Complex-Information
Ethics Outline

Ethical decision making is made by the complex minds of complex beings that are embedded in a complex society and world. A few of the immediate results of this assertion include:
- Simple ethical rules, no matter how sophisticated that they might be, are bound to often fail as a guide for the "best" course of action. Too many variables must be considered within the context and milieu of multiple variables that will be present many situations.
- Ethical theory variants such as "relativism" (ethics depends on culture, politics, history, etc.) and "subjectivism" (ethics depends on individual perspectives) are inevitable due to the fact that ethical choices are made in different complexities that vary with time and location. For example, the best ethical choice made in ancient Greece might not be the best ethical choice in ancient Egypt or modern Greece because of spatial-temporal-cultural variations in religions, geography, resources, secondary norms, etc.
- A few ethical mandates do transcend time, space, and complexities, such as "do not cause needless suffering."
- Complexities are "non-linear," which is a mathematical way to say that the outcome for any given input may be difficult, or even impossible to fully predict; or at the very least result in an outcome that might not be straightforward to predict. Therefore, doing the "right" action for any given complex situation, might only favor rather than guarantee the "best" outcome.

The "good" action is typically one that preserves or promotes complexities, especially if that complexity is "net positive." Some typical net positive complexities include living species, ecosystems, most cultures, and even artificial complexities like the internet or a national economy. Some related ethical theories state that all complexities should be preserved or promoted. However, complexities like malaria (a parasitic organism that harms greater complexities like animals and people), prior devastating cultures such as the Nazis or the expansionist Mongol hordes, and an artificial intelligence gone rogue as in the movie "Terminator" are all arguably not complexities that should necessarily be preserved or promoted.

The reason for the hyphenated term "complex-information" ethical theory is that humans sometimes give substantial value to entities that are not complex, but have desired semantical informational content.
- Material objects like religious icons and national flags can be valued such that they are expected to be treated with reverence by its adherents, or conversely, their desecration can provoke great angst to its adherents.
- Immaterial things like music, cultural traditions, political ideals, and religious beliefs can also have great semantic value to people.
- The semantic value of things is derived by those who imbue it with value and often does not have any intrinsic value in itself. In C-I theory, that which has intrinsic value is that with which a sentient complexity cannot exist without like the planet Earth or water.
- A sentient complexity has fundamental intrinsic value - so long as it does not do great harms to other profound complexities - because without them, ethics itself is not possible, i.e., you need a profoundly complex organism to have the capacity to make moral decisions.

C-I theory is agnostic regarding whether moral agents have true "free will" - the relevant disciplines of psychology and neuroscience are far from being able to offer even a speculative scientific answer. Complexity science, however, does offer a possible alternative to the assertion that the human (or other) minds must be either deterministic as with the "clockworks universe" model, or indeterministic (and hence, random) for its decision making. Complexity science has revealed that systems can exist on the "edge of chaos" where several to many (but not infinite or random) outcomes are possible for any given input. Hence, the human mind which is the most complex system currently known, might similarly work such that any given input (e.g. a query as to the best action to take) can eventuate in several possible outputs (e.g. ethical or even general decision making). Although I unfortunately cannot provide an ultimate neurologic mechanism regarding how decision making ultimately occurs, this proposal might still be C-I's theory greatest contribution.