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Hybriduality and Geoethics

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Their limited ability to seek and give consent makes them a lower form of life than humans, but they cannot be gratuitously killed, like bacteria, because, unlike bacteria, they do have a limited ability to communicate consent to treatment, and even to request consent to an action.

The Transcendence of Life

The third criterion of life, Transcendence, requires a potential life form to demonstrate that it can extend itself beyond its information processing capability to serve the purpose of life. A fair test for Transcendence is compliance with the Second and Third Principles of Geoethics – the Principles of Equilibria and Assurance. The Equilibria principle says that actions should make the world a better place by increasing pleasure (which can include reducing pain), or reducing injustice (which can include increasing order). This principle is similar to the difference principle espoused by Professor John Rawls of Harvard University in his treatise [14] the Theory of Justice. Rawls deduced that if autonomous beings were asked to design from scratch a society in which they might have to occupy any role in the society, they could reach but one rational decision. They would require that there was equal opportunity for all and that any differences in equality operated to benefit most those who were least well off [15]. This outcome is the only logical outcome because nobody would want to end up being a person in a society who was discriminated against or trapped indefinitely in a bad situation.

Image 12 - Scales of Justice

The Principle of Equilibrium says about the same thing as Rawls’ difference principle, although the geoethical emphasis is on the more ascertainable “increase pleasure,” rather than on Rawls’ more incalculable “benefit most those who are least well off.” Geoethics relies on the fact that since actions are consented to, the subject of an action has an opportunity to negotiate such benefit as it can obtain in a given situation. Both principles endeavor to accomplish the same goal: increase the well-being of a group of people or society. Experience has taught us that reducing the disparities between people brings more total enjoyment to a group of people than does increasing the disparities. The Principle of Consent, coupled with the Principle of Equilibria, operates to reduce disparities because more well-off segments of a community cannot further advance their position without impacting less well-off segments, and those less well-off segments will demand a disparity-reducing share of any further advance as a condition for their consent.

Francis Bacon, a lawyer-scientist who kicked off the modern age ethos of “we make our own destiny” with his publication of Novum Organum in the early 1700s, explained clearly why reducing inequalities among people is in everyone’s best interest [16]. Bacon observed that people’s happiness is relative to the available happiness. Keeping everyone fed, clothed and housed, will not keep everyone happy if some people in the society also get to travel, learn and be entertained. In other words, if people knew a certain type of satisfaction was available, they hungered for it, although what they did not know they would not miss.

[I]t is only in the best interests of everyone in a society to provide reasonable legal avenues for people to satisfy their wants.

Now, if people are not given a chance within the laws of a society to achieve greater happiness, they will resort to extra-legal avenues to achieve that satisfaction. Such extra-legal avenues are frequently violent, and drag down

the progress of an entire society. Consequently, it is only in the best interests of everyone in a society to provide reasonable legal avenues for people to satisfy their wants. Given the nature of human wants, this entails constant efforts to reduce inequality. An entity that was not trying to reduce inequality would not be increasing the ratio of pleasure-to-pain as much as possible. Consequently, such an entity would exemplify a lower level of Transcendence, and a lower level of life.

The Transcendence of an entity may be quantified by assessing its contributions toward creating a more just universe. An entity that added no net pleasure to life would not be alive. Hence, a fantastic information processor, that never affected another entity without securing its consent, but which added no pleasure to life, is not alive because A*C*(T=0) is 0. In fact, it is difficult to say that any entity adds no pleasure to life. Even very painful actors generally add some pleasure to some aspect of life. Hence, a more typical situation – for a problematic life form -- is that T equals a very small number, and hence the life form occupies a very low rung on the vitological hierarchy.

