- What is Good?
- "There's nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so."
- Absolute good is not a real thing. There is only subjective good. There is no objective anything which is directly addressable by any human mind.
- The only good in the universe comes from the interpretations made by sentient beings. (In more than one sense.)
- You believe in an "absolute good"? OK, but consider that other person who also claims to believe in an absolute good but who so obviously disagrees with you. You say his good is wrong. He says yours is wrong. About absolute good, no one can be right. Everyone can be right about the good that we actually know. Each such good is subjective, though.
- People pursue what they believe to be good.
- This is another way to say that living things necessarily have desires which they must pursue to persist and thrive on many levels.
- There's no limit to how confused they might be about reality or their imagination of how to improve it for themselves.
- "Projective"
- Real Good is achievable
- A vision can be realized and retain fidelity to its imagining.
- It is the creation of good by sentient beings wherein the good has "reach" in the sense that David Deutsch defined it in The Beginning of Infinity, though he was talking about explanations with reach, whereas I'm proposing that applications have reach.
- We know about methods by which real good can be well-pursued.
- Good regularly comes into conflict in the world shared by sentient beings.
- Good vs Good - the irresolvable challenge of limited subjectivity
- Good vs Reality - the irresolvable challenge of model inaccuracy and incompleteness
- "Life is Suffering"
- The conflict introduces the proposition of evil. Don't buy it. It's a false proposition.
- What about all those whackos?
- Conflict is a necessary means to a Greater Good
- Greater Good is a coherence with natural progress (emergence)
- Greater Good is cross-perspective, inter-subjective, but not objective.
- This is an emergent world, not a designed one
- We have natural constraints with varieties of freedom; both must be explored to be applied
- Embrace conflict without war (seek consensus or common projection)
- Two rows of teeth get the job done by grinding against each other with the material in between.
- Sensitivity to conflict permits better models and more progress - that's sentience
- A Greater Good is achievable
- Rather than an absolute good, what’s available to us is an emergent good. As existence unfolds, good is manifest in its progress. The sum total of all good experienced (yes by sentient beings) is the greater good of today. But we all imagine more, so the greater good of tomorrow will be even more. But it's not predictable.
- Try to flip the traditional understanding of good:
- It is NOT "at the root", "fundamental", or "absolute", nor does it exist in some formic essence. You can't dig down into the depths of simpler and simpler forms of nature to find it, nor can you dig down into a single self and find it clarified or complete.
- It is rather "continually manifesting", "emergent", and "still unrealized". There is no design at its root. There is no plan for its development, no end goal to which it seeks to attain.
- It is discovered and refined in constructive conflict.
- Its summary nature (the "greater good") is embodied in the thriving of all living things to their maximum degree.
- Its specific nature is represented in the aspirations of sentience.
- Sentience is crucial to enhance progress. The variety of freedom it brings is revolutionary, but not ultimately so, nor uniquely so.
- Cooperation is naturally emergent, as are empathy and sympathy.
- Concepts of fairness and justice are commonly derived by deeper beings from social experience and naturally emergent impulses.
This is a distillation of the macrocosmic ideas introduced in The Best World Possible?? . For the microcosmic ideas see Gap Theory.
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