Why the Good Guys Will Generally Win

This is a brief post, typed hastily, but it captures some ideas that have been germinating in my mind for quite some time.

It's definitely a “stoned college sophomore” type of post (though at the moment of writing it I am neither stoned nor a college sophomore), playing fast and loose with a bunch of highly subtle and important concepts, in a fun and preliminary way.   So take it for what it is … or don't ...

The topic is what some would call “Universal Ethics” – i.e., what are the ethics intrinsic in the dynamics of the universe itself?   Various people have attempted to argue, in various ways, that the universe tends toward Good rather toward Evil in various senses, but none of the arguments I've read have quite resonated with me (perhaps due to shortcomings in the arguments, or perhaps just to peculiarities in my own perspective, and my need to think things through for myself and understand them in my own way rather than just eating other peoples' arguments).  

In any case, here I will present a sketch of my own argument that the universe will generally tend toward Good rather than Evil.

The argument I will give here is quite vague and hand-wavy, at least in the form in which it's presented.   Going out on a long creaky limb, I'll venture that it could potentially be turned into a formal mathematical proof, if one set up the framework right and did an awful lot of work.  This would be interesting, but of course it wouldn't make the argument definitively compelling in a philosophical sense (though it might well make it more compelling by adding detail and flavor in various useful ways).   Ultimately arguments about ethics and the universe we live in can't be settled by mathematics alone, because mathematics only has practical meaning when it is used in conjunction with appropriate bridging assumptions (e.g. physics, or mathematical metaphysics).  

I will start with three values that I have identified as core to the Cosmist value system (the variety of human value system that appeals to me most, and that I think has the greatest growth and survival path for the future): Joy, Growth and Choice.   For discussion of why these values seem critical to me, see the relevant sections of my books The Hidden Pattern (free pdf here) and A Cosmist Manifesto (free pdf here).   In brief, and in a very fuzzy/humanistic way:

• Joy is joy!  That is basic goodness.  Who can argue with joy?  In the context of complex cognitive systems like people or AGIs, joy is closely allied with the feeling of a system getting what it wants and expects; which of course is often achieved via the system adjusting what it wants and expects judiciously.
• Growth is important too, because with just joy and no growth, one might just have a universe comprising one big fuzzy orgasm.   Of course, from the point of view of the meta-cosmic orgasm itself, the meta-cosmic orgasm is No Problem At All.   But from my point of view as a complex cognitive system, I'm not satisfied with that, and I want to see new patterns keep getting created.  Growth is creativity, it's evolution, it's life.
• Choice is individuality.   With just joy and growth, we might just have some sort of universe-wide pattern-generating fractal – with no individual mind-systems pursuing their own goals and refining their own world-views.   But as a semi-autonomous human agent, the ongoing existing of individuals making choices feels important to me (though note the complexity of the concept of choice: some sort of “natural autonomy” is more interesting to think about than incoherent notions of “free will”).

Of course, these three values don't summarize the whole of human values, nor the whole of my own personal value system.  Furthermore, these three values – as I mean them – are complex constructs whose deep definition and meaning depends on a huge amount of human culture.  But nevertheless, I think these three values are symbolic of thought/feeling-networks that are very core to human values and encompass a large percentage of human values.   In terms of “glocal memory”, I think these three values are “keys” corresponding to distributed attractors in the human collective mind, and that these distributed attractors approximate the essential aspects of human values interestingly well (though far from completely).

Given this background: One thing I want to present here is a basic, simple argument why Joy and Choice promote Growth very effectively.   There is nothing profoundly new here, I am just summarizing some obvious ideas in a slightly different way than I've seen before.  

If one can show that Joy and Choice promote Growth very effectively (and in particular, that they promote it more effectively than suffering and de-individuation), then to show that the universe intrinsically promotes Joy, Choice and Growth, one basically only needs to show that the universe promotes Growth.   Because from an evolutionary view, if one looks at the universe as a large system containing various subsystems, then if

• Joy and Choice promote Growth better than suffering and de-individuation do
• the universe promotes Growth

it follows that statistically, subsystems with Joy and Choice will tend to prevail.  

