Foundations of a Moral Society
Sections of this chapter
Robots and Cyborgs
Structure of the Moral Society
Expansion of the Moral Society
Humanity is a gestalt of men, machines and knowledge. Knowledge is information that passes the test of prediction and control. Ethics are the most important kind of knowledge, because all knowledge stems from ethics. Men are animals whose bodies use knowledge to cause the effect called "awareness." The totality of man's awareness can only be expressed through his use of machines. Recall that language, clothing, tools, and computers are all examples of machines. Together men, machines, and knowledge represent the totality of human awareness. To destroy any part of the three part gestalt is to destroy all of it; human awareness can only exist when the parts are united. Man without the totality of his awareness is little more than an animal. Man devoid of all human awareness is no more than matter. Man with the totality of his awareness is the manifestation of the evolutionary force—the precursor to the Moral Society.
The precise structure of the Moral Society is, of course, impossible to forecast at this time. The important thing to keep in mind is that the Moral Society is both a means to an end and an end in itself. The ultimate goal is total awareness. The Moral Society is a means of achieving that goal by raising man to a higher state of total awareness. The structure of the Moral Society is implied by the evolutionary patterns. The patterns imply that 1) the Moral Society will represent a joining of men and 2) only men who are moral will join in the Moral Society.
Children will be made moral men by the Ethical State. The act of becoming moral will facilitate the development of the technology that will make the Moral Society possible. That the Moral Society will be primarily a technological development is implied by the evolutionary patterns that show man becoming increasingly dependent on his machines and the actual replacement of parts of his body with machines. The technological foundations of the Moral Society are pure conjecture and, like the rest of this book, should be regarded as hypotheses and theories still to be tested. Before discussing the technological components of the Moral Society, a brief discussion of the human component is in order.
The essential ingredient that distinguishes all persons is knowledge. Bodies and machines are means for acquiring, storing and using knowledge. Our knowledge is what makes us truly what we are. Morality is the most important component of man's knowledge but few persons are moral — most are at best ethical children — many are becoming immoral adults. As we look at the great moral men of history — Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Spinoza, etc. — we see that these men were all generalists. They were relative generalists in a historical sense since even many of the immoral specialists of today are better informed in every area of human knowledge than were the ancient generalists.
Therefore, it is not the intrinsic knowledge that makes men moral — it is something else.
The ingredient that seems to make men moral is not so much the breadth and depth of their knowledge, but rather the ability and the desire to communicate and extend the total sum of human knowledge to other men as well as the ability to learn from all other men. In other words, their breadth of knowledge makes them a part of all the men of their time. This commonality of knowledge with their fellow men when combined with creativity and love seems to produce an effect at the unconscious level that makes men moral as well as courageous. Only moral men are truly courageous (e.g., Spinoza). Children and immoral men always contain a streak of cowardice (e.g., Leibniz).
Psychosocial specialization separates men from each other in a process completely analogous to speciation in the lower animals. A joining can only occur when the unjoined beings are homologous. In the case of human beings, this means that all men must strive to acquire all important knowledge and be creative. Otherwise man cannot become moral and the Moral Society will not be possible. Therefore, the essential psychosocial process for producing the joining of moral men within the Moral Society will involve a radical change in our educational system. It will be necessary to create a system based on love which will enable all men to become full creative generalists with depth in all areas of knowledge. This subject is further discussed in the following chapters.
The technological basis of the Moral Society is much more conjectural and uncertain. What follows in this chapter represents only one possibility of how a joining may occur. It is the only technique that seems to fit all the evolutionary patterns. Others may be able to describe a more plausible technique for a moral evolutionary joining. Teilhard de Chardin, for example, thought that it would involve telepathic phenomena. However, this does not seem plausible and it does not fit the evolutionary patterns. In the end, when and if the joining occurs, it may be a radically different process from anything that can be imagined today. What follows is only one hypothesis. We begin the speculation with a discussion of technology.
