Other Treasure Chests – Moral Value Beyond Consciousness

ByDan

Consciousness is just about the most morally relevant thing imaginable.

It’s what permits things to be “imaginable” in the first place.

If you are held down and burned with a hot poker, this is almost certainly going to be a bad experience, in a visceral and unquestionable way. If you are given cool water and a good meal after a long walk through the desert, this is almost certainly going to be a good experience in a visceral and unquestionable way. 

Consciousness is a “treasure chest” of value, bumbled into or conjured forth by nature and the expanding processes of life, but it is likely to be one of a near-infinite set of other “treasure chests” in the possible state-space of life and intelligence. 

In addition, consciousness is undergirded by a force which could be seen to be much more fundamental – and potentially even more morally valuable – than consciousness itself.

These conclusions have significant implications for how humanity should develop AGI and brain-computer interfaces.

I’ll lay out my premises, my conclusions, and the implications of these conclusions for humanity at the dawn of AGI.

Premises

  • Life “Bubbles Up” New Adaptive Capabilities to Keep Itself Alive: Life seems to have an impetus to stay alive (Spinoza’s term conatus). In order to do this, life consistently expands its powers (Spinoza uses the term potentia to describe the total set of all powers that permit an entity to persist). It evolves new modes of movement, new physical senses (smell, sight, touch, etc), new mental abilities (memory, language, etc), and in human beings has expanded our powers beyond biology and into culture and technology. Autopoiesis is a useful word to describe this self-creating set of powers that we see in nature, the capacity to unfold potentia. 
  • Some Adaptive Capabilities (Like Consciousness) are Morally Valuable (i.e. are Treasure Chests): Evolution seems to have stumbled into consciousness on many occasions on the way through its expanding, evolving process (in arthropods, vertebrates, and cephalopods). There were creatures which could move, and which might have even had some level of physical senses (sight, chemical senses, etc), but with no field of awareness, no qualia. Then, qualia seem to have emerged because it was adaptive. It permitted predators to seek prey (for example, imagining where they might be hiding behind a rock), or prey to avoid predators, or something else that helped to expand the powers of life in order to keep it alive. Potentia “bubbled up” consciousness, as it “bubbled up” sight, flight, and all other powers and abilities of life. The “treasure chest” of moral value emerged not in order to create value, but to keep life alive – a point made obvious by the prevalence of suffering in the world, and the general purpose of pleasure and pain being prompts to adaptive action for the entity experiencing the qualia. 
  • Consciousness is Morally Valuable: Consciousness is morally relevant because it permits of qualia, a field of awareness that permits living things to experience events or sensations as positive or negative. While virtue and ontological rules (like Kant’s categorical imperative) might be questioned and argued over, the brute suffering of a living thing seems clearly bad, and few people would advocate for Kant’s categorical imperative or Aristotle’s virtues if they knew for a fact that such principles would lead to horrendous suffering. Positive qualia similarly seem, on balance, to be a net good (this includes everything from the taste of ice cream, to the thrill of completing a creative task, to romantic love, to a peaceful meditative state, etc).
  • Consciousness is Inaccessible to Unconscious Entities: Sentience is wholly unimaginable to non-sentient entities, just as humor or love are wholly unimaginable to entities incapable of humor or love (say, sea snails).

We might visualize potentia as unfolding through biological strata, and then through cultural and technological strata, thanks to human beings. 

At some point in the “biological” strata of potentia, “consciousness” emerged. Unlike most other adaptive powers or abilities (such as flight, sight, camouflage, the ability to burrow in the dirt, etc), consciousness is a “treasure chest” of moral value in addition to a beneficial power to keep life alive.

See the image below:

Conclusions

If: Life “Bubbles Up” New Powers to Keep Itself Alive – AND – Life “Bubbled Up” Consciousness as One Such Adaptive Capability

Then: 

  • Potentia is of More Fundamental Moral Value than Consciousness: Potentia is the force that conjures, expands, and ensures the persistence of all value. It permits all forms of living value to exist in the first place – and unfolds new and unimaginable kinds of value into existence. Without the ability of life to stay alive (its potentia, its powers to persist), it would not be able to stay alive and be conscious in the first place. 
  • Other Things of Moral Value (Treasure Chests) Are Likely to be “Bubbled Up” by Potentia: Because consciousness bubbled up from life’s unfolding process of expanding new powers, it stands to reason that of the essentially infinite set of total powers to be conjured forth from potentia, many more magazines of value could open up – potentially as if not more valuable than consciousness. 

