Quantified Morality

Speaker 1

Our next spamel panelist, not spammelist, our next panelist will be Scott Howe. Scott has degrees from the University of Utah, University of Michigan, and the University of Hong Kong. I’ve heard he’s planning on getting some more.

Speaker 2

Scott is a registered architect in California and Oregon with five years practice with BWLC Architects in Rancho Cucamonga, California. Did I pronounce that right? Cucamonga. And 10 years practice with Kaima Corporation, Kajima Corporation, thank you, in Tokyo, Japan. He spent three years as an assistant professor at University of Oregon and six years as an assistant professor at Hong Kong University. He is currently a senior systems engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he is a member of the Constellation Architecture Team for the Lunar Outpost that will be constructed in twenty twenty. His projects and publications can be viewed on his website, which is at plugin-creations. com. Slash US slash ASH. If you want that URL, you can also get it on the website over there. Scott will be presenting to us his fascinating ideas on quantifying morality, or basically the beginnings of an attempt to objectify Moral decisions, Scott.

Scott Howe

There’s this There’s this very interesting phenomenon in in our house where if I take stuff and throw it on the floor, papers, bottles, whatever, after I get done with drinking some water or whatever, I throw it on the floor. Somehow it disappears and it’s you know the floor is clean and stuff like that. And I just I kind of wonder, you know, is there this deentropy device in our house or whatever. And uh well after a few days in the dog house I realized that uh The deentropy device. She’s sitting right up there. But anyway, this kind of introduces the thought of some of the things that I’ve been thinking of.

Scott Howe

As I’ve been working with assembling structures, self-assembling structures, et cetera, using robotics. is there a way to determine objective value in various configurations and different things like that, the order that you come out of that? And it naturally, as an LDS, it kind of led into an idea that somehow my theology links to every other aspect of my life, which I’m sure every engineer here is able to say the same thing. And we find it as one continuous continuum. that there must be some kind of a link between order and opportunity, and that maybe in all of this, there might be something that will help to come up with a theory of the atonement.

Scott Howe

Now if we indeed believe that God is an engineer and that the atonement is the most important aspect of our religion Then there must be a set of laws, there must be a set of rules or whatever that he uses. That if there was an atonement, as As I believe Gibbons was, or was it somebody else that was talking about how if there was an atonement, then God would cease to be God. I guess that was this morning. Yeah, okay. And so if he did follow that law, then the atonement must be necessary. Through a series of these natural laws. And that’s kind of what I’ve, I’ve just, it’s my holy grail. That’s what I’m after.

Scott Howe

So in this, I’m just kind of, I’m putting together some ideas as First attempt at setting a groundwork for a discussion. And none of the things that I’ve been going through, of course, I claim that are Absolute, but there’s you know it’s a it’s a it’s for discussion as a theoretical approach that perhaps there’s a way of quantifying Moral choices that will eventually lead to something that we might be able to call a theory for the atonement, which is not the subject of this paper, but eventually I hope to tackle that someday.

Scott Howe

The other thing is the things that I’m going to tell you about, it’s not a tool for real-time evaluation. If you’re right there about ready to commit a sin, you can’t use these things to say, well, should I do it or should I not? It’s rather something that’s kind of a way for thinking about if there is a quantifiable way and if we can put value to it so that there’s a way of communicating on an objective basis.

Scott Howe

So I’m going to talk about these various topics. The proliferation of opportunities, cause and effect, entropy and sin. And is there a possible mathematics for morality?

Scott Howe

So uh the uh the se typical sep secular way of uh determining whether it’s v uh moral or not is by saying uh asking in the does it hurt anybody else. The problem with this, of course, is that That includes sins of commission, but it does not include sins of omission.

Scott Howe

And I’ve got a scale here on the bottom of the screen that talks that shows kind of a spectrum where at one end we are buffeted about by every wind of change and Circumstance is the master of us. On the other end, we are have slowly been able to master our environment and we have control over all circumstance. And what I hope to be able to get to the point of saying is that as we follow moral choices That we will get to the point where we’re all the way at the right end of the spectrum and that we have control over circumstance and eventually get to the point where we There’s no unknowns, and we have achieved godhood.

Scott Howe

So, the first thing I just want to talk about real quick is a proliferation of opportunities. If we use, instead of the question, will this hurt anybody? If we instead say, will this decision, will this choice that I’m about to make, provide additional choices later on? Will it proliferate my opportunities later?

