Oh, and by the way I don't think not eating is somehow immoral just because you have a goal of eating. For me it's all about justifying goals and the goal of eating isn't necessarily justified objectively. The stability goal solves the problem of justifying your choice of goals, since it does not need to be justified since it's a logical necessity and therefore not a choice.

If this follows then "If I don't eat I would be doing something immoral" would also have to follow (since you say that normative statements automatically define a moral law). Do you really think "If I don't eat I would be doing something immoral" should follow from "I have a goal of eating"? — khaled

Okay, it seems like we understand the word "moral" differently. To me it just represents the systems we have created to evaluate our actions and choices as "desirable" or "undesirable", since we truly have a need for that kind of system in order to make any choices about anything.

It became quickly clear for us in history that judging actions simply by whether they helped ones personal goals made all choices and judgements arbitrary. Therefore we invented the idea of objective goals aka "morals". Then Hume realized that such goals can't be philosophically justified and we got the great problem of ethics aka Hume's guillotine.

My system tries to solve this by showing that there is a logically necessary personal goal for everyone that is not arbitrary and therefore judging actions as "desirable" or "undesirable" according to this goal gives us an unarbitrary system that functionally does the thing we created objective morality for - evaluating choices. Whether one calls it "moral" is irrelevant to me, although again, I do think following it creates intuitively moral choices most of the time.

In the same way that these are non sequitors
"I have the goal of eating"
"I (morally) should eat"/ "If I don't eat I would be doing something immoral"

Neither of these follow. If you had meant should in the same sense that you use should in "You should turn on the stove to cook the stake" then it makes sense (I (instruction)should achieve stability because I want it) but then you're not making a normative claim — khaled

It seems like you do not understand subjective normative statements.

I have a goal of eating.
Therefore according to that goal I should eat.

There is nothing weird about that and it is a normative statement. It is not a non sequitur. Any objective moral imperative can also be expressed like this.

There is an objective moral goal of eating.
Therefore according to that goal I should eat.

What makes it sound weird is the word "moral" since we because of the history of that word associate it with something other than eating. But this is irrelevant because even you acknowledged that any system that makes normative statements is a moral system no matter how unintuitive they sound.

Is literally an oxymoron. Why do you think heat death is more stable than right now? Because that's what this implies — khaled

Heat death does not try to change its state unlike the current world which continuously tries to change its state until it reaches the heat death.

I've heard similar arguments before and I'll reply in the same way, there is always a semantic shift in the use of "should" when this happens. In this statement "should" simply indicates instructions as in "To cook the steak you should light the stove" there is nothing moral about it. To tell the difference between the instructional should and the moral one try replacing them with "would need to"

People go towards stability goes to:
"They should achieve stability"
"They would need to achieve stability"

The two sentences mean the same thing, so it's the instructional should being used here and there is nothing moral about the assertion.

An example of a moral should:
"You should give to the poor"
"You would need to give to the poor"

The two sentences are clearly different, so it's a moral should — khaled

They mean the same thing in both of the cases. It is the side of objective moral imperatives that uses semantics since our language has developed around ideas of objective moral imperatives and it has become one of the standard meanings for the word "should".

In both cases they should be said like the following in order to avoid semantics:

According to an objective goal so and so should be
And
According to a subjective goal so and so should be

Therefore it wasn't semantics.

That's what we see because we have flowers in our eyes. Ever heard of entropy? — khaled

Complete heat death of the universe aka where entropy is leading us is a stable state. Entropy increases stability.

That's what I'm saying though. This is NOT normative. Logically necessary? Maybe but not normative.

The statement is: People necessarily seek stability
A normative statement would be: People should seek stability

This falls right back within the guillotine. You can't go from either of those statements to the other. — khaled

The reasoning is:
Any person has a goal of stability by necessity
Therefore from the point of view of any person they should achieve stability by necessity

That is a normative statement, although its not an objective normative statement like X should happen irregardless of the point of view. It is a relative normative statement, relative to the ones point of view.

In general I find it a lot easier to argue for absence of something negative.
I don't see happiness, joy or contentment as the result of gaining something positive but losing something negative. In mathematical terms going from -1 to 0 you achieve happiness. Not going from 0 to 1 because of the 'mean reversion' the revert to the average you will always end up in 0 again.
People should be content at zero but don't realize they are. — ovdtogt

Well, this stability based explanation for happiness is quite like that. Happiness is the absence of instability. Gaining happiness is the losing of instability. Being at zero instability is being content with ones state.

If we extrapolate the goal of trying to achieve change in an unstable state aka trying to not be in that unstable state to an infinitely long timespan, one has a goal of trying to not be in any unstable state aka trying to be in a stable state.

