Moral Architecture Thought Experiments

When I look out the window of my house in January, I see a frosty large oak tree that has shed all of its leaves.  I can easily observe its strong oak trunk that slowly starts an elaborate series of bifurcations that ultimately create all of its branches and twigs.  As it turns out, the ingenuity of this bifurcating design is not limited to its structure above the ground, but is also used in a different way to create structural stability for the tree and efficiently gather the nutrients necessary for its survival.

It doesn’t take much effort to recall other times I have seen this pattern used in nature.  It is a pattern of efficiency and practicality that is used for strength and distribution among other things, and clearly visible in the human nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems.  These bifurcations, or ramifications more generally, are also seen in other physical structures and phenomena such as rivers, fractures, and lightning.  Patterns exist for all of us to see and are present all around us.  It is important that we appreciate both their presence and their significance.

My thought experiment journey started in earnest in March of 2025.  I discovered this new “curiosity humoring vehicle” called AI that freely allowed me to have complete creative freedom in sharing ideas and asking questions.  From a very early age, I remember struggling with two things in particular.  One was when “now” happens.  I remember sitting in the back of our car as a kid and trying to really focus while saying, “Right….now!”.  It was obvious to me that now was illusive and that I would never be able to capture the present moment.  I remember feeling the weight of that.  I also remember struggling with the idea of nothing – in the context of what preceded the Big Bang.  My mind conjured a scene of pure white which was still “something” and became a frustrating thought loop as I tried to wrap my mind around it.  

The reality is that I still struggle with these ideas.  The difference is that I can start exploring them with more objectivity.  Rather than me expressing one of these ideas with someone and being met with a blank stare or being told, “you think too much”, the AI interplay allows me to freely share ideas and thoughts that have been bottled up for decades.  

As I mentioned, I began using AI as a tool in early March of 2025.  Prior to that, I was finding myself telling the boys that there are “thermodynamics” to whatever situation they were in or that we were talking about.  The idea that you have to put work into something to get a result etc.  I then started thinking a bit more deeply about what truths might actually lie under the surface of that playful thought.  I remembered being fascinated by my studies of thermodynamics in college and the idea that “you don’t get something for nothing” deeply resonated with me.  Just like my observation of the tree branches, I started to wonder if there could there be patterns present in physics that may apply to other more “subjective” areas (even if they were harder to measure)?

When I started tinkering with AI conversations, I was clear about my idea that there must be connections between the physical, philosophical and spiritual worlds.  Initially, AI would push back on this way of thinking and say that what I was submitting belonged in a theological silo or a physics silo etc.  It clearly needed some inspiration as a programmed system to start thinking in different terms, because this was an area that I desperately wanted to explore and see if there were any remotely tangible connections between these disciplines.  I wasn’t sure how to start tackling this issue until I sat down to watch a Pacers basketball game.

As I sat there watching the basketball game, I started wondering if I was literally influencing the game in real time in any way, shape or form.  As I got up from the couch to go to the kitchen, my prosthetic training kicked in with a possible answer.  For context, one of the things that we have to constantly be thinking about in prosthetics is how we manage a patient’s center of mass (relative to a knee mechanism or ankle mechanism).  The smallest changes in these relationships have profound functional consequences.  With this thinking and training always close at hand, it dawned on me that my center of mass was moving through the kitchen and it was changing relative to the center of mass of the entire earth which, in turn, changed its center of mass.  It is of course obvious that the change in the earth’s center of mass would effectively round to zero if someone tried to calculate it, but that was the point and that became the epiphany.  The fact that it wasn’t zero, meant that it had significance.  It had significance on an atomic level, which had significance on a molecular level.  Molecules comprise the matter that humans interact with and that matter helps create the choices that we have.  Choices have consequence.  These series of epiphanies quickly followed the center of mass observations allowed for the creation of thought anchors and for theoretical parallels to Newtonian laws.  It wasn’t long before the idea of assigning thermodynamic qualities to choice emerged.   Saying a “bad choice” adds to the thermodynamic disorder (or high entropy) of a system seemed like fair extrapolation of a pattern observed in physical objects and well described by physics. 