As was shown in the previous chapter, the machine is an integral part of man's evolution. Man has always evolved by using his machines to amplify the components of his intelligence. The creation of the Moral Society should accordingly be an extension of the already-established patterns.
The creation of the Moral Society will probably be based on 1) constantly increasing the maximum level of total awareness for the entire human race in order to make all men moral and 2) developing the science and technology that will make possible the initial joining and the continuous expansion of the Moral Society. The former can be accomplished only by improving the individual quality of all human beings. The latter can only result from purposeful scientific and technological development. The two processes will interact synergistically.
The science and technology that will be essential for the creation of the Moral Society may be inferred from the basic structure of intelligence. That is to say, the technical and scientific foundations of the Moral Society as opposed to the moral foundations will be based on an understanding and amplification of Effecters, Sensors, Information, Memory, Logic, Imagination, Will, and Connectors. Intelligence will be a technological manifestation while morality will be a human manifestation.
Almost the entirety of human scientific and technological development has been concerned with the understanding and amplification of Effectors.. The only other component of intelligence that has shown considerable extension and amplification in man's multimillion-year history is the Connector of language. Language also served in a much more limited way as an amplification of man's Memory and Logic.
In the flickering interval of human history represented by the scientific revolution, man has begun to amplify the other components of his intelligence. This is being done at a rapidly accelerating rate.
First, man amplified his Sensors with the balance, the clock, the telescope, then the microscope. He continued to develop his artificial Sensors such as the thermometer, the barometer, etc. In the last 40 years, he has begun to amplify rapidly every one of his Sensors; he has developed electronic light amplifiers and the electron microscope. Every one of his senses — sight, sound, touch, heat, smell, position, etc. — can now not only be amplified but actually improved and replaced by machines. From the point of view of his intelligence, the only important effect of his Sensors is the Information which is provided to his brain. Today man uses machines to convert artificially-sensed events directly into Information. This is illustrated by such devices as remote seismographs, automatic spectrographs, and so on. Man is using technology to amplify every one of the components of his intelligence except Imagination and Will. The rapid development in the technology of intelligence directly manifests the acceleration rate of evolutionary change. This is most aptly illustrated by the computer explosion.
Electronic computers were first made in the late 1940'S. The computer, like all of man's machines, did not develop in a vacuum but evolved from his other machines. The forerunners of the electronic computer are 1) mathematics, which is a variation on the machine of language; 2) the abacus, which is thousands of years old; 3) the calculating machine, first developed by Pascal and then improved by Leibniz almost three hundred years ago; 4) the mechanical computer, first designed by Leibniz then imperfectly constructed by Babbage in the nineteenth century and greatly improved in the early 1940'S; and finally 5) electronic circuitry, which grew out of man's efforts to develop highly efficient artificial connectors through electronic means of communication.
Since the advent of electronic computer technology, computer quality has been improving by approximately a factor of ten every five years. Since 1950, computer technology has improved more every five years than it had in the entire three hundred years since Leibniz. Computer technology is about to take another giant leap that will improve it, not by a factor of ten, but by at least a factor of 1,000,000.
Professor Humberto Fernandez-Moran of the University of Chicago has recently discovered a technique for making submicroscopic integrated circuits called "picocircuits." Picocircuits are made by using the electron microscope in reverse and etching, with a beam of electrons, the patterns of an integrated circuit on a special organo-metallic substrate. Connections between the picocircuits can be made by forming conducting strands of organo-metallic substrate between different picocircuits with another beam of electrons. Working picocircuits already exist. Within a very few years it will be possible to use these picocircuits to make super-computers hundreds of times more powerful than the largest computers of today yet no larger than a brain cell!
In time it will be possible to manufacture complexes of super-computers in which the memory and logic units are packed with far greater density than in the human brain as we now understand it. Cryogenic, super-conducting versions of these computers could have even greater complexity than the human brain. They would be limited in size only by the speed of light, which might make communication between distant parts of the computer too slow for effective thought in some cases.
