Ethics under compression

"Thou SHALT" as the best meme

Hypothesis: Moral precepts are under evolutionary pressure of limited transmission across generations and action prescriptions are the best suited memes, like bacteria.

the widest explanation of ethics is this:

1. some state

2. some action

3. some consequence

4. some valence

in aggregation these give rise to

1. state space (note that things you can't influence are excluded here)

2. action space

3. consequence space

4. value space

Now 'thou shalt not X' is clearly a relic of the full explanation. Only 2 is visible.

It is global in terms of state, assumes uniformity of consequences and stable values.

The value claim is related in the most reduced way 'value that your Being-as-a-pattern needs to continue its existence'. If you trespass your essence is changed, you're disrupting a pattern. Now not all pattern-disruptions are anti-patterns - as we know from software engineering.

The more anti-pattern is ecologically competitive with the dynamic of existing pattern ecology the more it is spoken out against.

Your being as a *true disciple* of the given ethics is broken and you might be rejected from the community or your status changed.

Now you can come up with all the other elements by yourself or repeat blindly.

Often consequence space is persisted socially even if the original purpose is no longer relevant.

That's what conservatism is, lack of it can lead to a failure mode of not saving for the draught years, letting your habits get overspendy in the years of richness. US monetary policy is a great example of this.

What is the prediction from this model of ethics? That the full 4 element space is expensive to compute:

1. explorations of value spaces, preciseness over state spaces is proper to those who have the most surplus - the philosopher caste, and in conditions of abundance

2. the memeplexes that went through high memetic disruption and/or long decay will only have the most rudimentary bit - the action space

The first is trivially verified. The second should be true for high-entropy online environments ('we vibe') where chance for a deep conceptual alignment with a random person is low, only precepts get memed, and get memed the most.

> Dogecoin to the Moon!

The second case also applies under forced memetic competition from a dominant memeplex, like European Pagans under Christianity - most of that which preserved locally organically are superstitions about specific actions one can take for 'good luck'. Deeper meanings are lost the soonest. "Meaning is use" is the minimal evolutionary state for memes, where all non-essential associations are buried.

This distinction quite overlaps at the first glance with the studied spectrum of high and low context cultures.

What do you make of this? Do you agree with this hypothesis? Do you see a case where this prediction doesn't hold?