Aristotle seems to have predicted the functional aspect of the metamind with his ethical system centered around the golden mean. The golden mean is used in many ethical frameworks but generally works the same in all of them. It’s the tendency of moral agents to have a moderate response.
The golden mean is really just an averaging system. Pulling from the whole of your personal context and experience and choosing a path in the center not the extremes of deficiency or excess. The very process of describing a mean is a likelihood based on context. Or in other words a probability. The metamind (or conscience) is actually a probability engine for discerning the expected value based on the compound (mandatory) emotional state felt when the rational side of a dilemma is considered. The main attribute that is missing is in the time attribute limit or the ability to expand or shrink the scope of emotional context by duration. This seems to indicate psychopathy’s most visible symptom, the inability to group risk by time. Long term risk management suffering the most, as decisions all seem to benefit now at the expense of later.
This is where his system starts to fall apart. Aristotle did have the concept of mentally ill or deficient, but worked on the principle that it was curable. He does not consider that there may be two separate high functioning sets of behaviour displayed by superficially identical human beings. The first processing the ability to discern the mean(risk) in a flash of insight, and the second that each moral choice was a major struggle. This resulted in the real world failures of modern day moral relativism. Where in the worst case the mean is reached only after the abhorrent behaviour is normalized and the scope is tweaked to provide the desired results by an outside influence. Such as proto-psychopaths, non psychopaths who have been influenced over time to negate their ability to perform moral calculations. The conscience is there, but captured and temporarily but actively neutralized by outside forces.
Interestingly he discusses a political philosophy very similar to Civgene’s own Distribution Party. The politics of distribution of equity might be mistaken for a precursor to communism at a glance, but clearly were meant to be taken in the context of struggle of each conscionable human has to accumulate what he would call virtues. He calls for monetary equality, but it should be taken as above as opportunity to pursue happiness via virtues or to become virtuous. Complaining about the monetary motivation of oligarchy, it is as if he commenting on the inverse totalitarianism of today. Taking control of federal equity from the corporations, who are incapable of virtue, and returning them to states or lower, at least who’s components, the citizens, are capable of ongoing, time scope sensible, risk assessment or as he would say, the pursuit of virtue or happiness. He might list in it’s positive aspects, the abilities of equipped happiness perusing citizens in generating sensible natural law for practical, long term, context sensitive equity distribution.
This is just scratching the surface of his work and it’s similar insights. His influence is vast and works many. Many others have expounded and further developed these ideas since his time. But it seems to be he was the very first to identify just how what we typically call the conscience works. Bouncing between psychology (generating rational copies of both individuals and society’s emotional maps) and the structure by which such maps are generated, meta-psychology.