Trying to achieve not being in any unstable state = trying to be in a stable state

The reason we see systems in nature usually ending up in a stable state if they don't get outside influence, is because all systems are trying to change their states until they achieve a stable state. So, stability is the same thing as being content with ones state. It's not a stretch to define a state one is content with as a definition for a goal and defining instability aka a state in which one is not content as not having achieved ones goal.

So, it ends up with the definition of what a goal is. Trying to achieve change in an unstable state is probably a goal by most definitions. Is stopping trying to achieve change the achievement of a goal? Hmmhhh... this will take some thinking.

That is a nice belief but there are elites whose voice of authority weighs much more than others, and they can prevent correction just as the church of old was able to prevent correction, short of torturing and killing people. Only a person with much persistence and knowing people with strong connections can get past the control of these guardians of truth. — Athena

Well, any engineer knows that this is not true - one can simply read wikipedia for engineering issues and their engineering projects based on this easily available scientific information reliably end up working.

And while I do acknowledge that mainstream science will never be perfect and that some level of corruption will always exist... mainstream science with its peer review from large diverse sources which can't all be controlled by any power on earth does the removal of errors and corruption better than any other large source of information on earth.

Of course one can with effort and persistence become an expert and get even more reliable information that way, but that has no bearing on how reliable mainstream science is.

I would emphasize that there are schools of thought in science, not mainstream and fringe science itself. The foundations of science are the same. The experiments are the same, publish them or not. You either have science or then you have non-science, humbug. You can have scientist disagreeing on a variety of issues, but either one is right and another is wrong or they are talking about different issues. — ssu

I do agree that there are many schools of thought within science. For example quite many of the interpretations of quantum mechanics are so widely accepted that they are all part of mainstream science. This simply shows us that mainstream science has not concluded the issue yet to a single theory and mainstream science clearly acknowledges this. And that is a reliable position to take from mainstream science - that the issue is controversial and no single position has yet been definitively proven.

I disagree that everything either is or is not science - there are degrees of how scientific something is. An unpublished experiment that has not been peer reviewed is not very scientific. An unpublished experiment peer reviewed by a small fringe group is more scientific. And a published experiment peer reviewed by a large and diverse group is very scientific. It's not black and white.

Everything could just be wandering from instability to instability — khaled

It's true that an unstable state might change just to another unstable state. Still, an unstable system is trying to achieve a change in its current state, which is a goal and a logically necessary one.

Although trying to change an unstable state does not seem to equal trying to get to a stable state... hmmmhhhh... a new realization! thank you for that :) It's been a while since the last time this happened for this theory.

I do still think all systems are trying achieve a stable state since we also see this in nature, but it seems that the trying to achieve change of an unstable state is the only goal I can demonstrate as a logically necessary one right now. Exiting!

I don't think it does. First off I don't agree this seeking for stability has anything to do with logical necessity. Secondly even if we give that there is a "logically necessary" goal for everyone that doesn't translate to it being moral to seek. Say eating is a "logical necessity", does that make it moral to eat and immoral to eat? — khaled

This system is trying to solve Hume's guillotine by giving logically necessary personal normative statements which are not choices. It achieves this by showing that trying to achieve a change in an unstable state is a logical necessity. From that one can derive a personal normative statement for everything by how much it optimizes the achievement of that goal.

To me any system that makes normative statements is a moral system even if it does not make normative statements which seem intuitively moral. Although, while I do think following this system is also intuitively moral in most situations, that is an empirical scientific question and I can't demonstrate that claim here and it's not the point of this system.

"Nuclear physics is quite at the core of physics and totally mainstream, actually. And is just as reliable as anything else in science."-ssu

You are confusing a scientific subject like nuclear physics with what the mainstream science says about nuclear physics. I'm saying that a theory that has been evaluated and accepted by mainstream science is more reliable than a theory that has only been evaluated and accepted by a fringe group (like a selected group of contracted scientists who will keep their studies secret) simply because peer review does become more reliable with a larger mass of more diverse peer reviewers. Mainstream science is not the only way of getting reliable information, but it is usually the most reliable if one does not want to become an expert himself.

So in my mind re-wording it to something like : "Emotions and Ethics based on Homeostasis" seems a bit more appropriate/intriguing. — 3017amen

I try to avoid words that have too specialized meanings like homeostasis that to my knowledge only apply to living systems. I use a very general term like "stability" and give it a very simple and general definition, since I'm trying to create a theory based on logical necessities, which usually are harder to find about very specialized concepts. For things like homeostasis I would need to study empirical information about organisms and make more of a scientific theory. Interesting - but not really the point of this theory, although finding empirical support from things like organisms and their tendency to find homeostasis is supportive for the claim that every being tries to achieve stability by logical necessity.

