Letter to New Scientist on Unified Diversity

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In November 2006 the New Scientist had a special edition on the biggest questions of life. I sent in the following letter in response to the various articles:

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an ethical framework that was compatible with both science and religion, and so didn’t involve the divisive approach of the Beyond Belief conference (18 November, p 8)? And wouldn’t it be fantastic if that framework could also provide a species-neutral way of judging the value of non-human entities, such as animals, ecosystems and the conscious computers that many of your leading scientists predict are just around the corner? (18 November, p.31)?

Well, there is such an ethical framework. It’s called unified diversity, and was proposed by the philosopher Robert Nozick. He argued that something is of value to the extent that it displays a structure of unified diversity, in which diverse elements combine such that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This may sound too woolly to be practical, but when applied to systems is in fact the same concept as complexity, which scientists have used to describe complex adaptive systems in the field of cybernetics.

Ranking entities according to their level of unified diversity/complexity appears to match our own moral intuitions quite closely. For instance, we feel that animals are more valuable than inanimate things, and humans more valuable than animals, in keeping with their complexity ranking.

It is compatible with science since the more highly evolved organisms display the greatest unified diversity/complexity, and the ‘awe’ that scientists feel when observing nature is surely based upon its unified diversity. And it is also compatible with religion since the essence of mystical experience is a sense of the unified nature of reality.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, scientists have found complexity to be a slippery concept to objectively measure. But every ethical framework has areas of ambiguity, and given its advantages I would suggest that it is well worth more attention.