Paper 2: Morality is Alliance Technology
This paper describes the role of morality in living systems, both human and nonhuman. This is a summary; the full text can be found at my website www.talkingoctopus.com.
We think of moral norms within human alliances as sets of rules that govern behavior, but they must have some deeper organic basis. Moral norms are also subject to continual change and evolution in human societies, which tracks approximately the speed of technological development. Morality is driven by emotional and mental reactions, which then spread between individuals. But these emotional and mental responses, like all organismic actions, must aim at homeostasis. This means that morality must in some way be a form of self-protective enterprise.
The altruistic element of moral norms appears contrary to self-protection, but when we view human individuals in the context of broader social alliances, this element clearly serves to reinforce homeostatic problem-solving by cementing protective bonds between individuals. Morality, then, can be seen as a form of social technology, which serves the purpose of making the best possible use of the organisms in our vicinity to support our individual homeostasis. Just as physical technology defines new techniques to enable the use of nonliving matter to support homeostasis, moral technology defines new techniques to enable the use of living matter.
Morality is a set of technologies, enabled by information, that create better opportunities for life. In other words, uses of other living beings that better enable opportunities for homeostatic problem-solving can be seen as good, and uses that destroy such opportunities can be seen as evil. This rule can apply not only in humans but in all species. This rule can link humans to all other species in moral terms, serving to resolve the paradoxes of animal ethics.
Living systems are all networks, nested within other networks. In order to understand the behavior of one level of a living system, one has to look at the levels above it. A cardiac cell becomes excited, but its pattern of excitement makes no sense without reference to the waves of rhythm in the heart muscle tissue, which in turn make no sense without reference to the circulatory system as a whole, the activity of which still makes no sense without reference to whether the environment is causing the organism to exert itself or to rest. The environment, the niche, is the highest level of organization that constrains the purposive behavior of organisms.
The supreme military alliance, which once separated warring societies but now encompasses the entire human species, is the highest level of social organization in the human niche. At the turn of the century, there were dozens of supreme alliances on earth. By the end of World War I, there were only four or five. By the end of World War II, there were just two. After 1989, the whole world unified in one supreme alliance. This is because alliances, like organisms, have affinities for one another driven by their need for knowledge. Competition between alliances leads to the growth of knowledge, which often obliterates the boundaries between compatible groups.
There is another way to look at morality, consonant with the above view. Many scientists see morality as an important, but un-scientific dimension of life, which is based on eternal rules that never change as we make discoveries. Some scientists base these moral values on faith, others on rationality, but few see them as a rapidly expanding frontier. But moral values have changed, rapidly, as technology has developed.
The human neocortex, perhaps like all intelligent nervous systems, is divided into two hemispheres. The two hemispheres inhibit one another, and they process knowledge in two different “styles.” The left hemisphere processes knowledge in the manner of reductionist science, one bit at a time, in order to find out how to manipulate the bits and construct particular structures with their own internal logic. It separates particular things from their context and operates on them as objects. This is what you might call the “bottom-up” manner of processing. The right hemisphere processes knowledge in a drastically different way. The right hemisphere regards the whole, everything, all at once, and notices the many things that may not fit with the flow. It uses intuition, emotion, aesthetics, and even spirituality. It finds the interesting bits by taking the entire picture of life as a process, and seeing what stands out. You might call this the “top-down” manner of processing. Although this manner is quite different from “gathering data” in little bits for precise measurement, it is nevertheless empirical, and it is absolutely essential to make sense of the world.
You can see science and technology as the effort to use “bottom-up” processing on the human niche. We try to isolate parts of our world, like bits of iron ore or wood or petroleum, and process them in very particular ways to make houses, cars, or spaceships, things which protect our prospects for homeostasis both as individuals and as a species. When we do this to living things, we call it “bio-technology.” But morality, for each of us, regards life as a whole, as a flow, as a unitary process. It regards the entire picture of all this knowledge, including every technology, and suggests to us a general way of behaving that will gain us the most trust, and get us farthest in the way we live our own life. When you look at the world as a whole, the most important objects in it to interact with in a certain way, to get what we want out of life, are the other living beings, especially humans. This is why how we treat other humans is the main concern of moral thought. Morality is “top-down” processing of all the knowledge we have of the world.
This argument shows why technology and morality move together. Moral values and norms may have changed more in the past hundred years, since 1921, than in the previous five hundred, from 1421 to 1921. You might debate the particulars of my guess about these rates of change, but it would be hard to deny that the acceptance of homosexuality, equality of women and minorities, nonviolence, and global human rights are incredibly novel in the history of humanity. These changes track the technological developments we have achieved not by chance, through specific arguments, but because morality is based on the same “dataset” as technology, viewed from the other end. The questions of what we “can” do and what we “should” do, then, are always intermingled, and they cannot be separated, because they come from the same sources of knowledge.
The two sides of our neocortex interact with each other to help us maintain homeostasis. Likewise, the moral dimension of life and the scientific dimension interact continually. What is most important to realize is that these are both empirical efforts to improve our human niche, and they are complementary. We can thank science for moral progress, and we can thank moral values for scientific progress.
In my personal opinion, I believe there are two ways to think about God. One can see opportunities as a closed door, and imagine that only God has the key. Through God we can achieve all that we desire. In other words, God makes rules and the scriptures, and by following them you can achieve enlightenment and bliss. Many religions encourage this view. The other way is to suppose that opportunities are an open door, and God is that opening. In this way of thinking, it is we who discover new ways of finding God, and although God exists and is eternal, we are eternally discovering new ways of being that make Him real. In this view, all the efforts of all living beings to discover their own better ways of life are spiritual, and epistemological, struggles. We must regard and learn from all of it in order to be moral.
Copyright 2021 by Charlie Munford