But the fact that the universe promotes Growth, in the sense that it rewards growing systems via differentially favoring their existence, follows fairly directly from the finitude of the universe's resources.   In a universe with highly limited resources, systems that can grow a lot will grab up more of the resources, shutting out systems that can't grow that much.   This sort of phenomenon is seen in evolving ecologies of every sort.

But why do Joy and Choice promote Growth so effectively, so much better than their opposites?   This is also easy enough to see:

1. Joy promotes greater generosity, which promotes greater collective intelligence.   A system that is getting what it wants and feels it needs, is more likely to share with other systems.   Thus, a collection of joyful systems is more likely to share resources and information amongst each other copiously, than a collection of less joyful systems.   Less joyful systems, that are not getting what they need, are more likely to conserve what they have for themselves and avoid sharing with others, as they will be occupied with scheming to get what they need.   But greater generosity is the key to superrationality, which is the key to collective intelligence.   Collections of joyful agents are more likely to display powerful collective intelligence.   (There is some yet-to-be-unraveled mathematics underlying generosity and superrationality; the incomplete and awkward thoughts I wrote down in this rough draft a few years ago may provide a few inklings in this direction).
2. Choice promotes greater diversity of pattern generation.   The core reasons for this are subtle, and in the end boil down to the finitude of energetic and informational resources once again.   The nature of pattern-space is that patterns are easier to detect if one restricts attention to relatively local regions of pattern-space (i.e. regions consisting of patterns fairly similar to each other).   To recognize patterns across a very broad region of pattern-space, requires much more intelligence, i.e. much more energetic and computational resources. Thus if one wants to recognize a large number of patterns, it is generally better to have a collection of pattern-recognition processes each looking in some relatively local region of pattern-space, and focusing on that region with inductive biases appropriate to that region. There is some as-yet-unraveled mathematics underlying this point, which I predict will be very interesting to unfold over the next decades.   (This closely relates to some of the ideas underlying OpenCog's MOSES component, which carries out automated program learning via a set of small evolving populations of programs called “demes”, each of which seeks to learn programs in a certain semi-local region of program space.  The reason MOSES works this way is that certain sorts of patterns (“syntactic-semantic correspondences between programs”) are easier to recognize in a small region of program space than in a large one. But I think the computer-science observations underlying MOSES actually represent more general principles.)

So there we have it.   To re-cap:

1. Joyful systems will tend to grow better than non-joyful systems, because joy fosters generosity which fosters collective intelligence driving superrationality
2. Choiceful systems will tend to grow better than non-choiceful systems, because choice fosters diverse pattern generations
3. Growing systems will tend to prevail over non-growing ones, because they will tend to grab up the universe's finite resources more rapidly

So from the assumption of the finitude of the universe, we arrive at the conclusion that systems embodying Joy, Growth and Choice will be more likely to prevail.

Of course, even if all this is correct, this is purely a statistical argument, and doesn't show that Good Things will prevail in any particular situation.   Nor is it the kind of statistical argument that is likely to yield accurate calculations of the specific odds of Good prevailing in any particular real-world situation.  

But as a piece of speculative philosophy, I find this direction intriguing, and – in the random odd moments I find to devote to such things – I hope to refine this line of thinking in more detail in coming years.  

Among other things, this argument provides a slightly different angle on the Problem of Evil – which I often consider in the form “Why does an infinite universe want to divide itself into finite subsystems, when the limitation of resources within these finite subsystems causes so many internal problems from the perspective of entities within these subsystems?”  ….  

The angle suggested here is: Finite universes exist because, within them, there is a dynamic via which Good (i.e. Joy, Growth and Choice) will statistically prevail.  

Which is a fancy way of saying what I said much more simply in A Cosmist Manifesto: Separation exists so that there can be the joy of overcoming separation, which is love.   And this of course, is not an original notion at all.   But the unraveling of this notion in terms of evolutionary dynamics, pattern space, superrationality, and so forth, is fairly new within our shard of the meta-cosmos, and still mostly to be unfolded.

As an exercise for the reader, it may be interesting to modify the above long winding choo-choo train of thought into an argument why happy societies with ongoing progress and individual liberty are ultimately going to prevail on average.   Good news for those concerned about society and politics!