The Fundamentals of Cogitism: Grounding Ethics in the Nature of Consciousness

Cogitism is my personal moral framework, developed and refined in my free time, and it is the main mechanism by which I've been approaching philosophical and moral questions over the last six months as of posting this essay. It is my belief that the concepts laid out here provide a solid foundation for approaching any moral or ethical question from first principles, up to and including some of the most difficult questions of our time.I am crossposting this to Less Wrong to get more eyeballs on it, essentially throwing it to the wolves to see if it survives. While I'm aware of similarities with other rational moral frameworks, I believe that Cogitism is distinct in grounding value in the nature of consciousness itself rather than in preferences, utility, or consequences.A Brief Clarification on AI InvolvementPeople often care very deeply that the involvement of AI in the production of a work is stated upfront, myself included, because the extent of AI involvement in a project and what shape that involvement takes provides useful context for its legitimacy. As a result I feel it is important to disclose and contextualize the involvement of such tools in this work as early as possible.Over the period where I developed these ideas, much of that development took place in chats with LLMs (Claude, most often), which I used as a sounding board for my ideas. In these chats I gave these models explicit instructions to check my work and reel me in whenever it thought it saw a flaw in my reasoning. A lot of the time it's wrong in the analysis, and a lot of the time that's because it doesn't understand what I mean, but *explaining why* to the machine and *getting it to understand* tends to help me think through the problem more clearly than I could otherwise.The ideas, words, and phrasing in these essays are my own; I am writing this after having solidified and used these ideas privately for half a year. AI models did not write any of this for me. In short, LLMs only had a hand i