Of course, you set yourself up for failure by the very premise of your inquiry: developing a logically necessary ethics. Anything that is logically necessary cannot tell us anything about what is or what ought to be. Logic is a sealed system, it is limited to its own abstract playground. Unless you feed it some real-world premises - which you will then have to justify - it cannot accomplish anything that doesn't collapse into triviality. — SophistiCat

It is true true that no logical necessity can ever give us any information about our world since they are true in every possible world. They are all trivialities. But since our intuition doesn't seem to understand all the logically necessary trivialities, they can still teach us new things we didn't realize before. (Like: I think, therefore I am.) Therefore proving things as logical necessities accomplishes useful things. In this case it demonstrates a trivial yet unintuitive goal that everyone in every possible world has. At least I didn't know that before I came up with this theory. A logically necessary triviality gave me new understanding, therefore logically necessary trivialities can give new understanding.

Since this theory is about logical necessities and not about premises that can be untrue in a possible world like ours, it misses the point to talk about real-world premises. Except my claims that it is usually easier to be happy in an environment where others are happy and where people have compatible goals - that is not a logical necessity and does require empirical justification.

Or are you saying that when you are in a state you are trying to change (my definition of an unstable state), you are not trying to change that state? That would be a paradox.

I guess it would be easier for me not to describe the logically necessary goal as trying to get to stability, but trying to get away from instability, although to me they seem to be one and the same thing.

But you cannot just define goals. I as a moral agent select my goals according to what I judge to be good or bad; you cannot unilaterally define my goals for me and then call it a "logical necessity." — SophistiCat

But even you should agree that something you try to achieve is your goal. And you as a system are trying to get away from any unstable states you may have aka you are trying to get to a stable state whether you judge it good or bad. It can't be chosen. It's inherent in what instability is. An unstable system is trying to achieve the change of its current state whether it wanted or not. This is a goal by any common definition of a goal. And you have this goal if you have instability in you no matter what you judge or choose.

And when ones personal normative statements can be derived from logical necessities, ones goals and choices become unarbitrary and they can be judged objectively.

You keep repeating this, but it makes no sense whatsoever. It is trivially true that every thing either changes or it does not, but no normative statements can be logically derived from this truism. — SophistiCat

It seems like we don't have a common definition for words "trying to change" or "goal". Probably my mistake since I could have defined them in the original text, although I had to make some compromises to keep it short. I define "trying to change" as when a system changes in time when no outside influence is applied to it. And I define a "goal of a system" as a state in which the system does not try to change meaning a state of stability. Therefore it's a quite an obvious logical necessity that a goal of a system=stable state of that system with these definitions.

But then again, this moral system is trying to solve the problem of ethics by showing that no objective normative statements were ever needed. It simply tries to show that every system has logically necessary personal goals from which personal normative statements can be derived.

What's logically necessary about it? I wouldn't call it "logically necessary". In the same way that food isn't "logically necessary" neither is seeking a more stable state. Sure you try to do both, but there is nothing logical about that — khaled

Stability is a logically necessary property of everything since everything either is trying to change its current state or isin't. Therefore everything is trying to achieve stability since instability means that one is trying to change its current state. Therefore everything has a goal of achieving its own personal stability by logical necessity.

Unsubstantiated claim — khaled

This I partially agree with. Even my text describes how to cheat this moral system by isolating yourself from the suffering of others. The point of this moral system is to solve the Hume's guillotine by showing that there is a logically necessary personal goal for everyone and the choice of it doesn't need to be justified like Hume demands since it's not a choice. No objective ought was ever needed to make logically justified choices. The fact is that in most cases (not all) trying to achieve personal sustained stability is intuitively moral. (has to be proven empirically, but we do see people usually achieving sustained happiness in communities which are not too unstable. Even dictators are usually more happy when their community thrives. And slave-systems and others with much unhappiness do see revolts and instability reliably.)

I actually usually call this just a "goal system", but since it does solve the Hume's guillotine and since it actually promotes intuitive morality like happiness and harmony as a bonus, I also call it a moral system. It kind of does make other moral systems redundant, since one can judge every action of everyone by this system. And unlike others, it's based on logical necessity.

Limit x can be described as "A is not equal to (a defined group of possibilities)". I don't see how this creates an infine regress, since the text clearly defines Limics as analysis of limitations based logical rules. It's not the statement of any limits - it's the analysis of stated or defined limits. It makes no statements of its own, so I don't get how it would cause any sort of infinite regress.

Also if you could be so kind to provide us with a numbered list of your theories foundations it would be great. — TheMadFool

On it... Although I do think my arguments and concepts are defined precisely, I'm in the end just an individual thinker who decided to post my private philosophy to this forum to get some feedback. Thanks for these kinds of comments since they force me to try to describe my theories in a more formal and standardized way ;)

The law of non-contradiction is just a part of limics - the part that says that paradoxes are not possible. Limics has other properties like everything that has to do with analysis of logical rules that don't form paradoxes. Thus Limics is not the same as the law of non-contradiction.

