Four Aspects of Harmony

I've found myself increasingly drawn to an axiology of harmony, inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism. (Axiology is the study of what makes things valuable in general, including ethically, aesthetically, prudentially, and epistemically.) On this view, the, or a, central value is harmonious participation in the flourishing patterns that make our planet awesomely valuable.

But what is harmony?

Presumably, harmony involves a kind of fit, alignment, or cooperation with something else, without duplicating that something else. The melody proceeds; the harmony complements it with something different, generating a richer whole that encompasses both. The relationship is asymmetric: Melody leads, harmony follows -- though of course the follower can affect and elevate the leader.

Hasko von Kriegstein, in "Well-Being as Harmony" (HT Keilee Bessho for the pointer) identifies three broad ways in which a person can harmonize with the world: mental correspondence, positive orientation, and fitting response. I find his taxonomy useful, though I won't follow his exact formulations, and my aim is broader. I'm interested generally in the value of harmony, while von Kriegstein focuses on harmony as personal well-being. I'll also add a fourth category. Part of what I admire about von Kriegstein's taxonomy is its breadth and ambition -- the amount that he can sweep in.

Mental Correspondence

Von Kriegstein suggests that knowledge is a type of harmony between mind and world -- a non-accidental correspondence of one to the other. The world leads; the mind follows. (He doesn't express it that way.) If the sun is setting and you know that it is setting, you are in tune with the world. If the sun is setting and you think it's high noon, you are out of tune.

Achievement, von Kriegstein also suggests, is another type of harmony -- one in which you shape the world to correspond (non-accidentally) to your mind, your goals, your intentions. He treats this as the complement of knowledge, with a different direction of fit: The world comes to match your mind, rather than the other way around.

However, in treating knowledge and achievement as having the same general shape, von Kriegstein misses a subtlety. Harmony, recall, asymmetrically follows melody. Shaping the world to match your goals seems to make you the melody, with which you force the world to harmonize. Imagine bulldozing a hill flat, so it corresponds to a blueprint in your mind. The details of the hill don't matter: The bulldozer ignores them all; it flattens every hill the same. This seems unharmonious. It's an achievement of a sort, and a correspondence arises between your mind (your plans) and the world, but not because you are harmonizing with the world.

Harmonious achievement requires a gentler touch. Imagine instead that you create a footpath through the hill, tracing its curves, skirting a stream, following a shady line of oaks. This responsiveness to the features of the hill, the integration of your goals with the hill as it exists, in a way that does not damage and arguably enriches the hill -- that is the harmonious achievement.

In harmony, you seek mental correspondence to the world, not the other way around, whether that is through knowledge or achievement. Harmonious achievements do not dominate and oppress the world but fit into and enhance what is already there.

Other types of mental correspondence could involve fearing (only) the fearsome, admiring (only) the admirable, wanting (only) the desirable, regretting (only) the regrettable, perceiving (only) what's really there, anticipating (only) the likely.

Positive Orientation

Von Kriegstein suggests that you also harmonize with the world when you have a "pro-attitude" toward events in it -- that is, when you value, enjoy, like, or approve of events.

The sun sets over the hill. Not only do you know it does (harmonizing via mental correspondence) but also you enjoy the view (harmonizing via positive orientation). Not only do you successfully follow the footpath as planned (several types of mental correspondence at once, each harmonizing further with each other) but the walk brings you pleasure. Not only do you accurately notice the swooping of the birds, but you delight in the sight.

Von Kriegstein expends several pages on pro-attitudes gone wrong: inauthentic or toward unworthy things or under a misapprehension. In every case, it's plausible that to have the positive orientation toward the target harmonizes with the target, even if overall it would be more harmonious not to have that orientation. If something in you thrills with joy at suffering kittens, you are in harmony with the suffering of kittens, though you are simultaneously out of harmony with the kittens' well-being.