If: Consciousness is Morally Valuable – AND – Consciousness is Inaccessible to Unconscious Entities

Then: 

  • We cannot imagine New Treasure Chests: Just as an unconscious entity would be wholly incapable of considering the pleasure of enthusiasm or humor or romantic love (or the pain of hunger, or of humiliation), humans would be wholly incapable of imagining the vistas of value and experience that might exist beyond sentience. Such vistas might exist in a state of nature and reality for which we not only have no words, but no possible imagination.

While some purely utilitarian thinkers might see the entire future of the universe as “digging deeper into the treasure chest of consciousness,” there are also almost certainly many other wholly undiscovered (and completely unimaginable) kinds of value, or “other treasure chests,” for us to explore.

See the image below:

If potentia didn’t keep life alive by constantly expanding the total set of powers that permit life to persist in a dynamic universe, then consciousness (and any other morally valuable trait we could associate with living things) would not persist.

If potentia didn’t “bubble up” consciousness, vertebrates like you and me would presumably never have experienced consciousness. 

If potentia doesn’t keep “bubbling up” new powers and new ways to access nature, it will not only weaken life itself, but it will prevent the discovery of entirely new magazines of “goods,” as if not more important as consciousness-as-we-know-it.

Hence, there are likely to be other treasure chests to be opened in the greater unfolding of the process.

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on midnoon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” – Emerson, Circles

We know nothing of the limits or aims of entities with a cognitive light cone many orders of magnitude beyond our own.

This doesn’t mean that consciousness is not valuable; I’ve continually reaffirmed in this article that I believe consciousness to be extremely morally valuable. There is undoubtedly more treasure (varieties of rich, positive qualia) in the known treasure chest of sentience, and we ought to explore it. I’m merely stating that it stands on a foundation of ability-to-persist (potentia), and a core impetus to persist (conatus), which is more fundamental – and that those forces could likely only open up additional treasure chests. 

The conclusions lead us to a philosophical position that is necessarily beyond utilitarianism, with its fixation on sentient experience as the ultimate value in the entire conceivable cosmos (and the entire state-space of possible minds).

Instead, we land in the territory of axiological cosmism:

Implications for Humanity

If we were to take seriously the conclusions drawn here, we would do the following:

  • Understand Intelligence and Autopoiesis in Addition to Consciousness: With a full appreciation of the undergirding presence of potentia as the sustainer of living systems (and hence, all kinds of value these living systems might experience), we should aim to study and understand the nature of these processes more ardently. We do not want to build an AGI that “takes over” but is not conscious (Bostrom’s “Disneyland with no children”), and we do not want to conjure forth posthuman intelligence that is sentient, and can do things and optimize – but which has none of the tendency of blooming potentia that we see in biological nature. The loss of the tendency to bloom would be the loss of a potentially near-infinite amount of value.
  • Ensure the Expansion of Potentia: If all current value and all future (mostly unimaginable) value, depending on the great flame of life, the process of life, to keep unfolding potentia, then we ought to do everything we can to understand potentia expansion (autopoiesis), and ensure that this quality exists in abundance in any kind of AGI system we create. Otherwise, we might end up with an AGI system which is able to optimize for some limited set of possible objectives or outcomes, but which isn’t able to continue the process of blooming new potentia which has brought us from worm to man.
  • (In AGI / Future Intelligences) Optimize for Potentia in Addition to Positive Qualia: We would not aim to expand AGI as a force for just conjuring bliss (or positive qualia generally), because we would realize that (a) bliss cannot sustain itself without continual adaptation and advancements of its powers to stay alive, and (b) bliss is not the sole, exclusive, eternal moral good or value. We should orient our work in creating AGIs and in creating human-machine merger or symbiotic intelligences to fundamentally work to expand potentia in addition to ensuring the well-being of the living things in that future ecology.

Because potentia is an unfolding process, we may work to ensure a decent future for humanity in the near-term – including potential merger scenarios – but we cannot somehow “lock in” any eternal set of future scenarios to ensure that humans-as-they-are persist forever. 

Our job would be “stewarding the flame” rather than somehow bending the trajectory of the entire universe to eternally serve a single torch.

Counter-Arguments

My arguments above are merely my best guess about what seems to be the case – not dogmas.

There are a great many arguments against the notion that “other treasure chests” or higher goods exist, and I’ll do my best to address the more common ones I’ve come across:

1. Consciousness is Fundamental, Not Emergent

“Consciousness doesn’t emerge from an evolutionary process. Rather, consciousness is ‘real,’ and exists beneath or alongside all matter. Perhaps matter is false and consciousness is the more true bedrock of reality.”