Also, limics is not just about uncertainty - if you limit all but one possible option off, you are left with certainty in that one option.

When we don't have the information that x=2 and we only know that x is between 1 and 3, the only thing we can say with our information is that x is between 1 and 3. This is not redundant. It is the correct description of the information we have. x=2 would be incorrect description.

You should read the whole text since it clearly states its point. (although I understand that it's annoyingly long, so no judgement here.) I'm not trying to say that limitations based logic is something new. I'm trying to show that limitations based logic can be used to explain pretty much everything about everything. That's the point of the text.

The analysis of the logical rules in behavior or chess is logic. If the rules can be expressed as limitations, it's limics. The word limics is useful for describing this particular form of logic easily.

I agree that limitations based logic is mostly quite simple and commonplace. I still needed to define and explain it in order for me to make my arguments. I'm not a native English speaker, so sorry, if my definitions are not the most usual for the words I use. I still define them in exact manner, so it shouldn't be that much of a problem to evaluate the veracity of my arguments by those definitions.

The goal of personal stability is a logical necessity for everyone, since every possible system tries by necessity to achieve stability, since instability means that the system is trying to change its state and stability means that the system is not trying to change its state. Also, every system has the property of stability by necessity since every possible system is either trying to change its state or not. This was explained in the text before.

The idea of foundationalist utilitarism is not new - the idea of basing it upon stability as a logically necessary personal goal for everyone (stability) and also explaining what emotions are through stability is quite new, to my knowledge. Since the logically necessary personal goal of stability/happiness is not a choise unlike other goals, it doesn't have to be justified as a choise like other goals. It's not my preferred utility, it comes from logic. My preferred utility would be humor, but one can only dream.

All of this "secret science" you are talking about is pretty much by definition not mainstream science and has no bearing on how reliable mainstream science is. Sure, there probably is quite a lot of scientific studies that never get to the mainstream and the mainstream would probably develop in some areas, if it got its hands on such data. And mainstream peer review would probably find quite a lot of unscientific nonsense from this weird set of data that missed much of the scrutiny it would have gotten within all these years. If any institution could use the mainstream to make their secret studies more reliable, they would. But that would ruin the whole point of the secrecy. If you ever get your hands on such "secret data", use it as much as you want. It's still not as reliable as mainstream scientific studies, but if there are no mainstream scientific studies about the subject and you really need to use that data for something, go ahead.

One way to prove, that a self-replicating system with random mutations does not have to be very complex fundamentally, is computer simulation. Almost any decent programmer can program a simulation where a system replicates itself with random mutations in a world with completely mechanical rules. Of course it's easy when the programmer can choose the rules of the world himself to make creation of life simple, but it proves that purely mechanical self-replication does not have to be complex.

And we do know that chemical things can combine to create mechanical things at least as complex as that. (Random mutation comes almost as a side product since nothing in chemistry is that precise.) This combined with the fact that enormous amounts of random chemical reactions happen in this enormous world. Therefore it would be weird if life hadn't happened. It would also be weird if creating life in a lab would be easy, because then it would also be that much easier to happen at random. Every millisecond, more random chemical reactions happen on the surface of Mars than will ever happen in all our labs combined. If life happened easily in a lab, it would have happened on Mars dozens of times in our lifetimes, not to mention the past billions of years.

"...and prompts me to ask if this theory of Limics isn't already extant and that too in a vitally necessary way in the form of the law of non-contradiction?" - I'm not absolutely sure if I got your question right (english is not my primary language), but if you are asking if Limics is an already existing theory, I'd say "somewhat". The idea of logical rules and information as limitations has existed to my knowledge for a long time. (And yes, the rule of non-contradiction is an important part of it.) The idea of Limics, where literally everything about everything is explained through this "limitation information" is quite new, I think.

You seem to use the word "religion" in quite a liberal way. And everything being either science or religion seems also quite black and white. Why can't we just acknowledge that there are many ways that seem to work in gathering functional knowledge? Like scientific empiricism seems to work consistently and seems to be the most reliable thing currently. But just pure logic without empiricism has also proven to work consistently as it has been consistently confirmed through empiricism afterwards. (At least I find new logically proven mathematical theories quite reliable even before they are confirmed empirically.) Also, the veracity of empiricism should be proven by something else than empiricism. For that at least, pure logic is needed.

Also, science isn't just logic+empiricism. It's also about taking away potential corruption and human error through things like peer review. Logic+empricism was invented way before science with mixed results. Modern science works because of what it added to logic+empiricism.

so, mathematics is also religion since it uses logic without empiricism?

well, this is still an abridged version. Especially the later conclusions would be hard to understand without the definitions and deductions from prior parts.