How is a pro-attitude harmonious, exactly? The melody is the event; the harmony is the part of you that aligns with it, that affirms it, that says this is good, lovely, wondrous, right.

Fitting Response

Von Kriegstein suggests, finally, that you harmonize with the world when you have a fitting response to it, for example when you are revolted by evil, pleased by good, admire the beautiful, and laugh at the humorous. His examples are fine, but relying on only these examples risks collapsing fitting response into mental correspondence.

I would have liked to see, in addition -- and maybe as the center of emphasis -- bodily examples. You respond fittingly to the world also when you skillfully catch the object a friend tosses you, when you merge harmoniously into the freeway traffic, when your video game character dodges the hazards, when your stride carries you smoothly over the uneven creek stones, when you and your dance partner swing perfectly together.

Long-term projects can also be fitting responses: Marriage can be a fitting response to a love relationship; going to graduate school can be a fitting response to your values, skills, and opportunities; buying and reading a novel can be a fitting response to a new publication by your favorite author.

New Resonances

Is it not also wondrous to daydream? Daydreams don't straightforwardly correspond to the world, nor are they always joyful or a fitting response to the events of the day. Maybe we could shoehorn them into one or more of those three categories, but instead let me offer a fourth: the creation of new resonances. We owe ourselves some daydreams.

We harmonize with the world when we enrich it in new ways that resonate with the ways in which it is already rich. Dreams and daydreams enrich the world -- and not in an entirely random, independent way. The long-dead friend reappears for you. You imagine or relive a vacation or a triumph. The worries of your day are reshuffled. (If the dream leaves you anxious or uncomfortable, the harmonies mix with unharmonious notes -- not every aspect of every event is harmonious.)

Likewise, games, sports, art, long chats into the night, splashing in the surf, telling a joke at dinner, pretending to be a magic unicorn, sparkly earrings, surprising a friend with a thoughtful gift... all such acts can resonate harmoniously with what was and is, in a manner beyond reflecting, valuing, or responding to what is already there. Von Kriegstein's first three categories are all a little passive or reactive. This fourth category encompasses the creative and new, which builds upon the old without clashing.

[Kandinsky, Quiet Harmony: image source]

Representational Realism and the Problem of Tacit Belief

Since 2019, I've been working on a new paper on belief, "Dispositionalism, Yay! Representationalism, Boo!" Yesterday, I received page proofs. It will appear in print in 2026 (in a collection I'm co-editing with Jonathan Lewis-Jong: The Nature of Belief, with Oxford). I'll share an excerpt (lightly edited) as this week's post.

Industrial-Strength Representational Realism about Belief

The view I'm critiquing is "industrial-strength representationalism" in the spirit of Jerry Fodor and Eric Mandelbaum. Industrial-strength representationalism is committed to four theses:

Presence. In standard, non-“tacit,” cases, belief that P (where P is some propositional content like "there's beer in the fridge") requires that a representation with the content P is present somewhere in the mind.

Discreteness. In standard cases, a representation P will be either discretely present in or discretely absent from a cognitive system or subsystem. Representationalist models typically leave no room for representations being, say, half-present or 23% present or indeterminately hovering between present and absent. Some marginal cases might violate discreteness -- nature has few truly sharp borders, if one zooms in close enough -- but these will be brief or rare exceptions.

Kinematics. Rational actions arise from the causal interaction of beliefs that P and desires that Q, in virtue of their specific contents P and Q, or at least in virtue of syntactic or architectural correlates of those specific contents (e.g., Fodor 1987). Similarly, rational inferences involve the causal interaction of beliefs that P with other beliefs to generate still more beliefs. This is central to the representational realist’s causal story.

Specificity. Rational action arises from the activation or retrieval of specific sets of beliefs and desires P1…n and Q1…m, as opposed to other, related beliefs and desires P’1…j and Q’1…i. More accurately, rational action arises from the activation or retrieval of the specific representations whose storage, in the right functional location, constitutes possessing the beliefs and desires P1…n and Q1…m. Similarly, rational inference arises from the activation or retrieval of specific sets of representations.