Such computers would eventually make it possible to have a completely automated society where all production, maintenance, scientific research and even design is performed by machines. Super-computers combined with other technological developments in 1) artificial sensors, 2) mathematics, 3) communications technology, 4) electro-mechanical servo systems; and 5) controlled thermonuclear fusion would make it possible eventually to produce a machine which in some sense rivaled and perhaps greatly exceeded the totality of man's present-day intelligence. The question before us then is whether or not the Moral Society can be purely a machine without a human component.
Robots and Cyborgs
It is part of the pattern of evolution that the more aware entity replaces the lesser aware entity whenever there is competition. There are no apparent logical reasons why machines directed by self-improving super-computers with logic and memory units more densely packed than in the human brain could not be more intelligent in some sense than man is today. If we consider that cryogenic versions of these computers could grow almost indefinitely, then we have a possibility for a totality of awareness within a machine comparable to that envisioned for the Moral Society. If these machines developed Wills of their own, then they would compete against man for natural resources and they might replace him. This is a picture of the evolution of a robot to a super-robot. Consider the evolution of the cybernetic organism (cyborg).
A cyborg is a machine that directly amplifies human powers. A cyborg is most easily pictured as a robot with a man inside it who controls every action of the robot directly and uses the machine to simulate and amplify his own actions. A lame person who puts on a mechanical limb is a cyborg of sorts. A man wearing functional clothing might even be considered a cyborg. In the broadest sense of the word, every machine that man has ever created has made him a cyborg. But the essential notion of a cyborg is that of a machine intimately associated with a man. The evolution of man has from the beginning been intimately associated with the development of the machine. Only the machine enabled our pre-sapiens ancestors to become fully human by avoiding specialization until they became moral.
A computer, no matter how complex it appears, is little more than a glorified adding machine. The human mind has features that no known machine has, namely Imagination and Will. A computer amplifies man's Memory (capacity for information reducible to simple symbols such as numbers) and Logic (speed of checking alternative consistencies). A computer in no way amplifies his Will or his Imagination; it will show no more Imagination or Will than was originally programmed into it. A self-improving (sometimes called "self-organizing") machine is one that can use its past experience to improve its speed at checking classes of inconsistencies (by developing heuristics) and/or its memory in quantity and/or quality. A machine with these characteristics would be a robot. It could completely control an automated society. The machine could increase its own ability to predict and control events in that society. However, it could not do it as well as a man who used all the capabilities of the computer plus his Imagination and his Will.
Robots cannot generate events independent of the Sensors. A robot can have a "Will" in the sense of being programmed to generate new events with its Effectors.. However, the "Will" is only a part of the Will of the original programmer. It is not amplifying the original Will in any way. The Imagination interacts with the Will and the other components of intelligence to select the new events to be generated by the Effectors. does this by completing the incompletely-perceived patterns in the environment in order to form a consistent set. Science tests the completed patterns with the Effectors to see if they have been completed in such a way as to allow one to predict and control. This is how awareness grows.
A robot would only generate events according to a predetermined formula though it could become increasingly efficient at generating them. Even if robot Will and Imagination were developed, a robot would still not be moral, although it might be ethical. Morality is the first step in the process of mind going from an effect of life to an effect of itself. Morality is a field effect which is an integral part of our species and which we cannot separate from ourselves.
In the end, a cyborg is a much more aware entity than a robot. A cyborg needs a man. Furthermore, the most complex aspect of the environment is still man. We still have no clear notion of what constitutes Imagination and how it is dependent on the structure of the brain. It may be that Imagination can only exist in the presence of a moral field. (This does not mean that only moral men are imaginative. Children seem to be creative because they are receptive to the moral field. Immoral adults are never creative.) Man may create a machine for amplifying Imagination and Will some day, but even then the cyborg will remain the pattern of the Moral Society because only the cyborg incorporates man and only man can be moral.
