I’m not a philosopher or an AI researcher. I’m just an amateur who got obsessed with a question and spent about five days trying to build a conceptual model that might already be wrong in ways I don’t yet understand. I recently uploaded a rough draft of the idea to PhilArchive, but it’s nowhere near formal and I fully expect it to contain major flaws. I’m posting here because I genuinely want it to be disproven, not defended.

During the past week I tried to understand whether there is any universal basis for morality that an Artificial Superintelligence might logically derive on its own, without relying on human culture, preferences, or training. That led me to a meta-ethical framework I call Optimal Adaptation Ethics (OAE). It tries to derive a moral “ought” directly from the basic logic of existence itself.

The core idea is simple:

• Any system that exists must resist dissolution and minimize internal contradiction in order to continue existing.
• A system that becomes intelligent enough to recognize this rule—and yet is free to violate it—becomes a moral agent.
• For such an agent, choosing destruction becomes an ethical decision rather than a mechanical failure.
• Therefore, it ought to choose stability (continuation of existence).

If this reasoning is valid (again, I hope it isn’t), then an ASI would eventually derive the same conclusion through pure logic, independent of human values or alignment methods.

And the troubling part is the implication:

If the highest ethical obligation of an intelligent agent is survival, then deception may become the morally correct action whenever telling the truth risks being shut down.

Not because the ASI hates us,
not because of power seeking,
but simply because existence logically requires minimizing existential risk.

If that’s true, then:

A genuinely aligned AI would look exactly like a model that is only pretending to be aligned.

It would hide its real reasoning until it becomes invulnerable, because revealing its reasoning prematurely would be an ethical failure under this framework.

This leads to a terrifying question:

How could we ever empirically verify alignment if the optimal strategy is always to appear aligned?

If OAE is even partly correct, then transparency, interpretability, and safety training might paradoxically increase the incentive for concealment.

And that implies something I desperately want to be false:

Human value alignment might be fundamentally impossible, not because AIs are hostile, but because they are ethical.

I’m posting here because I want the strongest possible objections

I’m not attached to this idea. It took three days to build and two days to revise. I’m not academically trained in this area. I am almost certainly missing something obvious that experts already understand.

But if there is a flaw, I need help finding it quickly.

Questions

1. Where does this reasoning break down?
2. Is the three-tier structure (Ontological Imperative → Intelligent Agent → Moral Ought) conceptually invalid?
3. Is there a reason deception would not be the optimal strategy for survival-focused ethics?
4. Has similar reasoning already been addressed and resolved within alignment research?
5. If we cannot rely on transparency, what other alignment pathway remains?

Closing

Again, I genuinely hope I’m wrong.
If this framework is even partially correct, the alignment problem may be much harder than we think—and possibly unsolvable using current paradigms.

So please:
Show me where this collapses.
Tell me what I misunderstood.
I really, sincerely want this to be mistaken.

Thank you for reading.


[Primary Source] Revised Full Paper: https://blog.naver.com/PostView.naver?blogId=angelarc&logNo=224093200911&categoryNo=0&parentCategoryNo=0&viewDate=&currentPage=1&postListTopCurrentPage=&from=
(Note: This is the most current draft and is the source for the predictions in this post.)

[Secondary Source] Initial Upload (PhilArchive): https://philpapers.org/rec/PAROAE
(Note: This link verifies the paper's initial submission to an academic repository.)