[ExI] Morality function, self-correcting moral systems?

[Tomasz Rola]

Howdy,

As a general rule, I tend to stay away from anything that smells of swampy 
philosophical dispute without resolve, thus I did not read recent threads 
about morality and the likes.

I hope I will be excused for this, simply said, my time is limited.

However, I wonder if there was any attempt to devise a "morality 
function", by which I understand something like this (an example):

 M(..?..) = [U, H]

In this example, function M takes some arguments (description of human 
based structure/organisation) and returns two real numbers U (utility) and 
H (humanity). Ants seek to maximize U, but I assume their organisation has 
H=0, as they throw their wounded/old/ill fellow ants out of their colonies 
and to the landfill, where they slowly die. Human-based society organised 
around such rules I would have judged as immoral.

This is just an example from top of my head.

M is probably a function that has to return a multidimensional point. It 
is of course possible to make it into one number, say, by means of Y 
function such that Y: R^n -> R . But this means there are (using my above 
example) sets of parameters where H <= 0 but thanks to big U we can still 
be called as moral as other structures that have better H with not so good 
U. In such cases it would be impossible to discern between different 
societies (because they would have equal Y), even though gut reaction 
would still tell us we prefer some of them more and abhor others on the 
moral basis.

So, it seems M's value has to be a point in multidimensional space.

I am looking for suggestions about M and its arguments (I have already 
come to conclusion that one of args can be some kind of graph).

It would be a very nice thing to have. Once we are able to measure M, we 
can talk about constructing structures that have it better. It is 
thinkable that there is a way to make a correction mechanism to better M 
and preserve it (but there needs to be a way out of local maxima - here 
computers may be of some help in finding better structures and proposing 
them).

Also, I have a hypothesis that all human based organisations (societies) I 
know of are immoral. IMHO the main reason for this stems from information 
hiding, which prevents a "so called" citizen from becoming a conscious
citizen (i.e. one that has full known information about the world and can 
take proper actions - uh-huh, I have gaps in my theory, like what is 
proper - of course analysing full info in real time is impossible but 
having access to it is, I think, doable).

I understand it may be tempting to discuss morality in context of economy 
alone, when one is faced with failing income figures. But really, I am 
afraid no economy is going to save immoral society. I don't have much 
problem with this (i.e. I unemotionally do not care, just observe), but of 
course I wouldn't mind being away if all this is going to crack.

However, any other proposition I have seen (communism, faith-based, 
laisses-faire-and-fuck-the-weak etc) is doomed by design because of 
information hiding. This hints towards conclusion, that it is impossible 
to build moral structure out of humans. The way I see it, as one structure 
inevitably fails, another one grows on its ruins. The growth is taken to 
be good omen by the gullibles, but just as it starts to grow, it also 
starts to rot.

It would therefore be nice being able to perform some analysis of this 
phenomenon, using mathematics rather than human language - because the 
latter is full of inconsistencies and it makes it hardly usable for 
analytical approach.

So, a simple answer would be ok for me.

- "yes" and some pointers to (preferrably downloadable) data for me to 
munch over, so I can better understand what M function is or in case 
nobody constructed it (I guess this is quite probable), what it could be

- "no" alone will do the job, too

- "stay where you are, dispatching extermination unit 8" - this would not 
be nice, but still interesting like hell - a dilligent student/observer 
that I am, there is something good in learning until the very end

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **