The Fourth World

Is consciousness the last moral world?

Imagine trying to explain to a virus why suffering matters.

A virus is a simple self-replicating molecule: unsophisticated and arguably not even alive. It has no experience. It just copies itself according to chemical laws. From its “perspective” (it doesn’t have one), the universe is just physics: particles following rules. If you could somehow tell it that certain arrangements of matter are good and others are bad, it wouldn’t disagree with you. It does not have the concepts to agree or disagree. Might as well ask a stone what it thinks of war.

Are we that virus, relative to what the future could hold?

Photo by Kiril Dobrev on Unsplash

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I. The Three Worlds

Today I want to discuss the possibility of further moral goods: further axes of moral value as yet inaccessible to us, that are qualitatively not just quantitatively different from anything we’ve observed to date.

For background, I think normal, secular humans navigate three conceptually distinct but overlapping worlds:

1. The physical world. Matter, energy, atoms, stars, cells. If you were a detached observer of our universe, you might think this is all there is.

2. The mathematical world. Logic, abstract structure, rationality, natural laws. Even strict materialists can see how this is conceptually different from the physical world. Mathematical truths seem importantly distinct from, and in some sense deeper than just observations of the physical world. Some Kantians try to likewise ground morality entirely within this world, in the logic of cooperation, game theory, and strategic interaction.

3. The world of consciousness. Subjective experience. What it feels like to see red, to be in pain, to love someone. This is where most moral philosophers think the real action is. A pure hedonic utilitarian might think conscious experience is the only thing that matters, but even other moral philosophies would consider conscious experience extremely important. And it does seem almost self-evident: conscious suffering matters deeply in a way that the scattering of stones does not, no matter how striking the scattering.

If you slowly learned each one of these worlds¹ in order, every new world would be a huge surprise that reframed everything before it. If you were only aware of the physical atoms and matter, seeing the deep meaning of mathematics would be a huge shock. Mathematics doesn’t predict that subjective experience should exist, let alone that it should be the primary locus of moral value. Each new world didn’t just add more stuff, or more intense versions of the same stuff. Instead, it added a qualitatively different kind of stuff, and retroactively made the previous world seem like an impoverished position to ground your ethics.

Trying to derive all of morality from physics alone – say, if someone is crazy enough to derive an entirely ethical philosophy and ideological movement based on maximizing entropy — would strike most people as deeply confused.

It’s not so much a technical error as missing entire dimensions of what matters.

Likewise, most robots in science fiction, and likely present-day LLMs, live entirely in the first two worlds. Consider a robot building ethics purely out of rationality, or Claude 4.6 or Gemini 3.1 trying to ground ethics solely in decision-theoretic terms. To most people, this approach still seems to be missing the thing that makes morality actually matter.

But are these the only 3 worlds? Is consciousness the last world?

Or could there be a fourth, fifth, or sixth world: sources of moral value as far beyond conscious experience as consciousness is beyond mere physics?

II. Pinpointing the Ineffable

This probably sounds too abstract. Let’s try to make it more concrete.

Note that every transition between worlds has looked, from below, like something between impossible and incoherent. A universe of pure physics doesn’t hint at consciousness. An intelligent non-conscious alien, raised in a civilization of intelligent non-conscious aliens, would see no reason to posit subjective experience and would likely dismiss anyone who did. The jump from “particles following laws” to “there is something it is like to be me” would be completely radical and unexpected.

And yet it happened. We’re conscious (I think!). So radical incomprehension should not by itself preclude the possibility of further worlds.

So what might a further world look like?

Now of course, there’s an ancient answer for what the fourth world might be:

The supernatural world. The world of spirits, Gods, heavens and hells. Religious traditions often claim that divine or transcendent value is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, superior to natural goods. Saying that “heaven is infinite bliss” is a secular/materialist approximation of something purportedly much deeper.²

Now, I personally think the religious answer is wrong about the world as it actually is. But I think notions like the sublime captures a deeper intuition: the space of possible value might be way broader than what we currently have access to.

III. Reasons for optimism

There are at least three different concrete reasons for believing new worlds of value might become accessible in the future:

The first is the inductive argument. Go back far enough in Earth’s past, and there was neither intelligence nor conscious awareness. Since then, millions of years of evolution led Earth’s lifeforms to both consciousness and awareness of the universe’s mathematical structure³. Why should we believe this is the last stop there is?

The second reason concerns the structure of new (and potentially radically different) minds. Most people believe that humans have conscious experiences that (current) otherwise intelligent AIs do not. Similarly, it seems at least plausible that sufficiently different mental architectures could access moral goods that human minds cannot experience or perhaps even conceive. Minds radically different from our own might be capable of qualitatively distinct moral goods beyond our current imagination.

The third reason is an argument from the ability to search for more, and perhaps the willingness. If humanity and/or our descendants survive long enough, it will at some point become trivial to dedicate more cognitive effort than the entire history of human philosophy and science combined to questions like “are there other sources of moral value, and how can we access them?” This search could explore exotic arrangements of matter, novel structures of minds optimized for value, or something else entirely. The search space is very large, and we have explored almost none of it.

