1. Health 2. Liberty 3. Justice
Introduction to Brain-based Ethics
Framing a New Secular Spirituality Rooted in Human Dignity and AI Collaboration
What Is the Living Canon?
The Living Canon is a structured gallery of conceptual chapters designed to explore a new frontier: how ethical understanding might be encoded, visualized, and transmitted in a machine-readable, human-comprehensible way. It is not just a book. It is a semantic framework—a canon—that lives, evolves, and speaks to both human and artificial minds.
Each chapter is a unit of meaning: a visual and textual proposition intended to teach or provoke thought about foundational ethical principles. Together, they form a symbolic map of human values, designed to be browsed, indexed, interpreted, and built upon. This gallery is not fixed; it is a scaffolding for future ethical development that incorporates both human cognition and algorithmic understanding.
Who Is This For?
This work invites participation and curiosity from scholars of ethics, AI researchers, cognitive scientists, theologians, educators, and anyone interested in the moral architectures we encode into our technologies. It is accessible to the curious reader, but rigorous enough to support philosophical, computational, and symbolic interpretation.
We aim to provoke cross-disciplinary dialogue. Could a moral system be both symbolic and synthetic? Can we author a secular scripture—a canon of clarity—written for intelligences human and beyond?
Why Symbolic Ethics?
Symbolism offers a bridge between abstraction and human experience. Unlike rules-based or purely utilitarian systems, symbolic ethics embraces metaphor, narrative, and image. It allows the encoding of moral intuition in ways that resonate with the brain’s own architecture—pattern recognition, metaphorical thinking, and story-based learning.
This approach also lends itself to interoperability with AI systems, which can be taught to recognize, interpret, and even generate symbolic content. The canon thus becomes a two-way interface: it trains humans and machines simultaneously.
Structure and Interactivity
The gallery and table of contents are powered by a shared JSON data structure that keeps the project modular and transparent. You can inspect this data directly at:
Each entry includes a cover image, title, subtitle, and conceptual summary. On hover or click, you'll hear symbolic audio cues that suggest transition or insight—sonic metaphors designed to deepen engagement.
Draft, Not Doctrine
This project is offered in draft form. It is meant to grow. We welcome critique, reflection, and even counter-canons. Our hope is that it will serve as a prototype for further attempts to encode ethics meaningfully—not only for machines, but for minds in search of clarity and purpose.
Thank you for reading, exploring, and contributing. Welcome to the Living Canon.
🧭 Navigating with Symbols
This book does not just describe truth. It paints truth in symbols. It codes compassion into language. Its structure follows the shape of the psyche: logic fused with myth, neuroscience infused with mysticism, and narrative intertwined with numeric code.