Ethics

The political term for the interface between the world and philosophy. It helps defines abstract, moral, rules that should direct any of our behavior.

It seems that we can define ethics based on information: the good would be to maximize available information in the long run. One's contribution to global information would be the measure of one's behavior.

Because total information in the system is bounded, not only the amount of actual information (see Security) collected, but also the waste of potential information (see Liberty is to be considered.

Also, producing redundant information is considered poor yield; original information is much more valuable. In fact, all that results from elements of information not to be considered independently but accumulated together.

The fact that one's works can propagate one's information beyond one's short (and condemned) physical life is a good justification for long-term moral behavior: the information resulting from one's deeds are the part of one that survives one's death. Of course, in any case, it will be only a small contribution to the world; but even then, "good" deeds will have long-term effects, while "bad" deeds from different people will be canceled in the chaos of each other's deeds. Thus, if you want to live longer and broader, you must do good. No need of any supernatural explanation. But all this is a very large problem which is to be discussed in another project (see Cybernetics).


This page is linked from: Cybernethics   Information