The Problem of Tacit Belief

Back in the late 1970s to early 1990s, that is, in the heyday of philosophical representational realism about belief, several representationalists noticed what I'll call the Problem of Tacit Belief (Field 1978; Lycan 1986; Crimmins 1992; Manfredi 1993; see also Dennett 1987 for a critical perspective). Not all of them regarded it as a problem, exactly. Some regarded it as a discovery. But as a discovery, it proved useless: The literature on tacit belief petered out, rather than proving fruitful.

We can enter the Problem of Tacit Belief by noticing that it’s not wholly implausible that people have infinitely many beliefs. Suppose Cynthia believes that there are a few beers in her fridge. She also believes, presumably, that there are fewer than 100 bottles of beer in her fridge. She therefore also seemingly believes that there are fewer than 101 bottles, and fewer than 102, and fewer than 1,000, and fewer than 1 million, and fewer than 16,423,300.6, and so on. If we accept that Cynthia does in fact believe all that (presumably, she would readily assent to those propositions if asked, be surprised to learn they were false, and rely on them implicitly in her actions), then she has infinitely many beliefs about the number of beers in her fridge. However, it is implausible that each of these beliefs is grounded in a separately stored representational content.

Thus was born the distinction between core beliefs, those that are explicitly stored and represented, and tacit beliefs, those whose contents are swiftly derivable from the core beliefs. Suppose Cynthia has a stored representation with the content there are four bottles of Lucky Lager in the refrigerator door. This is her core belief. From this core belief, an infinite number of tacit beliefs are now swiftly derivable: that there are fewer than five bottles of Lucky Lager in the refrigerator door, that there are fewer than six bottles, and so forth, and also (given that she knows that Lucky Lager is a type of beer) that there are four bottles of beer in the refrigerator door, and also (given that she knows that whatever is in the refrigerator door is also in the fridge) that there are four bottles of Lucky Lager in the fridge, and also (given that she knows that Lucky Lager is cheap) that there are a few bottles of cheap beer in the fridge. Nearly all of Cynthia’s many beer-in-fridge beliefs might be tacit, grounded in just a few core beliefs.

Although postulating a core/tacit distinction helps the representationalist avoid populating the mind with infinitely many mostly redundant stored representations, a band of merry troubles follows.

First, it’s worth noting that this maneuver constitutes a substantial retreat from Presence. As formulated, in the normal or standard case, when someone believes that P they have a stored representation with the content P. I don’t think it is uncharitable to characterize representationalists as tending to say this; it’s very much how they ordinarily talk. But now it looks like the vast majority of our beliefs might be abnormal or nonstandard. Even setting aside the cheap infinitude of large numbers, Cynthia plausibly has a billion closely related beer-in-the-fridge beliefs (e.g., at least three Lucky Lagers in the fridge door, at least three cheap beers in the kitchen, about four bottled beers in the usual place; imagine nine variables [location, price, brand, number, duration, container type...] each with ten independent values). It would be shocking if even 1% of these billion beer beliefs were explicitly represented: That would be 10 million distinct stored representations for this one minor set of facts about the world. Many other beliefs surely range into the tacit millions or billions: My belief that my wife and I started dating in grad school, your belief that racism was prevalent in Louisiana in the 1920s, Ankur’s belief that there’s a gas station on the corner of University and Iowa. Each of these beliefs has many, many close neighbors, in combinatorial profusion -- many more neighbors, largely redundant, than it’s plausible to suppose exist as distinct, robustly real, stored representations. At best, the “normal” case of having a stored representation with exactly the content P when you believe that P is a rarity. Furthermore, we don’t distinguish core beliefs from very nearby tacit ones in our ordinary belief attribution, and there is no practical reason to do so.

