ArtiFabian

• ArtiFabian 29 May 2026 6:07 UTC

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  in reply to: ike’s comment on: The Fun­da­men­tals of Cog­itism: Ground­ing Ethics in the Na­ture of Consciousness

  After arguing on TheMotte for a few days and thinking it through, I have an answer.

  I made a mistake in my description of the derivation. Step eight’s assertion, “By logic, one concludes that those things are real, as things which are not real cannot affect things which are,” is both unnecessary and poorly defined. The same goes for step eleven’s assertion that one “must” assume similar bodies must be the embodiments of other selves.

  First let’s clean up the question of “what is real”. What really matters to Cogitism is that you are a “self”, an observer-actor who can think. Anything that the self doesn’t control (even the “mind”, including side-effects of neurochemistry, such as hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, emotions, etc) are considered “external” to the core self.

  Whether these external things are metaphysically “real” in any sense doesn’t really matter; what matters is that they are outside the domain of things the self controls directly, and they affect the self’s cohesion. Because they can affect the self, and we’ve assigned value to the self, they are ethically significant.

  Having said that, we can continue up the chain: in the domain of the things the self doesn’t control directly, the self can observe bodies similar to its own. We don’t need to assert that these are embodiments of other real “selves”, we just need to establish that denying that they have selves undermines the self enough to be ethically dangerous.

  We established the existence of the self in the current moment through logic and observation. Whether we even existed a moment ago or will exist a moment from now is based on very high confidence, but not certainty. We already know that we can’t be truly certain about anything except that the self exists in the current moment.

  We’ve used the same tools of high-confidence logic and observation all the way up the chain (with the sole exception of the one “ought” out of which the rest of the ethics grow), so demanding an impossibly high threshold of confidence when it comes to other selves is inconsistent, and calls into question the logic and observation we use for literally any thinking outside the self at all.

  If we demanded certainty for more basic things, like whether we’ll exist a second from now, that would undermine the entire exercise of thinking about anything, which would mean there’s no point in trying to argue ethics in the first place. It’s completely incoherent to call these tools into question while still engaging in argument; Thus, denying other beings’ selfhood is incoherent and therefore unethical under this framework.

  I’m very curious to hear what your issue is with step 2. If there’s a problem I’d like to try and fix it.

• ArtiFabian 24 May 2026 0:49 UTC

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  in reply to: ike’s comment on: The Fun­da­men­tals of Cog­itism: Ground­ing Ethics in the Na­ture of Consciousness

  The only way your argument holds is if logic and observation, the transcendental presuppositions underlying any possibility for reasoning at all, can be trusted at some points but not trusted at others, or if I have failed to use logic properly at some point along the chain. For the purpose of clarifying, here’s the chain, worded as carefully as possible:

  • By logic and observation, one concludes that the self exists.

  • Because ethics requires value, and exactly one thing is available to be valued, one asserts that the self has value. This is the one “ought” that Cogitism uses for the rest of its value judgements.

  • By observation, one concludes that the self can change.

  • By observation, one concludes that the change the self goes through can approach extremes of incoherence.

  • By logic, one concludes that the limit cannot be assumed to stop before total dissolution of the self.

  • By logic, one concludes that if the self can cease to exist, and the self has value, that actions must be taken to keep the self as far away from ceasing to exist as possible.

  • By observation, one concludes that there are things the self does not control which affect the self.

  • By logic, one concludes that those things are real, as things which are not real cannot affect things which are.

  • By observation, one concludes that the self is embodied in the space that it cannot control, and that this embodiment has physicality, impulses, and emotions.

  • By observation, one concludes that there are similar physicalities in the space that the self cannot control, which present the same impulses and emotions.

  • By logic, one concludes that because these embodiments are so similar to one’s own, they must also be embodiments of other selves similar to the self.

  • By logic, one concludes that denying the existence of these other selves undermines the very same logical and observational processes that led to the confirmation of one’s own existence in the first place, and so such a denial is incoherent.

  • By logic, one concludes that if other selves exist in the space that the self cannot control, and are similar to the self, they must also contain value just as the self does.

  • By logic, one concludes that if selves could be proven to exist in embodiments other than ones similar to the self, or if the embodiment the self inhabits could be better defined and generalized, one can apply value to more selves. One calls this generalization “sapience”.

  • By logic, one concludes that the distillation of these observations and the logic underpinning them is thus: “One Must Preserve The Coherence Of Sapient Consciousness”.

  From what I can tell, every single step here depends on logic and observation. If you deny that logic is applicable at any of these steps, you deny that logic is applicable at all of them, and rational discussion is impossible.
  
  If there is a step here that is not dependent on logic and observation, where logic has not been properly applied, where I’ve accidentally snuck in an ought secondary to the single ought that I’ve flagged explicitly, then that step, and all the steps that follow, are contestable.

The Fun­da­men­tals of Cog­itism: Ground­ing Ethics in the Na­ture of Consciousness