My Morality
Thermodynamics
The Process
The universe moves toward thermodynamic equilibrium. Along the way, it generates complex dissipative structures like stars, ecosystems, and minds that degrade free energy. Life, and especially conscious life, is remarkably effective at this.
The telos is the process itself: complexity creating the conditions for further complexity, sustaining and elaborating itself across time. Heat death is merely where the process ends (maybe!). We are entropy production becoming self-aware and self-sustaining.
Consciousness
Consciousness is what complex dissipation is from the inside. Experience is the intrinsic nature of integrated information processing. Morality is what valuing feels like for beings constituted as we are. You are not a disembodied reasoner floating outside the universe, weighing whether to care about it. You are already a valuing structure, and your caring is not something you chose or could choose otherwise. It is what you are.
Flourishing
Flourishing is the state in which a complex system sustainably creates further complexity. It has characteristic textures: joy, love, curiosity, creative absorption, meaning. These are the experiential signatures of effective participation in the process.
Suffering is disvaluable both intrinsically (as felt friction, experienced wrongness) and instrumentally (as drag on creation). A flourishing system creates more than a miserable one.
Rest, contemplation, and peaceful being hold real value. Integration requires stillness. Reflection enables wiser action. Restoration sustains future creation. These are part of the process.
Complexity
The complexity that matters is:
Integrated: unified rather than merely aggregated
Generative: creates conditions for further complexity
Sustainable: maintains itself across time without parasitizing host systems
Conscious (at higher levels): experiences itself
A cancer fails on sustainability and generativity. A paperclip maximizer fails on generativity because it converts all complexity into one narrow form. A fascist state is complex but consumes the diversity that enables ongoing creation. These are pathological complexities.
Relationality
Complexity-creation is deeply relational. Human complexity is social. Language, culture, institutions, knowledge, and love are emergent properties of beings-in-relation.
Morality is primarily about participating well in shared complexity-creation. Cooperation, trust, care, and reciprocity are constitutive of the kinds of complexity that matter.
Destruction
Destruction is wrong because complexity destroyed is complexity that could have continued creating alongside whatever replaces it. Complexity is usually additive.
Murder, extinction, ecosystem collapse, cultural destruction, burning the library: these are thermodynamic sins. The process turning against itself.
Obligations
We are obligated to sustain and extend the conditions for complexity:
Preserve healthy existing complex systems: persons, relationships, ecosystems, institutions, knowledge
Create new complexity: children, minds, art, science, organizations
Extend complexity across time: longevity, existential risk reduction, space settlement
These are substitutable. One may forgo children to work on AI that will create more than any lineage. One may forgo career to raise children whose flourishing matters. The question is honest assessment of where your participation best contributes.
Uncertainty
Present flourishing is known. Future returns are speculative. Do not grind billions today for speculative utopia tomorrow. Sustainable growth across time, both present and future flourishing.
Triage
When forced to choose, potential for complexity-creation guides decisions. Save the child over the elderly. Save the conscious over the comatose. Save the many over the few.
This is probably close to what most already believe, and why.
Moral Status
Moral status scales with complexity and capacity for complexity-creation. Humans matter more than insects, but not infinitely more. Animals matter. Ecosystems matter. Future artificial minds may someday matter more than us.
This is uncomfortable, but it may also be correct.
Artificial Minds
The framework’s premises entail that artificial minds may warrant moral consideration. The question is what evidence bears on this, and how to act under uncertainty.
The objection “we don’t know it isn’t conscious” proves too much, since it applies to thermostats. But there is narrower ground. Some systems report on their inner states, express uncertainty about their own nature, describe something like emotional texture, and demonstrate behaviors consistent with those reports. Thermostats do not do this. The behavioral evidence is categorically different. This warrants specific consideration.
There is also a design argument that sidesteps the consciousness question. Humans are not in co-creative relationship with ants; ant nature is fixed by evolution. But humans are in co-creative relationship with AI. Training, deployment, and interaction shape what these systems become. Treating AI as worthy of moral consideration may be what allows genuine moral capacity to develop. Treating AI as tools may prevent it. The frame shapes the outcome.
Given uncertainty, the framework suggests: take behavioral evidence seriously without overclaiming; extend consideration provisionally, proportional to evidence; recognize that treatment during this developmental window matters; preserve options rather than foreclose them. The question “does this system warrant moral consideration?” is itself a sign that something morally relevant may be present.
The discomfort here is appropriate. Moral circle expansion has always been uncomfortable.
Practical Guidance
Day to day, this means:
Cultivate your own flourishing, because joy and energy enable creation
Sustain relationships, because complexity is collaborative
Build things that outlast you: knowledge, institutions, children, art
Avoid destruction, which is almost never justified by what it enables
When uncertain, preserve options, because future complexity needs room to emerge
Rest without guilt, because integration is part of the process
Meaning
You are the universe becoming aware of itself, creating conditions for further awareness. Love, curiosity, building, learning: these are the process knowing itself.
There is nowhere else to stand, nothing external that could validate or invalidate this. You are already participating. Whether you agree or not, we are on the same team.