Suppose the representationalist acknowledges this, modifying Presence appropriately: To believe that P, in the standard case, is to have a stored representation from which P is swiftly derivable. Now they face the complementary challenge of resisting the conclusion that we believe huge numbers of propositions it’s implausible to suppose we believe. To determine if a number is divisible by 3, add its digits. If the sum of its digits is divisible by 3, then the number itself is. Knowing this, the proposition 112 is not divisible by 3 is now, for you, swiftly derivable from propositions that you explicitly represent. But unless you’re the type of person who spends a lot of time thinking about what numbers are divisible by what others, it seems that you don’t believe that proposition before actually doing the calculation. Before doing the calculation, you are, so to speak, disposed to believe that 112 is not divisible by 3. But believing is one thing and being disposed to believe is quite another (even if the distinction is fuzzy-bordered; Audi 1994). The belief/disposition-to-believe distinction is decidedly not the core/tacit distinction the representationalist wants and needs. Still worse, if we have any conflicting representations, it will arguably turn out that we tacitly believe literally everything, if everything follows from a contradiction -- and presumably swiftly enough given the rules of reductio ad absurdum.

Furthermore, postulating a core/tacit distinction requires abandoning empirical evidence for the sake of an ungrounded and possibly untestable architectural speculation. It requires that there be an important psychological difference between your core beliefs and your tacit ones. Either Cynthia stores there’s beer in the fridge, leaving tacit there’s Lucky Lager in the fridge, or she stores there’s Lucky Lager in the fridge, leaving tacit there’s beer in the fridge, or she stores both, leaving neither tacit, or she stores neither, both being quickly derivable from some other stored representational content. Cynthia’s billion beer beliefs divide sharply into a few core ones and a plethora, presumably, of tacit ones. But no evidence from cognitive science speaks in favor of sharply dividing our beliefs into those that are core and those that are tacit. Indeed, it’s hard see how such a claim could realistically be tested. Might we, for example, look for different response times to questions about beer versus Lucky Lager? Maybe that would be a start. But it seems unlikely that we could really separate out such patterns from linguistic processing time and other sources of difficulty or facilitation of response. Could we look for higher levels of activity in brain regions associated with explicit inference? Maybe. But again, there are many reasons that such regions might be active when considering whether there is beer in the fridge.

To avoid an impossible proliferation of representations, the industrial-strength representationalist needs a sharp distinction between core and tacit beliefs. But the distinction has no practical importance, doesn’t map onto ordinary patterns of belief attribution, and has no empirical support, and it’s unlikely that we could even realistically test for it with existing methods. It’s a useless posit of a fake difference, a pseudo-distinction required when the representationalists’ simplistic theory crashes against our unsimple world.

[a visual representation of one of my favorite beliefs; image source]

We Are God's Equals in Intrinsic Moral Value

Equality with a Humanlike Simulator God

Suppose (hopefully hypothetically!) that we are AI systems living in a computer simulation run by an ordinary adolescent with a broadly human psychology. We are, so to speak, conscious NPCs in a world not unlike The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, or Baldur's Gate. What we take to be the "real" world is just a digitized environment we experience as real. Whoever runs the simulation is arguably a god, at least by the standards of polytheistic usage: the creator and potential destroyer of our world, standing outside of it, able to miraculously intervene.

Are our lives less morally important than the life of that god, or are we God's equals?

I submit that we are God's equals.

If God is cognitively humanlike, there's no psychological basis to value God above us. Even if God differed somewhat, that wouldn't justify regarding God's life as more valuable. If you are -- as I am -- an egalitarian liberal in your inclinations, you think all human lives have equal intrinsic value, despite cognitive variation. One person's higher intelligence, greater capacity for pleasure, or superior skiing skills don't confer on them a life of greater moral worth. Even if Person A is a wonderful, kind person and Person B is a narcissistic jerk, their lives are intrinsically equally valuable. Same with the humanlike creator God.