In philosophy, Nick Bostrom captured something close to this in his “Letter from Utopia“: What I feel is as far beyond feelings as what I think is beyond thoughts. And in science fiction, Iain M. Banks imagined civilizations “Subliming”: transcending to a state where the very concepts of good and fairness ceased to apply, replaced by something the remaining spacefaring civilizations couldn’t comprehend.

IV. Implications and Future Work

Why does this all matter, beyond just an interesting intellectual note?

If further moral goods exist, it means all of humanity’s moral philosophy is radically incomplete. Every framework, every carefully reasoned ethical theory, is missing something key. Not wrong, exactly, but like studying war without game theory, or biological/evolutionary dynamics without genetics.

This should make us simultaneously more humble and more ambitious. More humble, because the thing we think matters most in the universe, like the happiest moments in our lives, the alleviation of extreme suffering, justice and fairness, the richness of experience, the unicorns and chocolates, might be a subset, even a small subset, of what actually matters. More ambitious, because it means the future isn’t just much more of what’s currently good, or more intense varieties of what we could currently experience. It could be qualitatively better in ways we cannot yet name.

The biggest practical upshot might be that we should focus more on avoiding extinction or other permanently catastrophic outcomes, especially from AI. See my earlier article here:

And on the positive side, we should work towards making a radically positive future for ourselves and our descendants, or at the very least, leave room open for futures we don’t yet know how to want.

Some questions and trailheads for future work:

1. Can we estimate how likely further moral goods are? I’ll be honest: I don’t have a good grasp of how likely any of this is. Estimating probabilities here feels beyond either my forecasting or my philosophical ken.

   1. But I think it’s likely enough, and strange enough, to be worth taking seriously. “This is all there is” has a poor track record across the history of human understanding.

   2. On the other hand, just because this is out of the range of my abilities (or easy access), it doesn’t mean it’s outside the range of yours! Perhaps you can succeed where I’m stuck.

2. Downside risks. Are there significant downside risks of we or our descendants falsely believing there are further moral goods? If there is nothing more “out there” beyond consciousness, would our children mistakenly risk building cathedrals to nothing, or making large sacrifices to false gods?

   1. Like what Bostrom calls a Disneyland with no children (a intelligent, highly technologically advanced, civilization, brimming with science and industrial capacity, without any conscious observers), but far weirder.

   2. Seems unlikely right now to me that our descendants will be so misguided, but not impossible!

3. In general, how can we “map the unknown?” I’m interested in a new research paradigm I sometimes call “non-constructive epistemology,” or more poetically “mapping the unknown.” Akin to non-constructive methods in mathematics, I’m interested in studying the structure of what we don’t know, via methods like induction, impossibility proofs, structural analogues, etc. I’d be very excited to make more progress in this area, and/or see other people take up this mantle.

   1. See Daniel Munoz’s post on epistemic fly-bottles, and also my earlier posts here and here.

   2. An analogy that might help is exploring a new land. Most of our current methods look like directly extending the research frontier by either

      1. a) taking what we know and looking a little further (like a explorer venturing out a bit further from known lands)

      2. b) via imagination, posit a hypothesis for what’s out there and then actively try to find it (like an explorer exploring far via following a hunch for where gold mines might lie)

   3. I’m positing understanding the unknown indirectly, via more structural bounds (eg look at the bird migratory patterns and deduce things about the geography, notice wave refraction patterns that only make sense if there’s land beyond the horizon)

   4. This post is an early instantiation of mapping the unknown. Keen to see if readers are interested in this approach and/or want to see more ideas!

   

   A navigational chart from the Marshall Islands, on display at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Polynesians used them to study wave refraction patterns around islands you can't see, a literal map of invisible things. Photo by Jim Heaphy.

I started this post by asking whether we might be like a virus trying to understand suffering: not wrong about our world, but missing entire dimensions of what matters.

I don’t know if that’s true. But I noticed that at every previous stage, the answer was yes. Physics was real but incomplete. Mathematics was real but incomplete⁴.

So if consciousness is also real but incomplete, if there’s a fourth world, or a fifth, or a twentieth, then the future isn’t just bigger than we think. It’s better in ways we don’t have words for yet.

The appropriate response to that possibility, I think, is not to try to build the fourth world today. It’s to make sure we survive and thrive long enough to find out if it’s there.

1. For the purposes of this post, I’m not that interested in the difference between whether these worlds are truly different or just conceptually interesting ways to talk about things (ie I’m not positing a strong position on mathematical platonism or consciousness dualism)

2. When a mystic says heaven matters more than earthly happiness, they don’t mean “it’s happiness but more of it.” They are talking about something qualitatively different, rather than just more happiness, or a greater intensity. Other ways to gesture at this include the ineffable, the sublime, etc.

3. In our world, consciousness of course arose in animals before we had beings that have a deep understanding of math. This chronological order makes my analogy less elegant but doesn’t meaningfully damage my argument, I think.

4. And within the moral worlds that we are familiar with, our initial gropings often tend to be importantly mistaken (our ancestors were wrong on slavery, on women’s rights, on animal suffering etc).