The Will, as previously defined, is essentially a program to increase total awareness continuously. The fact that man does not do this is due to the delusions of misinformation brought about by poor Logic and censorial illusions. A hedonist has the censorial illusion that only pleasure completes the set of all events. An ideologue has a faulty Logic that does not enable him to distinguish adequately between sensed events and imaginary events. He sees inconsistent events as consistent and fills his mind with imaginary awareness.
The Will is a vector with a direction and a magnitude. Man continuously corrects the direction when he plays the Game of Life, i.e., when he tries to maintain sphericity. The Will of a machine would only have the direction and magnitude it was originally given plus changes due to random errors in the program. The Will of man has a direction that results directly from the evolutionary force. Morality is the greatest amplifier of the Will. A robot can at best be intelligent; only the cyborg can be totally aware because only man is moral.
As man develops toward the Moral Society, a united humanity of men, machines and knowledge expanding its total awareness through science, art, and technology would become a single entity with a collective intelligence and the question of whether the ultimate form of the Moral Society is man or machine will become meaningless. The Moral Society will have a mind of pure humanity but a body that is mostly machine. This is the way it has always been. Men, machines and knowledge are a single entity. There are no sharp divisions between the body, the mind, and knowledge. Each is a cause and effect of the other.
Structure of the Moral Society
The structure of the Moral Society will probably entail the technology (physical, biological and psychosocial) for amplifying all the components of intelligence. It will be necessary to have the means for creating a synergistic interaction between the intelligence of many in order that a collective intelligence results that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is not now the case. Group efforts at solving complex problems by highly talented and imaginative persons may sometimes amplify some components of intelligence, such as Imagination and Will. However, the basic limitation in the efficacy of any group is the limitation on the intelligence of its most brilliant member. No problem is ever solved by a group unless at least one person fully understands all aspects of the problem. The Moral Society will be the first social system dependent on human behavior for circumventing this limitation. In so doing, it will make each of its individual members far more aware than they could have been otherwise. Every person who joins the Moral Society will possess the totality of man's knowledge.
The Moral Society, in mirroring the structure of man's mind, will possess all the components of intelligence. Most of these components will be machines, for example, communication networks (Connectors), electronic sensors, electro-mechanical and chemical Effectors, and computers (Logic and Memory). The Will and the Imagination of the Moral Society, however, will be a purely biological, i.e., human, manifestation — at least in the beginning. Will and Imagination will be amplified and unified by the intimacy of communication that will be made possible by the technology and structure of the Moral Society. However, the major amplification of Will and Imagination will come from man's final realization of his destiny and a desire to fulfill it — it will come from morality.
In the distant future, the body of the Moral Society may be all machine, but its mind will always be human. Similarly, a man's body is purely animal, but his mind sets him apart. That small part of the human brain that produces the effect some call a "soul" is the embodiment of the evolutionary force. It will have its most magnificent expression in the Moral Society. In creating the collective soul and mind of the Moral Society, man will for the first time achieve literal immortality.
Man's mind is an effect of the cellular and molecular structures that make up his body. All the components of intelligence manifest themselves as a functioning of these structures. Each component may be altered by altering some group of cells. When these structures no longer function, i.e., when a man dies, then they can no longer produce an effect and entropy quickly destroys them. Therefore, since man's awareness is an effect of his body, his soul ceases to exist when his body dies. Today, death for a man is total extinction. This, to many men, is an intolerable thought; therefore, men use religion to blind themselves to the overwhelming scientific evidence that their souls die with their bodies. There is no scientific counter-evidence that this is not the case. Man's innate need to be immortal has been the basis of many religions. This same need together with the love inherent in moral men will make the Moral Society possible.
As man evolves toward total awareness, he will begin to prolong his life by replacing increasingly large portions of his body with machines. This occurs today when men replace their missing or damaged Effectors with artificial limbs and organs (e.g., artificial hearts). Man has been augmenting his defective visual Sensors with spectacles for some time. Lately it has become possible to replace damaged Sensors with electronic devices connected directly to the human nervous system. This applies to eyes, ears, and the senses of touch, smell, and heat. These devices are still crude but they work and will get better until all of man's Sensors are replaceable and, most of all, augmentable by machines.
