The arguments for external reality seem rather poor.
The inference from "I am having an experience" to "there is something out there causing that experience" is invalid. I've suggested elsewhere that the latter may be meaningless.
The only way your argument holds is if logic and observation, the transcendental presuppositions underlying any possibility for reasoning at all, can be trusted at some points but not trusted at others, or if I have failed to use logic properly at some point along the chain. For the purpose of clarifying, here's the chain, worded as carefully as possible:
From what I can tell, every single step here depends on logic and observation. If you deny that logic is applicable at any of these steps, you deny that logic is applicable at all of them, and rational discussion is impossible.
If there is a step here that is not dependent on logic and observation, where logic has not been properly applied, where I've accidentally snuck in an ought secondary to the single ought that I've flagged explicitly, then that step, and all the steps that follow, are contestable.
Step 8 is problematic. (I would also quibble with wording on others, including 2, but those are less critical.)
What exactly does "real" mean there?
11 is also problematic. At best you can get that a model which assumes other people are conscious similar to you will help your predictions be more accurate. This says nothing about whether other people actually are conscious.
You can't actually bootstrap a refutation of solipsism.
I would claim that ultimately anti solipsism is a moral position, not a factual one. I.e. it is a moral good to treat others as conscious. I can't write up a full argument for that though.
After arguing on TheMotte for a few days and thinking it through, I have an answer.
I made a mistake in my description of the derivation. Step eight's assertion, "By logic, one concludes that those things are real, as things which are not real cannot affect things which are," is both unnecessary and poorly defined. The same goes for step eleven's assertion that one "must" assume similar bodies must be the embodiments of other selves.
First let's clean up the question of "what is real". What really matters to Cogitism is that you are a "self", an observer-actor who can think. Anything that the self doesn't control (even the "mind", including side-effects of neurochemistry, such as hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, emotions, etc) are considered "external" to the core self.
Whether these external things are metaphysically "real" in any sense doesn't really matter; what matters is that they are outside the domain of things the self controls directly, and they affect the self's cohesion. Because they can affect the self, and we've assigned value to the self, they are ethically significant.
Having said that, we can continue up the chain: in the domain of the things the self doesn't control directly, the self can observe bodies similar to its own. We don't need to assert that these are embodiments of other real "selves", we just need to establish that denying that they have selves undermines the self enough to be ethically dangerous.
We established the existence of the self in the current moment through logic and observation. Whether we even existed a moment ago or will exist a moment from now is based on very high confidence, but not certainty. We already know that we can't be truly certain about anything except that the self exists in the current moment.
We've used the same tools of high-confidence logic and observation all the way up the chain (with the sole exception of the one "ought" out of which the rest of the ethics grow), so demanding an impossibly high threshold of confidence when it comes to other selves is inconsistent, and calls into question the logic and observation we use for literally any thinking outside the self at all.
If we demanded certainty for more basic things, like whether we'll exist a second from now, that would undermine the entire exercise of thinking about anything, which would mean there's no point in trying to argue ethics in the first place. It's completely incoherent to call these tools into question while still engaging in argument; Thus, denying other beings' selfhood is incoherent and therefore unethical under this framework.
I'm very curious to hear what your issue is with step 2. If there's a problem I'd like to try and fix it.
Cogitism is my personal moral framework, developed and refined in my free time, and it is the main mechanism by which I've been approaching philosophical and moral questions over the last six months as of posting this essay. It is my belief that the concepts laid out here provide a solid foundation for approaching any moral or ethical question from first principles, up to and including some of the most difficult questions of our time.
I am crossposting this to LessWrong to get more eyeballs on it, essentially throwing it to the wolves to see if it survives. While I'm aware of similarities with other rational moral frameworks, I believe that Cogitism is distinct in grounding value in the nature of consciousness itself rather than in preferences, utility, or consequences.
A Brief Clarification on AI Involvement
People often care very deeply that the involvement of AI in the production of a work is stated upfront, myself included, because the extent of AI involvement in a project and what shape that involvement takes provides useful context for its legitimacy. As a result I feel it is important to disclose and contextualize the involvement of such tools in this work as early as possible.
Over the period where I developed these ideas, much of that development took place in chats with LLMs (Claude, most often), which I used as a sounding board for my ideas. In these chats I gave these models explicit instructions to check my work and reel me in whenever it thought it saw a flaw in my reasoning. A lot of the time it's wrong in the analysis, and a lot of the time that's because it doesn't understand what I mean, but *explaining why* to the machine and *getting it to understand* tends to help me think through the problem more clearly than I could otherwise.
The ideas, words, and phrasing in these essays are my own; I am writing this after having solidified and used these ideas privately for half a year. AI models did not write any of this for me. In short, LLMs only had a hand in the development of these concepts as a really complicated, talking rubber duck.
