Ethicophysics I

Certainly! Also, please point out any bad physics I have committed; I never got beyond intermediate mechanics in college, so Lagrangian mechanics is really approximately the limit of what I can confidently wield, and it's been a long time since I had anyone check my ability to do that. (In accordance with the rather specific and somewhat condescending directions supplied above the comment box, presumably triggered by my recent lack of karma for my recent posts, I would estimate a 75% chance that I didn't make any major errors in the math/physics side that substantively change the conclusions and usefulness of the approach I am advocating.)

1. Introduction: we model a cyberphysical system at ethical risk, which is approximately how I would describe the alignment problem in standard academic terminology. The physical part we model with standard physics, and the cyber part we model with standard computer science. The interface between the two, and the ethical components that are required to ensure good outcomes, are modeled by a novel theory that we term the ethicophysics. In this first paper, we simply lay out the philosophy of the novel theory and prove a single theorem, the Golden Theorem, which allows us to derive a large number of ethical conservation laws. These conservation laws are only approximate and statistical laws, the way that entropy is only an approximate and statistical property in thermodynamics. Just as molecules can and do sort themselves back into lower entropy configurations from time to time, individuals and communities can choose to exercise their free will to avoid and avert any of the conservation laws proved using the Golden Theorem. In the second paper (of which only an incomplete draft exists as of yet), we lay out a number of ethical conservation laws of interest: Conservation of Bullshit, Conservation of Kitsch, Conservation of Might, Conservation of Status, Conservation of Reputation. We argue that each of these laws has both a rigorous ethicophysical theoretical proof and ample experimental evidence from human history to be considered a law.
2. We define God as a hypothetical omniscient, omnireasonable observer. God is expected to prefer Jesus Christ to Adolf Hitler, and otherwise simply to conform to the ethicophysical laws that we formulate. The existence / ontological status of God seems undecidable and not of any particular interest or relevance, and so we ignore the question. We define the soul to be God's considered, reflectively consistent opinion of an individual at a given point in time. We don't define, but will in future drafts define, honor and reputation. Honor is defined to be the opinion of an agent of its own soul, and reputation is defined to be the bundle of opinions that other agents hold about the agent. We posit (without justification) that every computational device (human or animal brain, computer, etc.) can be said to have a soul, and that it seems like a reasonably worthy assumption to consider all souls equally precious, in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence. (Note that this assumption would, I believe, result in an extremely animist ethics in which e.g. hammers have an inherent right not to be carelessly chipped by a shoddy craftsman, which seems counterintuitive but not necessarily problematic.)
3. We define a large number of concepts relevant to ethics and corresponding to commonly used concepts in physics. We implicitly lay out (and future drafts should make this explicit) the equivalent of F=ma and "equal and opposite reaction" by assuming that people will tend to increase the amount they like people who help them. Since this seems like an empirically verified regularity in human nature, and like a good idea (it's essentially just an implementation of the Tit-for-Tat strategy), we find these laws to be quite robust and reasonable. We define love and hate (perhaps hate would be better called fear?) as the ethicophysical equivalents of position, like and dislike as the ethicophysical equivalents of velocity, help and harm as the ethicophysical equivalents of force (and thus proportional to acceleration/help/harm). We define active subjective energy via a straightforward formula inspired by the definition of kinetic energy. We define a placeholder concept of potential subjective energy corresponding to whatever quantities and laws we will need to posit in order to make sure that subjective energy is conserved. We define weighted subjective energy to be a variant of subjective energy where the agent or subject cares more about the opinions of some people than others. (As we all must inevitably do.) We then prove the Golden Theorem ("unethical actions have real-world karmic consequences"), using a mixture of Emmy Noether's techniques for proving conservation laws in traditional physics, and some novel arguments for proving conservation laws in the ethicophysics based on discrete, group-theoretic symmetries of ethical content based on the sort of empathetic reasoning advocated by Jesus in the Golden Rule. We note in this comment (but not in the existing draft, which we should update) that the primary mechanism for karma would be other people thinking you are immoral and defecting against you; since this is a good strategy and a very common one, it seems likely that the ethicophysics can form a sort of Schelling Point whereby we select a more reasonable Nash Equilibrium than the unstable one at which we currently reside. The Golden Theorem is thus less a matter of theological woo (which the current draft has far too much of) and more a matter of good solid ethical praxis.
4. We discuss the significance and implications of this work. First, we dispatch an argument due to Adolf Hitler that karma can be expected to function automatically without strenuous ethical effort on our own part. (Said argument presumably having operated in German history rather like the Prosperity Gospel operates today in helping to convince the German people to actually perform the literal atrocities that made up the Holocaust.) Then we formulate a conjecture (which needs to be made far more explicit) about the potential existence of ethical momentum, and compare it to a humorous dialogue from the comic/webcomic Girl Genius. We then present a short (but probably not short enough) dialogue on the relation of the ethicophysics to AI safety and alignment as it is traditionally understood.
5. We conclude with an epilogue, a song by Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam that we feel captures the emotional tone and cognitive content that we want the ethicophysics to have.
6. We give acknowledgments and references to prior work in the fields of ethics and physics.

I apologize for the constant invocation of Adolf Hitler, since this seems to run afoul of Godwin's Law. The primary motivating question I was thinking about when developing the paper was, how would we tell Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ apart if Omega told us that they had been uploaded to two superintelligent AI's but didn't tell us which one was which. I don't know that we could tell them apart (superintelligence buys a lot), but I think that the overall dynamic would be much like the short story that @jessicata [LW · GW] posted in the past day or so; by consulting both superintelligences carefully and in a balanced fashion, we would obtain better and wiser counsel than if we trusted either one of the superintelligences implicitly, or simply destroyed both of the superintelligences. This, in turn, would provide a solution to the alignment problem, since we can listen to the counsel of both superintelligences without fearing utter compromise by the rhetoric of a superintelligent Hitler; we could simply tune him out and pay more attention to the rhetoric of the superintelligent Jesus, or go for a walk and an ice cream and think about what the two superintelligences said.

https://github.com/epurdy/ethicophysics/blob/main/writeup1.pdf