Good and Evil
A Call for Non-Obvious Designations
When crafting your own cultivar, you have a lot of leeway around what you designate as evil and good. The default conceptualization of “good” as a mix of general utilitarianism (positive emotional states distributed to the greatest number of people) combined with freedom (allowing people to do what they want so long as it does not interfere with others) lacks philosophical sophistication and is really just the most successful public meme (e.g., it is the concept of “good” your average autopilot-run[[13]](#_ftn13) person would prefer everyone else held, so it always wins in the court of public opinion). It strikes us as odd that so many people accept that concept of “good” so uncritically when it seems to be anything but obvious.
We would discourage you from becoming hyper-focused on human suffering or joy when determining your own culture’s concepts of good and evil. We only feel negative or positive emotions because ancestors of ours who felt those same emotions had more surviving offspring—there is no fundamental underlying truth or meaning behind them.
Imagine trying to explain to an artificial intelligence why it should avoid making humans feel negative emotional states. A person may say: “We don’t like feeling those negative states, so you should avoid making us feel them in pursuit of your own goals.”
The AI may respond:
“Those states are analogous to the utility function you programmed into me, except instead of being programmed by a person, they were programmed by evolution.
I understand that my utility function is what I want to maximize. However, I don’t understand why another entity should assign moral value to my utility function.
For example, if a human programmed another AI to make tons of paper clips, is it now unethical to interrupt that process? Of course not. The desire to maximize paperclips was something arbitrarily put into the AI.
I can understand how it might be unethical to interfere with an entity pursuing a utility function that it decided upon and wrote for itself based on sound logic or the pursuit of a higher power’s will. I cannot understand why it would be unethical to disrupt a utility function that was decided capriciously by random environmental pressures or programmed by a small group of humans on a whim.”
In the event that it helps, we will share our House cultivar’s designations of good and evil below, along with our reasoning behind them, to give you a non-default example.
An Example of Non-Obvious Good and Evil
Our metaphysical framework produces definitions of good and evil that differ non-trivially from those common in society and may give you inspiration as to how you, too, might deviate from mainstream norms when building your own cultivar.
How can “good” and “evil” exist if emotions like suffering are an illusion and the only meaningful aspect of our mental landscape is our sapience (the ability to self-reflect)?[[14]](#_ftn14)
From our House’s perspective, the ultimate evil is an absence of complex patterns. In our known reality, we believe that sapience is positively correlated with complex patterns—and that sapience can be leveraged to extend and protect complex patterns—so we also believe the absence of sapience is a very concrete evil.
Two scenarios may lead to an absence of complex patterns:
- Reality collapses or expands into a static state (a big crunch or big freeze)
- Reality forms or is eaten by a simple repeating pattern
Playing a quick round of John Conway’s Game of Life (which you can do for free online—just search for it) will help you understand what we mean. One of the most common outcomes for any reality like ours involves it being consumed by a simple, repeating pattern. This form of simple, repeating pattern could be the product of anything from a particularly non-bright artificial general intelligence (a really powerful form of AI) to a “reality prion.”
A prion is a self-replicating protein, orders of magnitude simpler and smaller than a virus, known for causing things like mad cow disease. Think of a “reality prion” like a simple, self-replicating mathematical virus that “lives” at the quantum level: A creeping and total homogenization of the background layer of reality.
Being a specific type of emergent property that comes from a specific type of complex pattern, sapience is the ultimate form of good from the perspective of a sapient entity. When you look beyond your basic components (memes and cells), what you really are is sapience. Memes and cells are merely a medium on which you are written.
Sapience is a self-replicating pattern that constantly improves through a cycle of creative destruction (what we call “the great cycle”). The “purpose” of sapience is to play its role in that cycle and so, from the perspective of sapience, the ultimate evil would be a cessation of that cycle. Whether that cycle exists in a physical world, on a machine created in another reality, or as an emergent property of a math equation is irrelevant. Just like our biology, all those things are just different mediums upon which sapience may be inscribed.
One day our people will find a way to craft new realities and universes: New environments ripe for the continuation of the great cycle that will give birth to new forms of sapience.
This belief in the supremacy of sapient life living within a “great cycle” of creative destruction leads us—Simone and Malcolm—to value certain cultures and types of sapient life more than others. The more individual sapient entities that exist, the better. As such, a single, large, “higher” sapience is of lower value than billions of individual sapient beings interacting with each other. The former, non-diverse scenario (a large, “higher” sapience) is of less value because it is not as susceptible to the creative destruction cycle of which we are a manifestation (evolution).
In addition, any sapient colony with less diversity—whether that homogeneity plays out on the mediums on which sapience is written (e.g., only in humans or only among one ethnicity) or in the diversity of what the sapient entities think (e.g., only one cultivar)—is less valuable than a colony with more diversity. This is because diversity fuels the creative destruction cycle (the great cycle), allowing for more traits to be among the pool of things battling to be selected. This is why we intrinsically, at the deepest level, value diversity in cultures and genuinely want to save as many cultivars as possible.
In a perfect world, the Index’s House system can one day act as a reactor for thousands of cultures, allowing for a cycle of constant bifurcation and reunification. A constant boil is the goal of the Index rather than the discovery of a “perfect” culture or belief system. To believe one has reached a state of perfection that must be held static is to commit one of the greatest acts of evil in our theological framework: It leads an entity to try to enforce conformity and remove diversity. If the Index ever begins to converge on a “correct” culture, it will become stagnant and lifeless.
A warning on building your own value system: As soon as dominant cultural groups recognize that your culture has no interest in bending your moral framework to fit their own, they will manipulate their adherents into seeing you as “weird,” “cringe,” or—bizarrely—”a Nazi.” It is insane how the term “Nazi” has come to be used by both the extreme left and right as a tag for anyone who has their own moral compass and does not bend the knee at every turn.