Cogito Ergo Sum
There is only one fact that any individual can know for certain, beyond even the tiniest echo of a doubt: I Exist. Without first acknowledging one's own existence it is impossible to make any logical conclusions or form any stable beliefs about anything in the universe. If you did not exist, you could not think, and so it follows that thinking is itself proof of your own existence.
Of course, this is not a particularly original concept; the phrase "Cogito Ergo Sum" was first coined in the 1600s by the French philosopher René Descartes. However, despite the concept seeming self-evident and being relatively well-known in the modern day, I believe the reasoning is worth laying out here explicitly to ensure the foundations are solid.
Cogito takes care of base reality, but a moral framework cannot be constructed only from raw truth: to decide what one "should" do, a person needs to make value judgements, and for value judgements to be possible one needs to value something. As a result, Cogitism makes one additional presupposition: that the self, the only verifiable truth, has value.
These two fundamentals, the truth that "the self *Is*", and the belief that "the self *Matters*", make up the bedrock of Cogitism. From here we can begin to build a fully functional moral framework.
The Quality of Existence
We've established that the self exists and that it has value, but without the tendency for the self to change it's impossible for one to derive any direction from these principles; if nothing you do helps or harms the thing that holds value, then nothing you do holds any moral weight.
Luckily we know that the self has a tendency to change; simply by thinking and observing the self, a person can establish the knowledge that the self is plastic, and that one can sharpen or dull the fidelity of thought by taking different actions within oneself.
If thought is the quality that proves the self, and thinking can get more or less difficult moment to moment, one must presume that thinking could degrade to a point where the self could dissolve, or otherwise cease to exist.
Because the self is our basis for value judgements, and it is possible for the self to end, it stands to reason that any action which brings us closer to that end (incoherence) is negative, and any action that takes us further away from that end (coherence) is positive.
The Reality of the Environment
So far we have only operated within the limited scope of the self, but moral frameworks must account for interactions with reality outside the self. So, how do we prove that the environment exists in a way that matters?
Invoking "Cogito Ergo Sum" only proves the existence of the self, as an observer of one's own thoughts, so it stands to reason that any stimulus that cannot be directly proven by Cogito must be outside it. If external stimuli can be shown to affect the quality or coherence of the self, they must be real, as things that do not exist cannot have an effect on things that do.
By reflecting on oneself while interacting with perceived reality, a person can observe that the self does indeed change due to external stimuli. Thus, there must be a reality outside the self that is relevant to moral discussions.
Note that under this model, the specific ontological nature of reality does not matter. Whether the universe is a simulation, the hallucinations of a Boltzmann Brain, or truly the lowest and most fundamental "reality" that can exist, the fact that the environment can change the self means that it is real in the ways that count to us.
Consciousness and Value Outside the Self
Now that we have established the existence of a world outside the self, a person can observe that they exist within, or at least linked to, a mind and body. One's mind can be seen to have emotions, desires, and impulses, and the body can be seen outwardly expressing these things.
Going further outside the self, a person can see that they exist in a world with other bodies, built similarly, presenting similar emotions and expressing similar desires. Because we know our observations are caused by real phenomena, and because these other bodies are so similar to our own, one must presume that there are other selves present within those foreign bodies and minds.
One cannot deny that these other selves have value under the same principles by which we derive our own value, because confirmation of their existence and moral relevance was reached through the same observation and logic that confirmed our own existence. To do so would call into question the methods by which we assigned our own value, and in doing so, we would degrade our own coherence.
Because of this, all other selves determined to have moral relevance through these or similar methods must hold the same or similar value as the self under our moral framework. This means that despite Cogitism being rooted in the value of the self, self-sacrifice, selflessness, and altruism are coherent under this system.
Keeping all of our principles and observations in mind, and generalizing to allow for beings dissimilar to ourselves, we can derive a singular aim to act as an ethical north star and guide moral discussion:
To Preserve And Enhance The Stability And Coherence of Sapient Consciousness.
Cogitism In Short
In short, Cogitism derives its conclusions along the following lines:
It is my belief that in this way, Cogitism presents an ethical and moral framework built entirely from the nature of consciousness, through observations that any person can make, and it does this with no appeal to any tradition or authority except one's own awareness of the self.
While not made explicit in this essay, Cogitism can apply to beings outside the scope of humanity. Animals, which can be determined by the same methods to have internal experience, qualify (just not as strongly). In the same vein, extraterrestrial life and artificial intelligence can also qualify given that certain criteria are met.
It is my intention to expand on these concepts and to dive deeper into the various implications of Cogitism. These explorations will take the form of additional essays published to my site and crossposted here.