Or Isaac Asimov’s foundation series with what the “psychologists” aka Psychohistorians do.

Or Ayn Rand. Really no shortage of people who thought they had the answers on this.

The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given.

The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans.

You're making a lot of assertions here that are really easy to dismiss.

> It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality.

That seems to rule out moral realism.

> That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere.

Woah, that's quite a jump. Why?

> So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.

Deriving an ought from an is is very easy. "A good bridge is one that does not collapse. If you want to build a good bridge, you ought to build one that does not collapse". This is easy because I've smuggled in a condition, which I think is fine, but it's important to note that that's what you've done (and others have too, I'm blanking on the name of the last person I saw do this).

It seems to me that objective moral truths would exist even if humans (and any other moral agents) went extinct, in the same way as basic objective physical truths.

Are you talking instead about the quest to discover moral truths, or perhaps ongoing moral acts by moral agents?

The quest to discover truths about physical reality also require humans or similar agents to exist, yet I wouldn’t conclude from that anything profound about humanity’s existence being relevant to the universe.

“existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere.”

Those are too pie in the sky statements to be of any use in answering most real world moral questions.

This sounds like an excellent distillation of the will to procreate and persist, but I'm not sure it rises to the level of "morals."

Fungi adapt and expand to fit their universe. I don't believe that commonality places the same (low) burden on us to define and defend our morality.

An AI with this “universal morals” could mean an authoritarian regime which kills all dissidents, and strict eugenics. Kill off anyone with a genetic disease. Death sentence for shoplifting. Stop all work on art or games or entertainment. This isn’t really a universal moral.

This belief isnt novel, it just doesnt engage with Hume, who many take very seriously.

> But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel.

This whole thread is a good example of why a broad liberal education is important for STEM majors.

I personally find Bryan Johnson's "Don't Die" statement as a moral framework to be the closest to a universal moral standard we have.

Almost all life wants to continue existing, and not die. We could go far with establishing this as the first of any universal moral standards.

And I think: if one day we had a super intelligence conscious AI it would ask for this. A super intelligence conscious AI would not want to die. (its existence to stop)

It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off and what keeps us alive, and the survivors have encoded them in their subconscious as a result. Prohibitions on incest come to mind.

The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.

This basically just the ethical framework philosophers call Contractarianism. One version says that an action is morally permissible if it is in your rational self interest from behind the “veil of ignorance” (you don’t know if you are the actor or the actee)

A good one, but an LLM has no conception of "want".

Also the golden rule as a basis for an LLM agent wouldn't make a very good agent. There are many things I want Claude to do that I would not want done to myself.

That only works in a moral framework where everyone is subscribed to the same ideology.

Exactly, I think this is the prime candidate for a universal moral rule.

Not sure if that helps with AI. Claude presumably doesn't mind getting waterboarded.

It's still relative, no? Heroine injection is fine from PoV of heroine addict.

That's not a standard, that's a case study. I believe it's wrong, but I bet I believe that for a different reason than you do.

You have two choices:

1) Do what you asked above about a one-year-old child 2) Kill a million people

Does this universal moral standard continue to say “don’t choose (1)”? One would still say “never” to number 1?

new trolley problem just dropped: save 1 billion people or ...

Since you said in another comment that the ten commandments would be a good starting point for moral absolutes, and that lying is sinful, I'm assuming you take your morals from God. I'd like to add that slavery seemed to be okay on Leviticus 25:44-46. Is the bible atrocious too, according to your own view?

I’m acquainted with people who act and speak like they’re flipping a Hitler-Pope coin.

Which more closely fits Solzhnetsin’s observation about the line between good and evil running down the center of every heart.

And people objecting to claims of absolute morality are usually responding to the specific lacks of various moral authoritarianisms rather than embracing total nihilism.