Scott Howe

So in the paper that eventually you could read, I have this little example of a person about to they they walk up to a cliff and they have three choices. One choice is they can turn around Walk back, and they have they can go back to the cliff another day. You know, they have plenty of other choices that they can do. The second choice is they can climb down the cliff. And I’ll explain some issues with that. The third choice is they can jump off. Okay?

Scott Howe

And if you look at the chart here, I’ve created a decision tree that has depths of nodes. that we can if we literally knew all the decisions that were going to be made, we can count those and we can actually create a value system based on how deep the decision tree is on how many nodes there are. In option A, of course, it just proliferates. There’s lots of choices that turn out. In option B, If you haven’t prepared yourself, you could get yourself into a situation where you do not have control over all circumstances in your environment. And you might end up having the same end as you would have if you chose C. The only choice left is to jump off, okay?

Scott Howe

So in B, then the choice that if you chose B, then you would obviously want to prepare yourself in advance with ropes and all kinds of whatever. To make sure that all of your choices are continually proliferated as you go along. So,

Scott Howe

As you start to expand your opportunities, you realize that some of the opportunities that are in the future end in red X’s, okay? And so you want to be able to constrain yourself to the ones that advance your opportunities in the future.

Scott Howe

So in our life we live by definition in a constrained free environment. And by definition, what I mean by that is, our bodies literally, in order to survive, we have if we’re breathing air The air, in order to get to all of the cells that are possible, it’s constrained in a certain route that goes through the body in order to get all the oxygen to get to each of the cells. So the very physics and the biology of our bodies is a characterized of characterized constraint. So I’m going to keep going because I think that’s just the very basic front end of what I wanted to say. That everything else is going to build on.

Scott Howe

And one of the big connections that I want to make is that in cause and effect, The physics of the universe, where an effect follows the cause, we can also look at that as action and consequence. And when we talk about how justice in the scriptures, how justice must be satisfied, then The very same thing that, or this justice that we’re talking about, is literally the cause and effect that we see in the physical universe.

Scott Howe

This cause and effect is the basis of all structure in the universe, where without cause and effect, you do not have forces or paths of forces, you do not have Constraints that you’re able to build upon and slowly build up structure, and that eventually snowball into what we find ourselves at at in a position of advanced intelligence in complex bodies.

Scott Howe

So, one of the questions that I want everybody to think as I continue with my presentation is: is God’s ultimate purpose to fight entropy. And the reason that I ask this is because by in a lot of indications we see that the universe is winding down. The direction of time is such that as things go forward in time, they decay. The uh if if everything goes according to the the um path of entropy, then eventually We will have a couple of very nasty endings at the end. One is either a big crunch or the other one is a what’s the term for it? Cooling off or Heat death, yeah, heat death. And so, in all of that, it’s the ultimate demise of the universe that is a result of entropy.

Scott Howe

And so if we consider what cause and effect is, we see that it’s something that with a certain cause, it creates a kind of a ripple effect, where this ripple effect just goes Through and it expands forever and ever, or whenever there’s it’ll go until it’s blocked. If the One thing that we know is that cause and effect can be channeled with structure such that if we if we Are able to create some kind of a structural barrier, then the cause and effect will bounce against it, and we’re able to create structure that actually channels actions and things like that. In other words, we’re able to manipulate the matter of using certain types of structures. So

Scott Howe

As an alternative definition of entropy, I’m going to kind of explain because a lot of people might not know what entropy is. Entropy is a kind of a leaking of cause and effect, where you have a specific line of effects that you’re creating in your creation, and If those effects get out away from what you’re intending it to be, then it’s kind of a leak. And

Scott Howe

Another definition of entropy is it’s a measure of disorder, where it’s the number of unknowns in an arrangement. If you look at this diagram that I show, it shows a bunch of particles that They’re just randomly scattered on the page. And I’m showing the one particle here in the middle. If you can see the cursor. That has a relationship with every other particle in the whole arrangement, but since they’re not connected, they’re not physically connected, all those relationships are unknown. And therefore, it’s kind of a maximal entropy situation.