The next logical step should be to replace damaged parts of the brain. This will probably be done, at first, by using super-computers with picocircuits to amplify or completely replace those portions of the cortex that create Memory and Logic. The computers, like all of man's machines, should in time be far superior to the original animal components of his intelligence. This is already the case with many kinds of artificial Effectors, Sensors and the more simple Memory and Logic functions of computers. Eventually, man will have machines performing all his bodily functions.
The human body has been decaying for thousands of years as man has become increasingly dependent on his machines. A simple extrapolation of this trend indicates that some day man will have a body completely dependent on machines—his body will be made of machines instead of animal cells. These machines will be as integral a part of man as the animal cells that perform the same functions today. If man still has a sentimental attachment to the particular body form that he has had for millions of years, he may create the machines in his animal image. A human gene was recently synthesized at the University of Wisconsin. The synthesis of human cells seems inevitable. A synthetic cell is a machine. The technology produced by the ever-expanding total awareness of an Ethical State should eventually make it possible to create machine bodies for man that are indistinguishable in their appearance, function, and "feelings" from his animal body. Men would at first choose these bodies not so much as a means of creating the Moral Society but as a means of 1) prolonging their individual lives and 2) amplifying their individual powers.
Eventually, the cellular and molecular structures in the brain which produce Imagination and Will should be deciphered. Then man will have a machine body that exactly duplicates the basic structure, function and possibly appearance of his animal body, but in which all the components of intelligence are greatly amplified. This will be analogous to an enlarged photograph in which the same basic patterns of the original are reproduced but on a much larger scale and on different material. Man's intelligence will result from machines controlled by the morality of man's mind. The morality has no substance and should remain the same as it was before. In other words, man will still be himself but no longer an animal. He will be an amplified man with human morality but with an almost immortal machine body. Death could still occur but only by accident.
Imagination and Will are currently amplified by the close cooperation of highly aware persons with a common purpose. The same process should apply to the amplified man. Except that now the same technology which made it possible to replace the animal body with a machine body should make it possible to achieve an intimacy of communication and cooperation not possible between animal bodies. Moral men will join in voluntary association for the sole purpose of expanding their individual and collective awareness and assuring their immortality. Immortality will be assured by the collective power of the Moral Society that makes it immune to accidental death. Individual components might be destroyed but the collective mind would not be affected any more than our individual awareness is affected by destruction of our Effectors or even millions of brain cells. Our individual awareness should last as long as the Moral Society.
While the Moral Society is being created within the Ethical State, there may be some persons who are so strongly attached to their animal bodies that they will forsake immortality and the maximization of their individual awareness in order temporarily to preserve their animal structure. As all persons in an Ethical State, they should be free to do this. They would not be part of the Moral Society and their awareness would cease to exist when their body died.
Men will be immortal within the Moral Society because their body is made of machines that can be replaced and improved as needed. The effect that produces the mind should never have to stop for any man so long as the Moral Society is expanding its awareness faster than entropy is destroying the material universe around it.
Free men whose bodies are machines but whose minds are human would voluntarily join in a Moral Society in order to maximize their total awareness. The Information of each would be pooled in a common Memory. In this way, each person would have all the Information of every other person. Each individual Will and Imagination would be amplified by the moral field. The collective awareness of all persons would form the individual awareness of each person. Each person would remain individualized and literally immortal so long as the Moral Society did not succumb to entropy. For this reason, there should be a point in the evolution of humanity when all men will forever choose to expand their total awareness at their maximum rate. Only in this way could they assure their immortality and have their individual awareness expand forever. This would be the point of no return in awareness, where the Moral Society becomes irreversible and each man becomes an ever larger part of the infinitely-expanding cosmic Moral Society.