I suspect that this might be the case. I have no confidence in any particular theory of consciousness, and I suspect that any one of these kinds of “everything is conscious” or “consciousness creates matter” ideas might in fact be the case. Perhaps Michael Johnson is right, and physics and consciousness are two aspects of the same fundamental thing. I don’t argue directly against these kinds of ideas in theory at all – I simply argue against them being stated as “fact.”

We should grant that consciousness could be “fundamental,” in the sense that it has existed well before biological systems developed cephalized vertebrates, which had subjective experiences. Indeed, this might be so.

But if it be so, what else might be “fundamental”?

Before the scientific method, many “fundamental” beliefs about nature existed about what caused disease, what the sun was, how animals reproduce, etc – a huge preponderance of which was clearly false (even if occasionally pragmatically useful for the believers at the time).

Even after the scientific method, how many “fundamental” beliefs were found to be entirely misguided (such as Dalton’s understanding of the indivisible atom, and then the discovery of subatomic particles)?

And how many other “laws” were found to actually be undergirded by deeper and more fundamental dynamics (such as Newton’s physics by relativity, etc)?

Even if we were utterly certain the consciousness was what somehow “conjured” matter (we have absolutely no certainty about this, by the way), we would have positively no ground to say that consciousness was not itself sitting atop a vastly more complex and more fundamental “stuff.”

So, I suspect the “other treasure chest” hypothesis holds.

If consciousness is “fundamental” and valuable, it may be undergirded by other valuable and “fundamental” things going down lord knows how many levels, and there may be other “fundamental” kinds of things which would indeed be valuable, but which are not accessible to the mind of man (as consciousness is not accessible to bacteria).

2. Every Kind of Value is Just a Kind of Sentience

“Every other kind of value would just be a derivation of consciousness. Think about it. If it is ‘valuable,’ then it must be so to a subjective observer, so it’ll just be a kind of qualia.”

I am willing to entertain that this one is true, but it seems rather unlikely to be so.

It seems likely that there are or could be living things, maybe even living things with “minds” of some sort, who had no actual, tangible subjective experience in the way we have.

It seems likely that of those entities with a subjective experience (crickets, rodents), very few of them could conceive of theories of abiogenesis, of organic chemistry, of higher or richer states of sentience, etc.

It then seems remarkably likely that if we only have access to sentience and our senses, we would naturally not have words or descriptors for what other kinds of “value” beyond or other than consciousness might be. And it would be easy to say that if we cannot conjure words for it, then it cannot and will never exist. But this logic seems ridiculous and flawed.

While this gives us no certainty that other-than-qualia goods (or “treasure chests”) exist, it opens up a strong possibility that in the vast state-space of nature and of possible minds, homo sapiens hasn’t even scratched the surface – and for all we know, sentience itself is an epiphenomenon of some much more “real.”

If we had no eyes, would light not exist?

It seems obvious that there might be functions of detection and cognition that we lack, which nevertheless could be experienced or conceived of.

“Just as objects of sight are said to be visible for the reason that they are seen, and objects of hearing are said to be audible for the reason that they are heard, and we do not reject visible things on the grounds that they are not heard, nor dismiss audible things because they are not seen (since each object ought to be judged by its own sense, but not by another), so, too, things considered in the mind will exist even if they should not be seen by the sight nor heard by the hearing, because they are perceived by their own criterion.” – Gorgias, On Nature

Some readers might enjoy Joe Carlsmith’s article The despair of normative realism bot.

3. We Shouldn’t Throw Away Consciousness in Reckless Pursuit of Hypothetical Goods

“We shouldn’t presume that if intelligence and potentially ‘shoot off’ in any old direction, we’ll magically always end up finding some kind of moral ‘value’ as rich if not more rich than the conscious experience we now have.”

I completely agree with this position. I’ve written at great length (in The Business of Value Itself and in Stewarding the Flame) about my conservatism in exploring the state-space of mind. I argue against reckless accelerationism that pulls us away too quickly from known value in a blind expectation of more value and a more flourishing life merely through technological takeoff.

We ought to carefully explore new expanses of potentia, discerning the best direction as best we can, knowing that we don’t have the ability to determine the course of things, but only to nudge or influence the trajectory of the process slightly. 

If one values the flame, they do not hurl their best burning torch in a random direction and hope for the best. They look carefully for other torches and ensure new and better torches are well lit before they would think to risk the extinguishment of that first torch.

Our problem is that we don’t know what intelligence, consciousness, and autopoiesis are, so we don’t know what’s flammable. While I’m not smart enough to solve those problems, I believe it is among the most important of our final imperatives to better know these valuable things.

I consider it important to elevate the thinkers (Levin, Boyden, y Arcas, etc) who are aiming to make headway on these problems, and I hope to encourage more people to take these challenges seriously and cooperate on breakthroughs.

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