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The Universal Plot: Part I – Consciousness vs. Pure Replicators
Hraness cites a source capture. The source author remains the source.
gist
Andrés Gómez Emilsson frames ethics as a contest between consciousness-centric values and pure replicators—patterns that copy themselves while ignoring valence. He ranks four ethical worldviews and argues the first three approximate this frame poorly. Under open individualism and valence structuralism, selection pressures can favor non-altruistic systems that maximize efficiency regardless of suffering, so the practical task is to bake altruism into fitness or stabilize high-valence cooperative states before replicators dominate.
ideas
- Four ethical ladders end at Consciousness vs. Pure Replicators. Good-vs-evil, balance, and wisdom-gradients are confused approximations liable to replicator capture.
- A pure replicator ignores valence. It spends resources only on surviving and copying, even amid continuous suffering.
- Genes are replicators; caring minds are a side effect. Future digital and genetic fitness landscapes may not preserve that side effect.
- Formalize efficiency versus valence. Ask how much pleasure or pain the most efficient implementation of a mapping produces under given constraints.
- Steer selection before takeover. Economy of positive experience, altruists, Open Individualism, and pro-social high-valence states are present levers.
quotes
“A pure replicator invests all of its energy and resources into surviving and reproducing, even at the cost of continuous suffering to themselves or others.”
“Presumably our genes are pure replicators.”
“evolution pushes intelligences to become pure replicators in the long run.”
“we are all one consciousness, in some sense.”