The ultimate body of the Moral Society, while made of machines, may not be made of matter in the ordinary sense. It may be that at some point in its development the Moral Society will be made of the interface substance between matter and energy. It might be made of tachyons, for example. Tachyons are postulated elementary particles that supposedly are spontaneously created from energy at speeds already in excess of the speed of light. This may be theoretically sound, but there is no scientific evidence that tachyons exist, although there is evidence that they should exist. In any case, relativity implies that objects may never be either accelerated or decelerated to the speed of light. An object made of conventional matter could exceed the speed of light only by a transformation of its structure directly into tachyonic matter. This would be analogous to a conformal mapping onto the complex plane. The techniques of differential geometry should be applicable to this process (see the work of Gerald Feinberg and R. G. Newton).
Since our minds are completely determined by the relationships that make up our bodies plus the field effect of morality, it should be possible for the Moral Society to duplicate continuously the material relationships of its body in substances that will enable it to amplify its intelligence further. If the Moral Society should choose to transform the patterns of its mind onto a body made of tachyons, it could recreate itself at speeds in excess of the speed of light. The speeds would be limited solely by how much energy the Moral Society was willing to lose. Tachyons accelerate by losing energy. When tachyons have lost all their energy, they are travelling at infinite speeds. A Moral Society made of tachyons could travel anywhere in the universe instantly if it gave up all its energy. The ultimate limitation on the speed of a tachyonic entity is how much energy, if any, it needs to reconstitute itself out of more conventional matter when it reaches its destination.
Tachyons, of course, may not exist even though they are theoretically possible. Other forms of energy might be used to create the body of the Moral Society and accelerate it, in effect, beyond the speed of light. The only limitations on the Moral Society should be the limitations of thought. As the Moral Society became less an entity of matter and more an entity of pure thought, it would transcend time, space, and matter. Its mind would become an effect of itself. It would become the evolutionary force — the source of all creation.
The mind of the Moral Society will be the collective mind of moral man continuously augmented and amplified as he evolves toward infinity. The mind of the Moral Society will be filled with purpose and devoid of all emotions, except love.
Emotion is a pre-programmed, i.e., instinctive form of behavior that enabled man to survive in the primitive Darwinian competition of prehistory. Lately, emotion has become less an aid to survival and more a source of entropy. It is emotion that causes men to seek happiness without purpose and security without awareness. Emotions such as fear, hate, greed, envy and anxiety are destructive and can serve only to impede the expansion of awareness. The only emotion that can serve a constructive purpose is love.
"Love" was defined as a state of mind in which the welfare of other persons is sufficiently important to us that we are willing to sacrifice part of our own welfare for theirs. To an ethical being, welfare refers solely to a person's ability to expand his awareness. Love will be the binding force that will enhance the initial joining of the Moral Society. It is only through love that it becomes possible to achieve the intimacy of communication with other persons which enables us to amplify our individual awareness. Love makes it possible for the awareness of one to be communicated to others at the unconscious level. Only love can extend the immediate family to the Moral Society.
The love of any given man is usually restricted to a very few persons — his immediate family and close friends. In the Moral Society the individual love of each will become the collective love of all. The welfare, i.e., total awareness, of each person will become the common concern of all persons. The Moral Society will be devoid of all emotion except love. It will be devoid of all purpose except total awareness. In the intimacy of the direct transference of thought, mankind will know true love for the first time. Only through the purpose and love inherent in the Moral Society can the human race find the joy it has vainly sought. Only love and awareness give quality to human existence.
The collective love of the Moral Society can only come about through the elimination of all the entropic forces of destructive emotion. Only moral men can do this. Only moral men can become totally aware. It is only by becoming totally aware that we can begin to understand ourselves. It is only by understanding ourselves that we can eliminate all emotion except love. It is only the love inherent in the structure of the Moral Society that will enable man to expand his awareness forever throughout the universe and beyond.
Expansion of the Moral Society
The future of man and consequently of the Moral Society is not on earth, but beyond the stars. The Earth is merely the first stage, or better still the launching pad, for the Moral Society. Only in the infinity of outer space can man have an infinite future.
