I’m either right or delusional and why I’m ok with either one.

Something snapped into place this week.

I don’t know if it’s new in the grand scheme of things. It might not be.

But I worked through it from scratch, it holds under pressure, and I haven’t seen it expressed quite like this, especially not in the circles I move through.

Most probably assume it’s LLM coded slop. Nope. It’s just me. And it’s admittedly surface level because it’s at the idea stage. That’s actually normal, from what I hear. It’s not an academic paper. Yet.

I’m playing around with a framework called IWRS. Increase Wellbeing, Reduce Suffering. (While also managing a diff thread about free will and the problem with Compatibilist semantics.)

IWRS starts from phenomenology: experience exists, valence is real, suffering is bad for the one experiencing it, and empathy makes that suffering matter across minds.

When empathy is active and coherence is online, a kind of directional “ought” shows up. Not a cosmic rule, but a “structural pull.”

I’m getting used to condensing this, I’ve written three versions now, each time delving deeper and clearer.

The novel break came when I realized Step 5, which entails empathy, has been sort of the unpredictable bottleneck. Not everyone feels it, not all minds bridge others’ pain, and that’s fine, but when they don’t, IWRS doesn’t fire.

So I stopped treating it (step 5) like a philosophical problem and started treating it like an engineering one. I don’t think empathy is sacred or magic. It’s consummately tweakable. (I assume?)

Thing is: once you say THAT out loud, a ton of stagnant moral debate starts to clear. From there, lo and behold, something deeper fell into view: A PATTERN across multiple stuck domains, like free will, desert, moral realism, is/ought.

I spotted something cool to me: the same move kept resolving all kinds of perennially unsolvable shit we assume to be dead-issues.

There’s a phrase—“worth wanting”—that has been hiding in plain sight. Dennett used it to defend compatibilist “free will” as the only kind worth wanting. Brilliant line, but I sorta wondered where the hell he got off telling us what “matters.”

Who appointed him the arbiter of what’s worth wanting? Doesn’t the clearheaded and informed majority get to decide what’s intuitively worth what?

And sure enough, once you look for proof of majority values held, Dennett’s line turned on him.

That line becomes a test. And when you run it honestly, compatibilist moral deservedness language folds. IWRS doesn’t.

So this week I didn’t just propose a moral framework in its own right. I also feel like I found a method, a way of resolving stuck philosophy by tracking majority intuition under controlled clarity, and by looking at parsimony.

I’ve now used it to solve two of the biggest ethical gridlocks we’ve got. I think it might work on more.

This is me planting a flag. Not declaring I’m right, just saying I worked it through, I found something that clicks for me, and I’m going to keep testing it in days to come.

Lila tov.