Scott Howe

What this product particle or what this diagram shows is the single particle has all these relationships, but Over here on the right-hand side, you can also take every single other particle and look at the relationship it has with every single other particle as well. And so a maximum entropy situation is where all particles are completely loose from each other and all relationships are unknown. So another thing that is important about entropy is that reversible processes

Scott Howe

have low or zero entropy. Where if you can take the process and if you go forward a series of steps, one, two, three, and you can exactly and perfectly back out of it three, two, one, Then you’ve completely recovered yourself. You haven’t added entropy to the universe.

Scott Howe

And the last point I want to make about entropy is that entropy can be calculated. Normally, it’s a it’s a kind of a probability because of the sheer number of particles. But there is a calculation that you can do to discover What the value of entropy is for a certain arrangement of particles or for a certain arrangement of objects.

Scott Howe

We can lower the level. Let me just, before I explain this slide, entropy then expresses itself in the universe in decay. Where you see, like for instance, rust. Rust is an example of how the particles of the steel are starting to oxidize with Oxygen in the atmosphere, and then slowly the pieces they break away from the main body. And so slowly, you know, rust or decay and things like that are just the the the typical thing where um the energy is starting to leak or the uh the cause and effect that is contained in this object is leaking out. And I’m specifically using these simplistic terms in a different way of describing how entropy functions.

Scott Howe

So in this slide right here, a stable object has the the lines of cause and effect completely self-contained. And the it’s it’s stable because There is the cause and effect is not leaking out to the universe.

Scott Howe

we can lower the entropy of an object or of a series of objects by bringing them together and connecting them together. And what this does is it reduces the number of unknowns between the objects. And it also makes it easy to be managed. So if you think about

Scott Howe

Reducing entropy as managing your series of elements Then, in this diagram here, it shows how normally in a maximum entropy environment, all these particles are related to each other somehow, and we have to somehow keep track of them all, and they’re all unknown. And it’s just a scattering of gravel all over the place. That’s really hard to manage. Whereas, if we take them and glue them together in the chunks, you can pick this rock up and throw it. Okay, it’s easy to manage. And what this is showing is that the unknowns in the two orange circles you see here have been reduced to just one because we have two groups that have been brought together and they’ve been organized, and it’s much easier to manage that way.

Scott Howe

Now, up in the right-hand corner, I have a diagram of Lego. Lego is a good example of this, where the particles that are in the Lego have been Form together in such a way that you constrain the number of ways that each Lego block can act with each other. If you have just a jumble of Lego in a pile, the entropy is maximized. But once you start to fix those together, there’s a fixed number of ways that you can put that together. the unknowns are reduced and you have more prediction of what you can build. And this kind of constraint for future opportunities then is under our control, because we the constraint actually defines ways that we can start to organize.

Scott Howe

So in this case right here, this is showing a maximal entropy environment where all these parts, this is the All the parts that are required to make this automobile, but they’re not connected anyway. There’s the relationship, it’s a big mess, okay? There’s a

Scott Howe

There’s no definition of what goes where and what connects to what, but once you put all these things together, then you’ve encapsulated potential. And everybody knows what the potential of a vehicle is. The potential is the ability to transport, to carry things. etcetera. So with this potential that’s encapsulated out of what could be potentially a high entropy chaotic set of parts we have developed something that’s useful that will can be a tool for continuing to reduce entropy.

Scott Howe

So with this aspect, or with this argument, then, I’m going to introduce a new definition for engineering. Considering that engineering is anticipatory, in other words, it is not completely causal. There is something that’s ahead in the future. that through our intelligence we are able to foresee and we’re able to apply backwards and say, well, let’s incorporate this potential into our structure. And then this structure will be able to anticipate any various types of cause and effect to be able to funnel that cause and effect in the direction that we want. And so, my definition of engineering is the conscious buildup of potential to direct and influence cause and effect for the purpose of reducing entropy.

Scott Howe

And uh to to uh re-explain that into into English, I guess, it’s it’s the uh the uh conscious uh Build up a how can I I can’t reduce this any any more, but I guess it’s the I guess it’s the it’s a Essentially, it’s building order into the environment. So engineering is building order into the environment to enable opportunity. It’s to give potential or opportunity to whatever you are trying to create.

Scott Howe

So When we look at nature, we look at the universe, we see that there’s an innate structure, there’s an innate order to it. These atoms, they run on electromagnetic energy. You can build anything with them. There’s a picture of an asteroid in the lower left-hand corner that is a It represents a vast reduction in entropy. If you consider if that asteroid was just a bunch of atoms that’s just scattered throughout space. Entropy would be phenomenal. But if you gather all those atoms together into a rock, the entropy is vastly decreased.