There is little doubt that the Earth, the Solar System, and eventually the entire Galaxy and all currently perceivable galaxies will run down to the point where they will no longer be able to sustain any life or mind. The entropy of matter must always increase. Only moral mind through the evolutionary force can forever counter entropic destruction. In order for this to happen, it is necessary, at least in the beginning, to tap the vitality of matter and life before it is destroyed by entropy.
The Moral Society could evolve indefinitely by expanding first to new stars then to new galaxies and then to "new universes." In the beginning, each time the Moral Society expands it will probably consume an ever greater amount of energy by converting much of the matter under its control before the matter is destroyed by entropy. The expansion of the Moral Society should be analogous to binary fission and should, like all life processes, mirror the basic evolutionary patterns.
The Moral Society will first split into self-sustaining parts each with critical mass. The parts will then expand to new domains of energy where they will in turn grow, split and re-expand. Eventually, all the Moral Societies, which are after all part of a single Moral Society, will rejoin. The new joining will occur each time that it becomes possible to master a new domain of energy by joining. Therefore, a Moral Society starts at a single star, then fans out into the galaxy that contains the star until a new interstellar joining enables it to dominate the entire galaxy. At this time, fanning out resumes within the universe of perceivable galaxies except that the elementary domain of energy is a galaxy. When all galaxies within the perceivable universe are dominated, then a new intergalactic joining occurs which enables the Moral Society to fan out again into the universe of universes where the elementary domain of energy is an entire universe. This goes on forever in an infinitely expanding universe where the Moral Society becomes ever more totally aware. This is the way it has always been with all evolution — fanning out, joining, fanning out, joining ad infinitum, always leading to greater awareness. The problem of testing remains.
Until now, testing has been as integral a part of the pattern of evolution as fanning out and joining. It is almost a certainty that within our galaxy, to say nothing of our universe, there already exist among the billions of stars Moral Societies, or at least incipient Moral Societies. Is it reasonable to expect that the human Moral Society will be tested by them?
(Quasars, which apparently consist of entire galaxies in which all the matter is rapidly being converted into energy, may result from the expansion of a relatively primitive Moral Society. (See Intelligent Life In the Universe by Shklovskii and Sagan.))
The creation of the Moral Society can only occur if a critical mass of men become deliberate players of the Game of Life. It is ethical to expand both our awareness and that of others. It is unethical to avoid the Game of Life. It is unethical to tolerate entities that increase entropy, i.e., immoral entities. As a Moral Society expands throughout the universe, it will probably encounter other Moral Societies periodically. When the encounter takes place, a decision will have to be made whether it is possible for the Moral Societies to meld in such a way that the totality of awareness which results is greater than the totality of awareness before the melding or whether the melding will cause a net decrease in total awareness. The melding of distinct Moral Societies would be possible because their bodies are made of machines which can be adjusted to one another. It would not be a biological process, but a technical and moral process. This process will be completely analogous to the unconscious testing that different cultures and races have undergone in social evolution, except that the testing between Moral Societies will be conscious and deliberate. The major criterion for testing will have to be based on whether or not a Moral Society is succumbing to entropic forces, i.e., becoming immoral, by over-emphasizing happiness and security. A primitive Moral Society that is expanding its awareness at its maximum rate cannot help but enhance the total awareness of a more developed Moral Society. Even when this is not the case, the love inherent in the structure of a Moral Society will make it give up some of its welfare (though not decrease total awareness) to advance the welfare of a more primitive Moral Society. Ethics would force a Moral Society to avoid a less aware Society only if the latter had begun an irreversible entropic decline. Therefore, the danger in the testing process of a Moral Society will be not in encountering more aware Societies (this is an eventual periodic certainty for all Moral Societies if the universe is indeed infinite), but in succumbing to the entropic force and expanding its awareness at less than the maximum rate.
