and its supposedly abstract rationality, are seen as radically distinct from, and superor to, the body and its emotions […] the tradition that can be traced form Plato down to Descartes converted vague intuitions about the distinction between people (who possess minds) and things (which do not) into a bizarre metaphysical dichotomy between a completely invisible, disembodied mind and the physical stuff that makes up our material world. (Slingerland 2014, 12)
In reality, we are not autonomous, self – sufficient, purely rational individuals but emotional pack animals, intimately dependent on other human beings at every stage of our lives. We get along, not because we’re good at calculating costs and benefits, but because we are emotionally bound to our immediate family and friends and have been trained to adopt a set of values that allows us to cooperate spontaneously with others in our society. These shared values are the glue that holds together large – scale human groups […] One of the key features of the wu – wei state is a sense of being absorbed in some larger, valued whole (Slingerland 2014, 15).
He specifically notes that a famous Taoist philosopher, Zhuangzi asserted that our primal human struggle is in resisting the instinctual urge to entitize our social reality. Reaching harmony requires first forgetting the labels we inherent and perhaps applying more enlightened ones (Slingerland 2014).
Shibboleth deserves its negative connotations. It remains an underappreciated driver of social injustice, inequity, and misallocation of economic opportunity, income and wealth (Kinzler 2021). However it served as the seedbed of symbolic identification and perhaps a window into the nature of existence writ large. Discovering that otherwise arbitrary insignia can divide us reminds us of the greater truth that we are, even as individuals as Allan Watts noted, simply social institutions.
We may have an easier time expressing positive moral sentiments towards those that fall within our in group but our sense of belonging is simply an aesthetic. Art of course is a harness on this very power of symbolic aesthetic. Painting a picture, while static as James Joyce suggests, provides an lodestone with kinetic implications. Rhythm represents a static pattern but one that invites us to dance.
What is and what Ought to be
Although my theory of ethics as a system that substantiates cultural identity is an evolutionary account of the origins of moral and conventional normative behavior, i.e. it is a proposed meta-ethical or descriptive narrative of morality, it has normative implications. Generally my view is that within Western or WEIRD societies ethics is underrated as a necessary motivating force of our social landscape. It restrains and inspires behavior, for often positive but also ill effect. We often fail to see that in the long run, the choices we make are hardly ever personal, and “no one else’s businesses.”
Pollution and climate change, for instance, are often cited as negative externalities that result due to the insufficient privatization of communal property, however, everything is the commons. In our economy for instance, firms hire employees that were educated by separate institutions, they exist in environments that are regulated and sell to customers that have an implicit or explicit trust in their brand as a business.
Moreover employees need to continuously sort out interpersonal and even intrapersonal conflicts. Binding oneself to an overall firm identity, or nested identities of groups within a firm, or even a person’s long run self-identified career, all help govern these interweaving incentives not captured in dollars and cents. The upshot is that often people fail to fous on morality and ethics directly as an object of social concern or instrumental policy tool.
In addition we largely fail in appreciating the largely emotional and psychological nature of morality and our ethical system. The civilization of Plato’s ideological progenitors likes to draw firm boundaries around its understanding of human society to diagnosis its ails and prescribe its fixes. Yet ethics exists to substantiate shared constructions then the first diagnoses and perscriptions involve ‘make better constructions.’ For those exceptional few who bother to concern themselves with morality I think there are several takeaways for including a more complexity oriented and psychologically experienced nature of moral and ethical values and practice. Three takeaways stand out:
Firstly, if morality began as reputational labels, one informative of the behavior of an anonymous conspecific, than we are not as conniving as some suggest. This error follows from failing to acknowledge Moffett’s notion of Imagined Communities. Hanson’s interpretation of Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH) is correct, it does imply a type of motivated conniving at the center of the moral arms race that led to our cognitive capacity.
However, if this signaling was primarily motivated to allow our ancestors to exist in anonymous societies, as Moffett asserts, then our signaling is at least cossetted in a band of intimates. Intimates, who would be less susceptible to moral trickery and deceptions. They have, after all, direct evidence of the integrity of our behavior and character.
My theory suggets the expansion of morality as a cultural thread was largely driven by the policing of intimate band members to ensure coordination with the greater tribe. The promise to curry favor with the greater tribal society and earning the subsequent political currency for band members and/or its leaders, carried our initial negative affective surprisal of in-group harm into full blown abstract symbolic morality.
Even if we are capable of aping moral signals and rationalizing immoral behavior we do at least share an instinct for avoiding group harm and acquiring pro-social labels. These help us not only signal to others our worth but signal a sense of certainty to ourselves. A sense that is beneficial in a topsy-turvy and forever changing world.
Secondly, there are a number of movements that seek to quantify morality. At extreme these movements amount to the age old Western attempt to resolve uncertainty. Unlike through genetic code or a price system, The Effective Altruism and the Rationlist movements seek to expand information sources to understand the impact of things like policy interventions and charitable donations. Holden Karnofsk, for instance, waned understand the return on charity the way prices gave him a return on a stock investment:
Holden Karnofsk […] was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn’t find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one.
The result was a hallmark of the EA movement, givewell. A company that seeks to measure the impact of a charities donations. These are founded on the assumption that all human life has equal value. It is also expanding to the notion that other organism deserve moral value as well.
While these movements are a force for good they seem to downplay the need to sell their definition of good. Given that humanity’s definition of good, as I claim, is based on the psychological construct and sentimental attachment to an abstract community, they should weight more heavily the second order effects of the boundaries of humanity’s perceived community.
Additionally, given our society’s reliance on our ethical system, the values we hold implicitly or explicitly are significant. The world evolves in unexpected ways and Individuals choose careers, jobs, and become members of institution not because have their quantified impact, but largely due to the perceived value they share in society. These values are both in principle and practice a product of imagination.
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ExhibitingBias 