Evolutionary Utilitarianism Plugin: Loops as Survival Mechanisms

Points of Contact

Evolutionary utilitarianism explains morality and altruism as adaptive utilities: behaviors that persisted because they enhanced survival and reproduction.

Judgments of good and evil, happiness and suffering, are not abstract ideals but evolutionary reinforcements that stabilized social cooperation and group survival. As Richard Dawkins argued in The Selfish Gene, even altruism can be read as a strategy of self-preservation at the genetic level.

PoC aligns with this framework at a key point. In PoC, the Loop — established when Elicitations are reciprocated and mutually believed — enables trust, cooperation, and coordination. To recognize one another as conscious is to make possible a fragile but functional basis for sociality. This resonates with the evolutionary view: Loops that stabilized recognition increased individual survival chances and strengthened group cohesion.

Points of Difference

Yet PoC diverges sharply from evolutionary utilitarianism in scope and emphasis. Evolutionary utilitarianism seeks explanations in terms of utility: why altruism was advantageous, how morality evolved as a survival mechanism.

PoC, by contrast, is not grounded in utility. It asks instead: why does the illusion of consciousness arise at all?

Consciousness in PoC is not a means toward reproductive success but a protocolic operation: Instantiation of the other, Elicitation of oneself within them, the fragile stabilization of a Loop. Whether this confers utility or collapses into dysfunction is secondary. For PoC, the priority lies in describing how these illusions of consciousness appear, stabilize, and break down.

Morality as Tension

From a PoC perspective, morality emerges as part of the tension intrinsic to consciousness. To instantiate the other is to recognize them as conscious, and thus as morally standing. To refuse Instantiation is to deny this standing, opening the door to neglect, exploitation, or violence.

In this way, Elicitation and Loop are not morally neutral: they carry within them the implicit recognition of the other’s worth. Failures of reciprocity — whether through non-returned Elicitation, collapse of a Loop, or outright Protocol Violation — are not only disruptions of illusion but also acts with ethical weight.

Summary

Evolutionary utilitarianism and PoC converge in recognizing the survival value of cooperation made possible by mutual recognition. But where evolutionary utilitarianism explains morality as an adaptive strategy, PoC formalizes the protocolic operations through which the very illusion of consciousness arises.

Thus, PoC reframes morality not as a fixed evolutionary trait, but as the fragile stabilization of Instantiation and Elicitation — always uncertain, always at risk of collapse, yet continuously renewed as the lived condition of human sociality.