Eventually, each galaxy will have room for only a single Moral Society. The most aware Society will have to meld with the less aware Societies or avoid them if melding would significantly increase its entropy. The same process will exist in all domains of energy. This is analogous to the critical situation that currently exists on Earth where we must either have world government very soon (i.e., the most aware nation melds with the less aware nations) or else nuclear proliferation, pollution, genetic decline, or gradual depletion of resources will destroy the Moral Society before it is born.
The infinite expansion of the Moral Society is only possible if the Society is deliberately expanding its total awareness at its maximum rate at all times. Only in this way can the evolution of the Moral Society become irreversible. Only in this way can the human race join periodically with other far more aware Moral Societies. Only in this way can each Moral Society evolve forever toward the infinite Cosmic Moral Society of all joined Moral Societies — the Moral Society of pure thought and total awareness. Only morality can engender immortality.
As humanity evolves toward the infinite Moral Society of pure thought, it should eventually begin to require less energy for its expansion since its mind will be less an effect of matter and more an effect of itself. The Moral Society should in time be able to tap the force of creation directly as it becomes one with the infinite Moral Society. At this time it would no longer need to convert matter in order to expand. It would instead become a part of the evolutionary force creating matter, life, and mind throughout the universe.
The evolutionary force may be irreversible in the larger patterns of the evolution of the Cosmic Moral Society. A Cosmic Moral Society is a Moral Society which results from the melding of independent Moral Societies which originated at separate stars. That is to say, the Cosmic Moral Society that transcends time, matter and space is already determined and inevitable. What is not inevitable is that any given Society will eventually meld with the Cosmic Moral Society. An individual Moral Society is not essential to the cosmic pattern. If a Society at any time succumbs to entropy, it will probably be avoided by the more aware Societies until it destroys itself as the incipient human Moral Society seems likely to do. The pattern of evolution indicates that the longer a Society has been evolving toward total awareness, i.e., zero entropy, the less likely it will be to succumb to entropic decline. In other words, the less entropy a species has, the less likely it is to succumb to entropy. Entropy feeds upon itself. Only the expansion of total awareness at the maximum rate under maximum tension can guarantee that a Moral Society will never succumb to entropy. This is the way it has always been in human evolution.
Throughout his history man has been under maximum tension to expand his awareness at his maximum rate. If he did not, he would be destroyed by animals, starvation, or other more aware groups of men. It is only lately that modern science and technology have made it possible for all men to relax and increase their entropy without being immediately destroyed. A counterforce to the descent into matter has been the competition between nations. This and morality have prevented nations from succumbing to entropy. The competition is about to end either through annihilation or the hegemony of one nation over the rest. Only an Ethical State can prevent the ultimate increase in entropy due to either annihilation or eventual hedonistic decline of a single immoral world state. Only an Ethical State has built into its basic structure the constant tension and creative competition upon which all human progress depends. Only an Ethical State is structured to become a Moral Society.
Before creating the Ethical State, it will be necessary to understand the current human condition. Man is at the edge of a precipice. He has blinded himself with ideology, bureaucracy and hedonism. If he does not deliberately play the Game of Life, he may fall into the chasm of irreversible entropy. If only a few men will deliberately play the Game of Life, then they can help lead their fellow men away from the edge toward total awareness. But in order to reach the heights, we must first perceive the depths. Only by observing the depths of irreversible entropy into which man is about to descend, can we find the resolve to scale the heights to which man can just as easily ascend. Only by direct perception of himself can man find the will to create the Moral Society.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H. G. Wells
The greatest horror is to see no horror. To observe the world as it is implies an ability to see ourselves as we are. It has been said that each man is three persons: 1) the person he thinks he is; 2) the person others think he is; and 3) the person he really is. For any person to attempt to give or accept an accurate description of the world, it is necessary that the three persons become one. This apparently is never completely possible; therefore, all observation involves error. The reader, in turn, may accept observations that are false and reject observations that are true. It must always be borne in mind that any statement concerning cause and effect relationships may be in error. Every description, theory, and strategy in this book may be erroneous. Only our perceptions are certain, never their causes.
© John David Garcia, 1971, All rights Reserved.