Morality, Claude 01

What is there on good vs evil absolutes. For example, in all sentient life forms, there seems to be some notion of what is good vs what is not good. By good, I probably mean that which engenders good feelings. I also mean that which sustains good feelings. There seems to be an arc in human history towards something that is better than the alternatives. What determines how the brain makes decisions that seems the propel the human race towards better (whatever better is). What might there be on this?

There's a lot on this, from biology, neuroscience, philosophy and history. Here's the short answer. Something like "good" seems to show up in every organism, and there's a real case that human history has an arc. But the arc runs mainly through culture and environment, not through changes in the brain, and it isn't guaranteed.

1. Is there a universal "good"?

Biology says there's a universal form of good, but not a universal content. Every living thing, down to a bacterium swimming toward sugar, sorts the world into "approach" and "avoid." Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio trace this to Biology, Homeostasis. Good, at bottom, is whatever keeps the organism within the range where it stays alive, and feelings are how the body reports how that's going. Your own framework puts it more sharply: valence isn't something the world hands you. It's computed, roughly as whether prediction error is getting better or worse over time (Joffily & Coricelli 2013).

The catch is that this good is always relative to the organism. What sustains the wolf doesn't sustain the deer. So biology gives you a universal structure for good, but not one cosmic, absolute good.

Your definition (what produces and sustains good feelings) is close to well-known positions:

• Hedonic utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill): good is pleasure and the absence of suffering.
• Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (2010): good is the well-being of conscious creatures, and science can in principle measure it. This is probably the closest modern match to your view.
• Aristotle's eudaimonia (flourishing) covers the "sustains" part of your definition better than raw pleasure does.

The standard objections are worth taking seriously:

• Hume's is/ought gap. Knowing what brains do value doesn't by itself tell you what they ought to value.
• Nozick's experience machine and "wireheading." If good just means good feelings, then plugging into a pleasure machine forever would be ideal. Most people recoil from that, which suggests we value contact with reality, not just feelings. Your word "sustains" partly addresses this, because the machine feels good but doesn't keep you in touch with a world you can act in.
• Sharon Street's "Darwinian Dilemma" (2006). Evolution shaped our moral intuitions for reproductive success, not for truth. So it's hard to argue that our intuitions track moral facts that exist independently of us.

2. How the brain makes moral decisions

• A common currency. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the striatum appear to put very different options on a single value scale. Patients with vmPFC damage (Damasio's "somatic marker" work) can reason about choices perfectly well but decide disastrously. That suggests feeling is part of good judgment, not separate from it.
• Intuition first, reasoning after. Jonathan Haidt's "emotional dog and its rational tail" (2001) argues that most moral judgment is fast intuition, and reasoning mostly justifies it afterward.
• Dual process. Joshua Greene's trolley-problem fMRI studies (2001 onward) found an emotional "don't push" response competing with a more deliberate, cost-benefit response in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
• Norm violations behave like prediction errors. In the Ultimatum Game, unfair offers activate the anterior insula, a region involved in disgust and interoception (Sanfey et al. 2003). Mutual cooperation, meanwhile, activates reward circuitry (Rilling et al. 2002). In other words, the brain finds cooperation rewarding and finds unfairness aversive at a bodily level.
• Morality is learned. Fiery Cushman and Molly Crockett model moral learning as reinforcement learning. We learn habit-like values attached to actions ("you just don't do that") alongside model-based reasoning about outcomes.

3. The arc of history

The claim is real and well argued, most famously by:

• Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle (1981): moral concern has widened over time from kin, to tribe, to nation, to all humans, and now partly to animals.
• Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011): over the long run, violence has declined by most measures.
• Robert Wright, Nonzero (2000): history tends toward larger webs of positive-sum cooperation.

The key point is that the brain hasn't changed. Biological evolution is far too slow to explain the last few centuries. What changed is the input to the same brains. The main proposed drivers are:

• Positive-sum trade. Other people become worth more to you alive than dead.
• States holding a monopoly on violence (Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process), which removes the need for revenge cycles.
• Literacy, novels and media. These take other people's suffering, which used to be invisible, and feed it into your own empathy circuits.
• Abstract reasoning, which Pinker calls a "moral Flynn effect": the habit of asking "what if I were in their place?"
• Cultural evolution (Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success). Groups whose norms support large-scale cooperation tend to outcompete and get copied by groups whose norms don't.
• Game theory. Robert Axelrod's work on tit-for-tat and Martin Nowak's "five rules for the evolution of cooperation" show how cooperation can be stable among self-interested agents.

Caveats:

• Nassim Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo dispute Pinker's statistics. They argue that rare, catastrophic wars make the trend unreliable.
• The 20th century shows the arc can reverse sharply.
• There's a circularity problem: we judge history as "better" by today's values, which are themselves products of that history.

4. How this connects to Simple Explanation Number 1

The following is my own speculation, not established theory, but it fits your framework closely:

• Individual level: good feelings mean prediction error is shrinking. Sustained good would then mean minimizing expected future prediction error. Active inference has a term for this, expected free energy, which covers states you can keep living in, not just pleasant moments.
• Collective level: in your framework, other people's experience reaches you only through their behavior. Moral progress could then be described as expanding whose prediction errors enter your Environment Model. Once a stranger's suffering becomes sensory input to you, through empathy, trade, contact or media, it starts registering as error that you're motivated to resolve.
• A built-in weakness: minimizing surprise isn't the same as flourishing. Active inference calls this the "dark room problem": the least surprising life is sitting in a dark room. Your framework would need some ingredient for exploration and curiosity to get to "good" rather than merely "comfortable."

Where to start reading:

• Damasio's Descartes' Error,
• Greene's Moral Tribes,
• Haidt's The Righteous Mind,
• Singer's The Expanding Circle,
• Pinker's Better Angels,
• Henrich's The Secret of Our Success, and
• Street's "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value."