Ready-to-mind

Morality after apocalypse

There are some injustices we are living through today and some that we remember from history, that we commemorate. We rally behind the victims to show them support, to remember what they have suffered so that these things are never repeated again.

In all of history just think about the many small countries, sultanates, kingdoms, duchies, tribes, religions, races, etc - against which serious injustices were done, but now no one remains who cares. After some number of generations, you don't even take one codon of DNA from those ancestors. Identities are also quickly lost over generations.

The world we inhabit is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, many times over. One of the first apocalypses was the introduction of toxic life destroying Oxygen as a waste product of Cyanobacteria - the first organism that could photosynthesize. The oxygen that they produced as a waste product started rusting Iron present in the earth's crust, turning the seas red. Oxygen oxidises things. It has electrons to give away to mess up the chemical structures of other things. Even the cyanobacteria weren't ready for all this oxygen and it killed many of them. The earth didn't start with 21% atmospheric oxygen. It had virtually 0%. Think of our oxygenated world as you would imagine a radioactive wasteland. The original chemical composition stands ruined.

It is tempting to draw the lesson from this that change is the only constant and that morality is naive. You have to adapt to change and only the fittest survive. It's good to draw those lessons, but be ready and willing to draw others as well.

I do feel bad for the cyanobacteria. They were chilling on the earth (no pun intended). They had solved nutrition. Capturing solar energy is the way; something humanity is figuring out only now. But like with any successful model, the mimesis took off, cyanobacteria made too many copies of itself and the reproductive principle was not far thinking or sensitive enough to see that it should proceed with temperance. The cyanobacteria could have devoted their resources to fighting any new forms of life that may come to emerge and threaten their chill time eating sunlight. They could have developed the forms of government that would control reproduction so that oxygen would not overwhelm the planet and cause global freezing.

And it's just so spooky that we humans find ourselves going through the same trials. It goes to show that we cannot, as per our discourse, "destroy the planet". The planet has survived a lot. It's a massive rock with a lot of momentum that has endured worse. If humans pollute a bunch, make irreversible changes and die away, that will just be another exciting chapter in the history of the planet. What we can destroy is just ourselves, other contemporary life forms, our own dreams for the society we could have, and the world as it was when we inherited it.

I find all of this deeply inspiring. It doesn't make me nihilistic but rather highlights to me how exciting the challenge of morality is. We need to find a way of acting morally in response to all this.

AI may ruin civilization, late-stage capitalism is making life really unfun, plastic straws outnumber many types of fish. From the planet's perspective: An exciting new chapter where the humans kill themselves and leave behind microplastics that after 3 billion years will be the perfect conditions for a new form of plastic-based lifeform.

Even if we try to hold on to the world as it was when we inherited it, how much can we hold on after the wave of thoughtless mimesis destroys whatever we held near and dear? At some point there's no going back. Can we give the world back to the cyanobacteria and help them set net-zero oxygen targets?

Transformative experiences such as these complicate morality because it is unclear whether you should use the morality you had before or after the transformative experience.

However these are all just paradoxes. These are ways of seeing how moral theories fall apart. This is not an excuse to give up but to retheorise.

Some ways I am doing that:

There are many many values. Values are kind of fun. I just want to keep playing with them and displaying them.

I don't want to peg my emotional state to humanity's carbon emissions. I don't want to judge what matters from the perspective of what "ultimately" matters. Why prioritise the "end"? We don't want there to be an end, and we may not get the luxury of an "end" to look back from. I don't want to live every moment in anticipation of how we will be judged when looking back.

I also don't want to carry so much hurt. Maybe some of the things we consider to be bad are over and the time to worry about them and hold onto them is past. Some people are too casual about morality, and some are maybe too serious. Being maximally serious is also not good. Seriousness just means something like thinking in series. Jumping from one idea to only the next one very carefully because you don't want to repeat a mistake.

I am filled with what I consider moral feeling, but maybe that is not the best way to characterise what I'm feeling. It is too confused. Maybe I am filled with a feeling of how things can be different. Just different. In some cases simpler, in some cases more just, in some cases healthier - but overall the strong feeling I feel is a feeling of how I want things to be different than the way they are.

Morality of course needs to have some universalisability. I think maybe morality is just a very careful kind of wanting - and one of the main principles of carefulness in wanting is to want something that others in your environment can also want, so that we can all have it.

I thought about this topic some more after watching Wall E, here is my review.