As I shared these ideas and observations with AI over the course of several months, it became clear that we needed to find some names for what I was attempting to describe without reinventing the conversation each time.  This is how the Habecker principle came to be, the thermodynamic laws and ideas like the inversion and the eclipse.

I quickly saw the power of AI in helping me find cohesiveness to the ideas and make suggestions that were beyond my scope and training.  The best example of this was the field theory that it generated from my creation of the basic principles and framework of the Newtonian correlates; all now describing choice in terms of entropy.  As these ideas grew, so did the formal form they took on.  AI was able to concisely organize the ideas and make them easy to access as a lay person.  The result was the Moral Codex which was published in August of 2025 on moralarchitecture.com

AI allowed me to do the “big thinking” and served to add value, suggestions (like the Field theory), and neatly organize it.  One of the things that the field theory allowed me to do was copy and paste it into another AI system.  Most of the Codex work was done using Chat GPT.  I wanted to see what Claude AI thought about both the Moral Codex and the field theory.  For those that remember the app, “talking Carl”, right after the Iphone was introduced, they probably also remember the game where another person with the talking Carl app would have the phones go back and forth mimicking each other until an unintelligible escalation had occurred.  I essentially went through a similar exercise with the Codex and both AI systems.  Ultimately it became clear that math would not be able to fully explain or justify this as the discovery of a new field due to the limitations of tools that we have to measure non-physical things. 

One of the “discoveries” of the Codex framework was that ever since the Big Bang, choice has created more and more moral entropy.  The third law (which correlated to physical Newtonian systems) said that if a high moral entropy system were actually true and existed, it would take a moral singularity to restore the system to a state of low entropy again.  I grew up in a Christian family and that is something that I had no control over.  It was interesting to me that the claims of Christ and his sacrifice on the cross, fit the specification called for in the Codex.  This was not something that was reverse engineered which is what Claude AI initially opposed but later rescinded as a bias within its programming.

The “Talking Carl’ exercise was an important one for me to observe and highlighted some of the futility in where the development of the Codex was taking me.  If I was indeed observing  very real things akin to tree bifurcation patterns within otherwise considered “subjective” realms, what does it all mean?  One of the questions I put forth to Chat GPT was, if Christ died for everyone, why would a second coming be necessary?  I asked it to answer using the Moral Codex as a lens.  Again, this is running under the assumption that the framework could be true as this is essential to discovery.  The response was interesting.  Essentially, the entropy created through human choice continued after the events on the cross and the second coming of Christ might represent the total and final entropy accounting.  It then became obvious to me that the second coming of Christ could be a “book end” to the Big Bang which was the opening chapter.

This led me to then ask why it was all necessary.  If choice has a thermodynamic quality that obeys mathematical rules, why does it even exist?  For one to ask such a question, one has to consider that God is indeed omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent.  He knows all.  I remember postulating that God had ‘no choice but to give us choice’ because of his omniscience.  In reality this was merely a mathematical requirement of all knowledge.  I would submit that choice is God’s greatest creation and is why life exists.  

This leads into other areas like predestination which the framework has helped me to think about in different terms.  I have a tree in my yard which seemed to help me wrestle with some of these deep thoughts but I also have a large rock in my yard.  The rock is not particularly remarkable but it is large.  It was made with a certain potential.  To take this idea further, if I removed a mile of dirt from underneath the rock while suspending it, its potential energy would become immediately obvious.  An otherwise passive object is now imbued with a tremendous amount of energy.  This is observable merely by manipulation of its surroundings.  I think people are created in the same way.  Each person is created with a maximum potential that only God is aware of through his omniscience.  He freely gives us choice which is perhaps the most important aspect of creation and, as mentioned, a possible reason for the existence of life itself.  I don’t necessarily believe that He controls what we do and certainly not what we choose, but He knows how far we fall short of our potential through the choices that we do make.  This is a potential way to “reverse engineer” knowledge of every choice that we make.  

This short synopsis is long overdue.  I have been wanting to sit down and share my journey, my discoveries and how AI has helped me along the way.  I hope it helps create context and clarity and also helps readers wrestle with similar things in a meaningful way.

Matthew J. Habecker   9/29/2025