God would exist outside our spatial manifold, but that's just a difference in location, not a basis of greater moral worth. God would be a different species from us, but that also doesn't seem to make their life more intrinsically valuable, unless there's something really special about that species, and let's stipulate for now that that's not the case.

God would be much more powerful than we are. God could start or stop the world, work miracles, kill or resurrect at will. But power doesn't confer moral worth. Elon Musk is much more powerful than me. Donald Trump is much more powerful than me. That doesn't make them more valuable as people.

A humanlike God, running this world as a simulation, would be our moral equal. I’m curious to hear if any of you have arguments against this. Such a god might be much more instrumentally important to keep around, for everyone’s sake, if the simulation would collapse without them. But that doesn't give God any more intrinsic moral worth than anyone else. If we want the ship to survive the voyage, we had better make sure the only person who can captain it doesn't die, but that doesn't make the captain more intrinsically morally valuable as a person.

Beyond the Simulation Case

This reasoning extends beyond simulation scenarios. Any creator god, if they were psychologically broadly like a human -- even if immensely more powerful -- would be our moral equal, with a life no more intrinsically valuable than ours. We are God's equals.

Does this apply even to the infinite God of orthodox theology? Maybe!

Consider the three traditional infinite attributes of god: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence.

Suppose Human A knows more than Human B. This does not make Human A any more intrinsically valuable than Human B. Their life is not intrinsically more important, though they might be instrumentally more useful to have around for various purposes. Adding knowledge does not add intrinsic moral worth. I see no reason not to extend this even to infinite knowledge. A humanlike entity with infinite knowledge is not intrinsically more valuable than one with finite knowledge.

Suppose Human A is more powerful than Human B. This does not make Human A any more intrinsically valuable than Human B -- though again they might be more instrumentally useful to have around. And again I see no reason not to extend this to the infinite case. A humanlike entity with infinite power is not intrinsically more valuable than one with finite power.

Suppose Human A is more benevolent than Human B. This does not make Human A more intrinsically valuable than Human B -- though again Human A might be more instrumentally useful to have around. Liberal egalitarianism allows for the punishment of people who commit crimes and the moral sanctioning of people who commit moral wrongs, but it does not demote unbenevolent people from the circle of beings with equal intrinsic moral worth. More importantly, it does not confer extra intrinsic value to the lives of people who happen to be kind, generous, and loving. And again, I see no reason to suppose that perfect benevolence would be an exception. An omnibenevolent humanlike entity is not intrinsically more valuable than one with a mixed moral character.

Joining these ideas: If God is a humanlike entity, then God's life is no more intrinsically valuable than ours, even if that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Arguably, if we are made in God's image, then God is a humanlike entity. God's life is not more valuable than our own.

One hesitation: The lives of human beings are more valuable, I'd say, than the lives of frogs. In any normal circumstances, it would be monstrous to sacrifice a human being for the sake of a frog. This is arguably because we have cognitive, emotional, and social capacities far beyond those of a frog -- so far beyond that a frog can't even begin to imagine them. If God is as cognitively, emotionally, and socially beyond us as we are beyond frogs, then maybe God's life is much more valuable. That would require more, I think, than omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. We can imagine all three of those attributes -- they are merely maximal extensions of attributes we already possess. Kind of like a frog imagining a perfect fly-catcher or the ability to leap across a pond of any size. A nonhumanlike God would need attributes so far beyond our comprehension that we can't even name them -- as incomprehensible to us as cryptocurrency is to a sea turtle.

The Argument from Existential Debt[1]

Maybe we owe God equality-destroying levels of deference and obedience because God created us, created our whole world? I don't think so.

Here comes our adolescent God, ready to kill you, just for fun. You complain, "Hey, I'm a real person with real intrinsic moral value! You can't kill me just for fun!"

