Man death ethics

Man death ethics
Walentin W. Wasielewski

…if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.– Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Lecture on Ethics

Man death ethics

Walentin W. Wasielewski

Proofreader Lucas James Wiese

© Walentin W. Wasielewski, 2022

ISBN 978-5-0056-1515-2

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

prolegomena I

1. Good and evil are not entities, but parameters. The only moral fact is death, and morality is the attitude towards death: everything that leads the system to destruction is evil; everything that overcomes the death of the system is good. The open-question argument is removed without appeal to a naturalistic fallacy.

2. All problems are linked to death. What does not lead to death is not a problem. Any obstacle, barrier, difficulty, or limit is a problem for us only if we know how it can kill us.

3. To understand death as a problem, we need a system of tenses. Any understanding is the transfer of a real event as an abstract symbol from the past to the future, and then the perception of the abstract future in the real present. The only known system that can operate with time is the human language. Human is the only socio-cognitive system that has understood death as a problem.

4. Ethics is a method of development.

5. The purpose of development is to overcome the problem – to obtain freedom from the limitations of death. Beginning with situational problems: hunger, cold, diseases, and external threats; up to the absolute problem: death as such. Overcoming these problems breaks Hume’s guillotine not by logic, but by the phenomenon of will. Overcoming is a transition from a naturally existing limit is to prescribed by a free reason ought.

6. Survival and overcoming death are not the same thing. Survival is the avoidance of death, the selection of forms and behaviors that allow not to face the problem. Death for Natural Selection is a tool of development, and Death for overcoming is a subject of development.

7. Achieving the development goal is the transition of the system to a new qualitative state. A New World and a New Man, free from the problem of death, will have no need for morality and ethics.

prolegomena II

1. The act of understanding death gives birth to the essence of human being. Based on this definition, any social-cognitive system that understands death will be human, ranging from any species of living beings to an artificial intelligence (AI).

2. Understanding is possible only in the system of tenses of the language. The system of tenses is the defining quality of human language, unlike all other information exchange systems, from natural RNA/DNA to animal communication systems (ACS). In fact, the abstract time machine of language is the mind.

3. Reason makes it possible to relate to death. Understanding and reasoning about what leads to death or what overcomes death provides a human an attitude towards death.

4. The attitude towards death is a dichotomy of good and evil. Thus, good and evil are not entities, but parameters of the relationship to death as a single entity.

5. Ethics is a method of development. Knowing the limit and its parameters, we get the opportunity to overcome the limit. Now, the capabilities of the available tools are never enough for a human. If it is known how the function can be performed better or worse in relation to death, then the development flywheel is launched towards a goal.

6. The goal of development is to overcome death. All problems come down to death. What does not lead to death is not a problem, does not require ethical evaluation, and does not require development and overcoming.

7. By achieving the development goal of the system, the system then transitions to a new quality. After overcoming death there will be no need for an attitude towards death – no need for morality or ethics and no need for development and overcoming. The New World will define new parameters, limits, and essences for the New Man – a Superman.

prolegomena III

1. Subject: the phenomenon of awareness of death. Hypothesis: awareness of death is a unique phenomenon in nature, which gave rise to a system of a new quality, human being. Only the awareness of death makes it possible an attitude to death.

2. The attitude to death forms morality as an experience of causes of death and ethics as a method of overcoming death. The ethical method gives humanity a unique ability to overcome problems, causes of death. Thus ethics is a method of development based on a hypothesis of freedom.

3. The wild nature has no awareness of death, no attitude to death and no method of development. Therefore, nature develops through natural selection of random errors. So death is a tool for the development of nature. It is impossible to overcome death as a problem by death as a tool.

4. Humanity is a socio-cognitive phenomenon, a system that has understood the problem of death. So we break the binding of a concept of human to the animal species Homo Sapiens. Any socio-cognitive system that understands the problem of death can be called a human being.

5. The understanding is a system of abstract symbols in the system of tenses. The understanding of any phenomenon necessarily implies the movement of an abstract model of this phenomenon in abstract time relative to reality. Therefore, mathematics without a system of tenses of its abstract symbols is not a full-fledged language.

6. Development is a transition from one quality of developing phenomenon to another, by overcoming the limits of phenomenon.

7. The idea of development for a human being is overcoming the problem of death. Beyond that limit will no longer be a human, but a Superman, or New Man. The values, ideas and problems of the New World will be qualitatively different.

Aristotle’s Mistake

To be, or not to be, Ay there’s the point…

– William Shakespeare, Bad Quarto

Considering Aristotle’s work Nicomachean Ethics, I would like to draw attention to a key point that characterizes the generally accepted and erroneous approach in all studies of the question of good and evil to the present day.

Aristotle looks at the good as an entity: «…every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.» As if good is something that can be defined; a phenomenon that can be arrived at; as if it were some kind of independent entity. But this is not the case.

