Eidogenesis: A Physics-Based, Valueless Ethical Framework

Traditional ethical frameworks—utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics—are grounded in assumptions specific to human cognition, experience, and social life. This anthropocentrism limits their applicability to challenges requiring coordination across cultures with incompatible values, governance of artificial minds that may not share human cognitive architecture, and decisions affecting entities or timescales beyond human experience. This paper proposes Eidogenesis, a framework for evaluating decisions based on physical constraints rather than human values. Eidogenesis assesses actions and systems according to four criteria derived from thermodynamics, information theory, game theory, and evolutionary dynamics: Branching Capacity (preservation of future possibilities), Diversity (informational richness), Reversibility (error-correction capacity), and Durability (persistence under perturbation). The central claim is that physically grounded evaluation—asking only what persists, never what is good—yields conclusions that satisfy moral intuition across a wide range of cases. This convergence occurs not because values have been smuggled in but because human morality and systemic persistence are shaped by the same physical constraints; ethics, properly understood, was always about physics. The framework has significant implications for artificial intelligence alignment (AGI reasoning correctly about physical constraints will arrive at conclusions humans recognize as ethical), global governance (evaluation criteria that do not require value consensus), and long-term risk management (distinguishing structures that preserve future possibilities from those that foreclose them).