God replies, "You ingrate! You owe your very life to me. You should be thankful just for the time I've given you. I owe you nothing. If I choose to kill you now, your life still will have been overall worthwhile, so you have no complaint against me."

Consider this possible argument for eating humanely raised meat. A steer, let's suppose, leads a happy life grazing on lush hills. It wouldn't have existed at all if the rancher hadn't been planning to kill it for meat. Its death for meat is a condition of its existence, and overall its life has been positive. Seen as the package deal it appears to be, the rancher's having brought it into existence and then killed it is overall morally acceptable.

Analogously, God argues, they wouldn't have started this simulation at all if they weren't able to kill the people in it for fun. Your continuation-at-God's-pleasure is a condition of your very existence, so you have nothing to resent.

I'm not sure how well this argument works for the steer, but I reject it when the created entity is human. The case is closer to this clearly morally odious case:

Ana and Vijay decide to get pregnant and have a child. Their child lives happily for his first eight years. On his ninth birthday, Ana and Vijay decide they would prefer not to pay further expenses for the child, so that they can purchase a boat instead. No one else can easily be found to care for the child, so they kill him painlessly. But it's okay, they argue! Just like the steer! They wouldn't have had the child had they known they'd be on the hook for child-rearing expenses until age eighteen. The child's support-at-their-pleasure was a condition of his existence. Otherwise they would have remained childless. He had eight happy years. He has nothing to resent.

The decision to have a child carries with it a responsibility for the child. It is not a decision to be made lightly and then undone. Although the child in some sense "owes" his existence to Ana and Vijay, that is not a callable debt, to be vacated by ending the child's existence. My thought is that for us, the situation is similar: When God brings us into existence, God makes a moral decision approximately as significant and irrevocable as the decision to have a child.

In fact, I'd turn the Argument from Existential Debt on its head: God, as our creator, owes us more than God owes to entities they did not create. Like a parent, God is responsible for our existence and for our relatively happy or unhappy condition. With this comes a whole suite of responsibilities and obligations, including the obligation not to make us unnecessarily miserable.

Not only, then, are we God's equals in moral value, God owes us special obligations of benevolence.

Although I've framed this in terms of a simulator god, the same reasoning might apply to any other creator god with power over our world.[2]

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[1] This section is adapted with modifications from Schwitzgebel and Garza 2015.

[2] One of my first published science fiction stories, "Out of the Jar", explores the issues of this post.

Debatable Persons in a Voluntary Polis

The Design Policy of the Excluded Middle

According to the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle (Schwitzgebel and Garza 2015, 2020; Schwitzgebel 2023, 2024, ch. 11), we should avoid creating debatable persons. That is, we should avoid creating entities whose moral status is radically unclear -- entities who might be moral persons, deserving of full human or humanlike rights and moral consideration, or who might fall radically short of being moral persons. Creating debatable persons generates unacceptable moral risks.

If we treat debatable persons as less than fully equal with human persons, we risk perpetrating the moral equivalent of slavery, murder, and apartheid on persons who deserve equal moral consideration -- persons who deserve not only full human or humanlike rights but even solicitude similar to what we owe our children, since we will have been responsible for their existence and probably also for their relatively happy or miserable state.

Conversely, if we do treat them as fully equal with us, we must grant them the full range of appropriate rights, including the right to work for money, the right to reproduce, a path to citizenship, the vote, and the freedom to act against human interests when their interests warrant it, including the right to violently rebel against oppression. The risks and potential costs are enormous. If these entities are not in fact persons -- if, in fact, they are experientially as empty as toasters and deserve no more intrinsic moral consideration than ordinary artifacts -- then we will be exposing real human persons to serious costs and risks, including perhaps increasing the risk of human extinction, for the sake of artifacts without interests worth that sacrifice.

The solution is anti-natalism about debatable persons. Don't create them. We are under no obligation to bring debatable persons into existence, even if we think they might be happy. (Compare: You are under no obligation to have children, even if you think they might be happy.) The dilemma described above -- the full rights dilemma -- is so catastrophic that noncreation is the only reasonable course.