This position is an error that reduces all ethical reasoning from Aristotle to George Edward Moore to invariably contradictory results. Reasoning exclusively about the good implies simplification: as if evil is something opposite to good, a kind of good with a minus sign, as antigood. But evil is not equal to good with a minus sign, as well as evil with a minus sign is not equal to good:

EVIL ≠ – GOOD or GOOD ≠ – EVIL

I claim that good as the entity, that served as the starting point in Aristotle’s reasoning, was chosen incorrectly. It is wrong to talk about good outside of its constant connection with evil, endowing them with the properties of certain entities independent of each other. We should not forget that good and evil, benefit and harm, virtue and vice are a dichotomy. So, when it comes to such a phenomenon as dichotomy, the representation of subclasses as independent entities entails the loss of the general meaning of the dichotomizing system, the dichotomizing entity. The loss of the meaning of the system of good and evil occurs the moment we replace one true entity with one of its subclasses, while endowing the subclass with a complete essential, or complete object character. By doing that, we take ourselves away from the true subject on the research of ethics. If we do not have the true essence of a subject, then we are liable to talk about anything except the truth. It is sad that philosophers, following Aristotle, persistently repeat this mistake even when the dichotomy of moral categories is known to everyone.

Fig. 1. Graphic dichotomy: the trick is that only the black subclass is drawn here, and the white one, without being drawn at all, manifests itself.

Without being separate entities, good and evil cannot be goals in themselves that we could strive for. Аnd for this reason, the good has wrongly «…been declared to be that at which all things aim.» Good and evil are parameters, level pointers, or relationships that allow us to come to the desired goal or desired entity. Thus, it is seen that both the substratum and the result of the action of a moral choice is that to which the attitude is expressed using the concepts of good and evil. It remains for us now to find out what kind of fundamental essence can manifest itself in almost any phenomenon around us.

Let’s look at this using the example of any measuring instrument that we use: speedometer, altimeter, thermometer, or fuel quantity indicator. These measuring instruments are excellent models of the «ethical method», their function can reveal the mechanics of its work. So, we may say that measuring instruments is designed primarily to show whether a process controlled by us either exists or is dying. On the instruments, we see on one hand the permissible range of the existence is the process that we launched, its existence right now. And on the other hand, the unacceptable parameters of the existence is the process when it is heading for death. And the danger of this death is important for us, because it is important to us that the existence of the process continues to exist.

If you bake a pie, then when you control the baking by the thermometer, the process is already underway, the pie is already baking and the process already exists. Now, consider the baking process chemically. As always, baking is a Maillard reaction: a chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that gives browned food its distinctive flavor. Ideally, it exists in the range from 110 degrees Celsius to 140 degrees. A complete taste is formed, which represents numerous rearrangements of molecules, and as such, an ideal brown crust appears along with a characteristic pleasant aroma. If the temperature is less than 110 degrees, the Maillard reaction will be insufficient, and there will be no baking as we know it – a brown crust, a full taste, and the smell of the pie. It will just be a boiled, half-baked dough, raw and tasteless pie filling. On the contrary, above 140 degrees there will be caramelization of sugars, and above 200 degrees and the combustion of carbohydrates – so baking will also die.

In this example, we see that we have indicators of good for baking: from 110 to 140 degrees. We also have indicators of evil: less than 110 or over 140 degrees. And it seems that we naturally strive for the good, while avoiding the evil. Exactly as Aristotle told us. But is this really the case? Can we say that we received a goodness as entity at the end of the process, if it satisfied us? No, we got good pastries and nothing else. Even a good, delicious pie is not «…to be that at which all things aim», it is not a goodness as entity. If we burn the pie, we do not get the evil as entity either. The only thing that happened was that the pastries that we needed is died, but nothing else.

So, by controlling the baking with the parameters of good and evil, we did not strive for good as such. Just like we didn’t really embody any evil if we chose not to control the baking properly and burn the pie. In essence, we used the ethical method on the measuring instrument to prevent the death of the process that was important to us. Therefore, ethics is exactly the method of precisely overcoming specifically the death that threatens the existence of the process we need. This technique can be applied to any life situation.

The entity we are looking for, which we track by ethical parameters on the measuring instruments, is precisely the threat of death of the process, but not the presence of existence. It is important to grasp this difference. We already have the existence of the process, which is commonly known as existing right now. But we will respond to the signal of the parameters only in response to possible process problems, which the measuring instrument signals by showing unacceptable parameters on the scale.

Thus, when we see a favorable range of parameters, this can be thought of as is a goodness for the process, rather than a good as entity. In other words, a parameter of the essence of the process. And when we see an unfavorable range of parameters, an evil for the process appears, but not as an evil as entity. It is an undesirable parameter for the essence of the process.

Let us consider one more example. A plane going 200 km/h will be too slow and dangerous – risking the plane to fall into a tailspin every second and lose its footing, and then die. However, that same speed for a car (200 km/h) will be dangerously too high. There will be increased threat of collision, human death, and destruction from an accident. So, there is no evil, nor good, inherently in the 200 km/h speed itself. It is obvious that our attitude to this speed will change depending on the situation, as demonstrated just above.

By itself, the figure on the altimeter indicates the position of the aircraft above the ground. And the figure becomes evil only when it indicates a position that means the possibility of the death of the aircraft, and good if the flight can continue safely. The pilot applies an attitude to the figure: knowing which of are good and which are bad makes an effort towards the indicators of good on the instruments and avoids approaching the indicators of evil. So, the pilot does not achieve good by itself, and avoids not evil as a separate entity. It can also be mentioned that the same numbers on the altimeter can mean evil for the aircraft in one situation, and good in another. There is no contradiction in this and the situation is clearly understood by us.