Consider, as an alternative example, a nice flower. It has an Autonomy value governed by the information processing rate of its DNA-RNA-protein machinery – perhaps on the order of one thousand calculations per second, or A=3. We do not know with which organisms flowers can communicate, other than perhaps the insects that pollinate it. Consequently, it is difficult to determine a Coopetency value to a nice flower, and so it may be accorded C=1 by default on the assumption that it does not fail to seek the consent of that with which it does communicate. Finally, a nice flower rarely adds pain to the world, but does make the world a more beautiful, and often a more fruitful place. Hence, the nice flower enjoys a T value that must be greater than 1. How much the T value of a nice flower exceeds 1 depends on how one chooses to unitize the teleological aspect of life. In other words, by what units does pleasure and pain get measured? This question is beyond the scope of this introductory text, but we can clearly determine that a nice flower is in the set of objects that are alive because they process information, communicate consent, and contribute more pleasure than pain to the world. Indeed, from our theoretical structure we can further deduce that a “bad flower” with comparable information processing capability, and comparable coopetency, but no pollination capability must have a lower vitological score than “nice flower” and hence occupies a lower slot on the hierarchy of life. Indeed, the phyla of biology imply precisely this result.

The Third Principle of Geoethics is reflected here by virtue of its requirement that the terms of consent amongst members of a just society be independently enforced and monitored. In other words, in order to comply with the Third Principle of Geoethics a superstructure must be created to help implement the consensual agreements of autonomous beings. Compliance with this Principle of Geoethics makes quantification of Transcendence much easier because the superstructure ordinarily is unitized.

An example of an Assurance superstructure is money. Such an artifact is not written into our DNA code. Instead, we have extended our information processing capability to create a unitized system that greatly facilitates coopetency. Money is a means of assuring compliance with consensual agreements, since it can easily be added to or subtracted from for any variation from an agreement.

The main point here is that the third requirement for life is evidence of making the world a happier place. Such evidence comes from behavior that addresses the Second Principle of Geoethics (enhance pleasure; reduce pain), and is manifest in higher life forms by externalized systems that keep track of consensual agreements. Such independent systems are expected of higher life forms via compliance with the Assurance Principle of Geoethics.

Our definition of life is based on why life is important to us. It is important to us because it accomplishes the purpose of making the world a better, more just, place. In order to make the world a better place a life form must be able to make decisions based on the status of the world as it is perceived (Autonomy). In addition, the world can only become a better place via cooperation amongst life forms (Coopetency). But, finally, pure cooperation among life is not enough to ensure the achievement of the purpose of life because life forms can cooperate in their own destruction. The ultimate hallmark of life is its ability to achieve objectively ascertainable advancement in the quality of life – greater fairness, greater justice, greater opportunities for universal satisfaction and pleasure. This criterion of vitology is called Transcendence.

Summary of the Fiction of Biology

Biology is not the study of all life, and all life need not be biological. Instead, life is much more than biology – it includes all phenomena that demonstrate autonomy, coopetency and transcendence – fancy words for processing, sharing and extending information. In order to process information, and thus demonstrate autonomy, an entity must have its own decision-making rules, such as are contained in DNA, computer programs, or acquired experiences. In order to share information, and thus demonstrate coopetency, an entity must be able to obtain the consent of other entities to actions that affect them. Finally, in order to extend information, and thus show transcendence, an entity must be able to construct an external, independent mechanism for assuring compliance with the terms of consent among autonomous entities. Any entity that meets these three criteria of Autonomy, Consent and Transcendence – shorthanded as ACT – will be alive. Indeed, all biological organisms currently thought to be alive do meet this definition, with evolution and natural selection often serving as the sole mechanism of transcendence. But of great importance is that many non-biological organisms also meet the ACT definition. These entities are equally alive, and hence the new term “vitology” more appropriately defines life as any entity -- biological, cybernetic or informational -- that processes, shares and extends information. Furthermore, such vitological entities can be arrayed along a vast hierarchy of life, calibrated from 1 to 1M, based on the product of their processing capability, consenting behavior and resources devoted to implementation of consensual agreements.

[14] Rawls, J. et. al. (1987), Liberty, Equality and the Law, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

[15] Rawls, J. (1999), The Theory of Justice, rev. ed., originally published in 1971, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.

[16] Bacon, F., (1620), Novum Organum, London

BIO

Martine Rothblatt, J.D. Ph.D. started the satellite vehicle tracking and satellite radio industries and is the Chairman of a biotechnology company.

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