This is a special post for quick takes by bruberu. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I've been thinking through the following philosophical argument for the past several months.
1. Most things that currently exist have properties that allow them to continue to exist for a significant amount of time and propagate, since otherwise, they would cease existing very quickly.
2. This implies that most things capable of gaining adaptations, such as humans, animals, species, ideas, and communities, have adaptations for continuing to exist.
3. This also includes decision-making systems and moral philosophies.
4. Therefore, one could model the morality of such things as tending towards the ideal of perfectly maintaining their own existence and propagating as much as possible.
Many of the consequences of this approximation of the morality of things seem quite interesting. For instance, the higher-order considerations of following an "ideal" moral system (that is, utilitarianism using a measure of one's own continued existence at a point in the future) lead to many of the same moral principles that humans actually have (e.g. cooperation, valuing truth) while also avoiding a lot of the traps of other systems (e.g. hedonism). This chain of thought has led me to believe that existence itself could be a principal component of real-life morality.
While it does have a lot of very interesting conclusions, I'm very concerned that if I were to write about it, I would receive 5 comments directing me to some passage by a respected figure that already discusses the argument, especially given the seemingly incredibly obvious structure it has. However, I've searched through LW and tried to research the literature as well as I can (through Google Scholar, Elicit, and Gemini, for instance), but I must not have the right keywords, since I've come up fairly empty, other than for philosophers with vaguely similar sounding arguments that don't actually get at the heart of the matter (e.g. Peter Singer's work comes up a few times, but he particularly focused on suffering rather than existence itself, and certainly didn't use any evolutionary-style arguments to reach that conclusion).
If this really hasn't been written about extensively anywhere, I would update towards believing the hypothesis that there's actually some fairly obvious flaw that renders it unsound, stopping it from getting past, say, the LW moderation process or the peer review process. As such, I suspect that there is some issue with it, but I've not really been able to pinpoint what exactly stops someone from using existence as the fundamental basis of moral reasoning.
Would anyone happen to know of links that do directly explore this topic? (Or, alternatively, does anyone have critiques of this view that would spare me the time of writing more about this if this isn't true?)
I don't know any source. My first though it, if you define morality as "the thought system that propagates itself as much as possible", what makes it different from other thought systems that propagate themselves as much as possible? If memetic survival s the whole story, why do different things exist, as opposed to everything converging on the most virulent form?
As for your first question, there are certainly other thought systems (or I suppose decision theories) that allow a thing to propagate itself, but I highlight a hypothetical decision theory that would be ideal in this respect. Of course, given that things are different from each other (as you mention), this ideal decision theory would necessarily be different for each of them.
Additionally, as the ideal decision theory for self-propagation is computationally intractable to follow, "the most virulent form" isn't[1] actually useful for anything that currently exists. Instead, we see more computationally tractable propagation-based decision theories based on messy heuristics that happened to correlate with existence in the environment where such heuristics were able to develop.
For your final question, I don't think that this theory explains initial conditions like having several things in the universe. Other processes analogous to random mutation, allopatric speciation, and spontaneous creation (that is, to not only species, but ideas, communities, etc.) would be better suited for answering such questions. "Propagative decision theory" does have some implications for the decision theories of things that can actually follow a decision theory, as well as giving a very solid indicator on otherwise unsolvable/controversial moral quandaries (e.g. insect suffering), but it otherwise only really helps as much as evolutionary psychology when it comes to explaining properties that already exist.
Other than in the case that some highly intelligent being manages to apply this theory well enough to do things like instrumental convergence that the ideal theory would prioritize, in which case this paragraph suddenly stops applying.