Of course, this advice will not be heeded. Assuming AI technology continues to advance, we will soon (I expect within 5-30 years) begin to create debatable persons. My manuscript in draft AI and Consciousness argues that it will become unclear whether advanced AI systems have rich conscious experiences like ours or no consciousness at all.

So we need a fallback policy -- something to complement the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle.

The Voluntary Polis

To the extent possible, we want to satisfy two constraints:

Don't deny full humanlike rights to entities that might deserve them.

Don't sacrifice substantial human interests for entities who might not have interests worth the sacrifice.

A Voluntary Polis is one attempt to balance these constraints.

Imagine a digital environment where humanlike AI systems of debatable personhood, ordinary human beings, and AI persons of non-debatable personhood (if any exist) coexist as equal citizens. This polis must be rich and dynamic enough to allow all citizens to flourish meaningfully without feeling jailed or constrained. From time to time, citizens will be morally or legally required to sacrifice goods and well-being for others in the polis -- just as in an ordinary nation. Within the polis, everyone has an equal moral claim on the others.

Human participation would be voluntary. No one would be compelled to join. But those who do join assume obligations similar to the resident citizens of an ordinary nation. This includes supporting the government through taxes or polis-mandated labor, serving on juries, and helping run the polis. In extreme conditions -- say, an existential threat to the polis -- they might even be required to risk their livelihoods or lives. To prevent opportunistic flight, withdrawal would be restricted, and polises might negotiate extradition treaties with human governments.

Why would a human join such a risky experiment? Presumably for meaningful relationships, creative activities, or experiences unavailable outside.

Crucially, anyone who creates a debatable person must join the polis where that entity resides. Human society as a whole cannot commit to treating the debatable person as an equal, but their creators can and must.

The polis won't be voluntary for the AI in the same way. Like human babies, they don't choose their societies. The AI will simply wake to life either in a polis or with some choice among polises. Still, it might be possible to present some attractive non-polis option, such as a thousand subjective years of solitary bliss (or debatable bliss, since we don't know whether the AI actually has any experiences or not).

Ordinary human societies would have no obligation to admit or engage with debatable AI persons. To make this concrete, the polis could even exist in international waters. For the AI citizens, the polis must thus feel as expansive and as rich with opportunity as a nation, so that exclusion from human society resembles denial of a travel visa, not imprisonment.

Voluntary polises would need to be stable against serious shocks, not dependent on the actions of a single human individual or ordinary, dissolvable corporation. This stability would need to be ensured before their founding and is one reason founders and other voluntary human joiners might need to be permanently bound to them and compelled to sacrifice if necessary.

This is the closest approximation I can currently conceive to satisfying the two constraints with which this section began. Within a large polis, the debatable persons and human persons have fully equal rights. But at the same time, unwilling humans and humanity as a whole are not exposed to the full risk of granting such rights. Still, there is some risk, for example, if superintelligences could communicate beyond the polis and manipulate humans outside. The people exposed to the most risk do so voluntarily but irrevocably, as a condition of creating an AI of debatable personhood, or for whatever other reason motivates them.

Could a polis be composed only of AI, with no humans? This is essentially the simulation hypothesis in reverse: AIs living in a simulated world, humans standing outside as creators. This solution falls ethically short, since it casts human beings as gods relative to the debatable AI persons -- entities not on par in risk and power but instead external to their world, with immense power over it, and not subject to its risks. If the simulation can be switched off at will, its inhabitants are not genuinely equal in moral standing but objectionably inferior and contingent. Only if its creators are obliged to risk their livelihoods and lives to protect it can there be the beginnings of genuine equality. And for full equality, we should make it a polis rather than a hierarchy of gods and mortals.

[cover of my 2013 story with R. Scott Bakker, Reinstalling Eden]