Scott Howe

But the problem is that there is no potential, or there’s very little potential for continuing or for working. There’s this special arrangement of atoms into molecules that we’ve come to know as the DNA that runs That encapsulates potential to manipulate the environment through these self self Replicating structures. And these self-replicating structures are literally microscopic factories that Are able to build copies of themselves and also function and have a potential to manipulate the environment.

Scott Howe

Okay, so with this potential, Then suddenly we find that the enclosed, encapsulated cause and effect that’s just working itself inside through cycles and cycles and cycles inside the cell somehow it creates a situation of negative entropy. We’ve actually gone the other way around and it’s so ordered that it’s negative entropy. The complexity and potential is all encapsulated for number one, sensing the environment, and for number two, actuating and manipulating the environment. And number three, and this is the granddaddy of all: self-reproduction. Now, what does self-reproduction do for us?

Scott Howe

Self-reproduction It allows you to only you could just create a few of these, let them go, let them reproduce, and suddenly they automatically just start to take all the chaos of the universe and order everything for you. It’s all remote control. Or not even remote control, it’s all self-contained. It does it for you. So thinking along those lines then,

Scott Howe

How does this fit in with entropy? We have the each individual organism, it breathes in something and poops out something else. And is that really I mean, is it it poops out things? You know, isn’t that entropy? Well, what the issue that we have is, is that we have this biosphere division of labor where whatever one thing Poops out, something else likes it. Okay, they’re going to take that, that’s their fuel.

Scott Howe

And so the whole biosphere then becomes an incredible superorganism that has Extremely minimized entropy. There’s extreme high order in the biosphere because of the division of labor that’s in there.

Scott Howe

And what’s more, all the processes are, almost all the processes are reversible. So if we look at this one, the big fish is going to eat the smaller fish, which is going to eat the smaller one, all the way to the smallest organism, which ends up being a microscopic organism that will end up consuming the body of the big fish as it decays. Okay, so we have organisms that are In the biosphere, in the division of labor, that takes care of all the messes that happen due to decay and stuff like that, and keeps that entropy at a minimum.

Scott Howe

So when we think about a mathematics for morality, transgression increases entropy. And one way that it does that is sin decreases potential opportunities. Okay? The effects of sin can be calculated based on the calculations of entropy. Repentance, restitution reverses the damage and lowers entropy.

Scott Howe

So if we could go backwards then we’re able to pull i the process that we go forward, if we make a mess, if we’re able to back out and completely restore that, then we’re able to You know, avoid making a mess, but clean it up if you do. Okay, try to clean up after yourself.

Scott Howe

So, uh In the paper, if you eventually get a hold of that, then I’ve taken actually each one of these items that are in here and have talked about how entropy can define

Scott Howe

The value or the less or the unvalue of these various acts, such as a creative act, having a baby. If you just think about having a baby, what kind of entropy does that produce? Well, it doesn’t. It vastly decreases. entropy because you’ve created another self-repr replicating seat for intelligence that is able to go on and exponentially reproduce itself as well.

Scott Howe

Whereas if you take a life, the entropy that you produce is you first of all you cut off that person’s potential of eventually replicating or whatever. and you end up, you know, all all the vast entropy of all of the little particles that make up that body, you’ve just increased the universe by that much entropy. Okay, so and there’s unconventional cases as well, such as building a house.

Scott Howe

If you build a house with materials that you have to destroy later. as opposed to if you build a house with things that you can easily unbolt and recycle. There’s all kinds of things that come into green technologies and things that we’ve kind of intuitively think are Are true, but we don’t really have a way of putting it into our moral system until now.

Scott Howe

So in conclusion, then Is God’s purpose to defeat entropy? If we think about the ultimate goal of eternal life, eternal life is continuation of the lives or self-reproduction. And so this ultimate goal and this eternal principle is available in every step of the creation and of self-replication or self-reproduction to to reduce entropy.

Scott Howe

And since I’m out of zero time, I’m not going to explain this. But what we want to do is we want to get all the way to the far right of the This column where we’re in control of all circumstance. And I want to leave one last tidbit for you to think on: is the atonement non-causal? And I’m not going to answer that. But I might try to tackle it in a future paper. Thank you.