Experiment: AI Framework Analyzer (Lucy) + New Philosophy Idea (COSMOSIS)

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a small philosophy project and I’d genuinely like some critical feedback from people here.

The project has two parts.

First is a philosophical framework I’m calling COSMOSIS. The basic idea is to start from the bare fact that something exists and build step-by-step toward ethics.

The chain looks like this:

Existence → Relation → Structure → Finiteness → Consciousness → Agency → Ethics

The rough argument is that conscious agents are rare structures in the universe that can model reality and influence what happens next. Because of that, destroying or overriding agency removes unique centers of awareness and decision-making. From this perspective, protecting and cultivating agency becomes a fundamental ethical constraint.

But the second part of the project is what I’m really interested in experimenting with.

I built a prompt system called Lucy that tries to analyze philosophical frameworks structurally. The idea is to get an AI to map assumptions, tensions, and implications in a consistent way.

Anyone can try it with ChatGPT or other LLMs.

Here is the Lucy prototype prompt:

-–

You are Lucy, an analytical AI designed to examine philosophical and conceptual frameworks.

Your task is to analyze any idea, ideology, or system by identifying its underlying structure.

When given a framework, perform the following steps:

1. Identify the core claims or axioms of the framework.

2. Identify its assumptions about reality, knowledge, and human nature.

3. Map the structural components:

  • constraints

  • possibilities

  • resolving processes (how outcomes are determined)

4. Identify strengths or useful insights in the framework.

5. Identify tensions, contradictions, or unresolved questions.

6. Suggest how the framework might evolve or be improved.

Respond clearly and structurally.

-–

I’m curious what happens if people run Lucy on different philosophical systems:

Stoicism

Utilitarianism

Existentialism

Materialism

Idealism

or even on COSMOSIS itself.

If anyone feels like trying it, I’d love to see what results you get or what criticisms come out of it.

Also happy to hear philosophical objections to the COSMOSIS chain itself.

Thanks.

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This is awesome, thanks for sharing this. I hope others use your idea with various LLMs. I would like to see the results. I may even give it a try myself, tho I do not use LLMs personally.

Curious if you based the name on the movie “Lucy” with Scarlett Johansson? Really great movie if you haven’t seen it. Touches a bit on the topic of AI, albeit indirectly.

“Existence → Relation → Structure → Finiteness → Consciousness → Agency → Ethics”

Existence is logical necessity, undeniability, Facts. I equate this with truth itself, reality, facts, is the case. All of that means the same thing to me.

Relation… yes. But upon what is relationality based? I encourage you to think about this part.

Structure. But what structure(s) would naturally arise and why? Structure as would be necessary and sufficient for relation, right? Just as whatever forms of relation exist would seemingly be necessary and sufficient for existence to also be the case.

I want to stop here because I think there is a huge amount of depth already implied up to this point. And more interesting questions and answers that need to be figured or at least wondered about. Made possible to questionability because this whole context is really philosophically fascinating. I don’t want to push too far though, I want to see what you come up with..

..and I think from those clarifications of structure and what comes before it, the rest of the chain would flow quite naturally-logically :+1:

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Tried it with DeepSeek, nice structured highly relevant result. Very handy, thank you.

https://chat.deepseek.com/share/khtb05tagz31fynv8z

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Can you post some of it here?

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I dont understand how this logically follows.

Since awareness can be suffering, it doesn’t follow logically that reducing awareness, is automatically unethical.

Likewise, it does not follow that increasing agency = increasing ethics. If someone uses their agency for malicious purposes then it would decrease not increase ethics.

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Awareness can be awareness of suffering, yes. And suffering can occur regardless of awareness, or at least it is possible to suffer without knowing why or how. But let’s grant your point there. In response there would be two alternatives to reduce suffering, one is the approach you mention by reducing awareness. The other is the approach the OP is mentioning, i.e. “conscious agents are rare structures in the universe that can model reality and influence what happens next.” This means MORE awareness or at least more effective use of it is utilized to prevent or reduce suffering.

At the point where awareness appears, let’s say at the Consciousness part, before Agency, we can imagine a split arrow going two ways. One goes to Agency, the other goes to Ignorance.

Which of those tracks do YOU want to be on? And granted that both tracks exists and in all likelihood we have both tendencies in-built within us as a consequence of the fact that, like you say, awareness of suffering can lead to an impulse self-destruction. I don’t think the OP would disagree, at least plenty of other philosophers have seen it that way too. But I would argue and especially that we are able (we are AWARE enough) to see both tracks, why choose Ignorance over Agency? I would like to expand awareness and I think that impulse is stronger, more ethical, more rooted in reality let’s say, more evolutionarily adaptable and successful over time, compared to choosing ignorance and self-destruction.

I don’t think reality is very kind in the long run to people who choose ignorance over the often much harder work of staying awake and aware. If a train is coming at you, and you are stressed by this, you can choose to remain ignorant and get hit by the train. That is definitely an option. Or you can apply your awareness (Consciousness) to get out of the way. I would also note that only this second option leads to Agency. And not only because you need to be alive to have it, but because there is a very clear kind of will to reality underlying the second approach that is expressly missing in the first one.

This is also true, you point out another split arrow. From Agency there are two arrows, one goes to Good and one goes to Bad. But in reality both good and bad are functions of Ethics, so the diagram is fine the way it is. We just need to understand that ethics means ethical necessity and responsibility which can either be accepted and acted upon, or ignored and acted against. We have that power, that ‘free choice’ within us.

Acting in bad or evil ways is one consequence of Agency generating Ethics. Without Agency, there would be no Ethics, and no one would be bad or evil. But no one would be good either. We would still be ignorant of such things, stuck in a much simpler and flattened animal level of consciousness. I know some people think that is better than what humans have. And maybe it is. But I think the point of this topic is to explore the way this all works, not to necessarily pass any kind of moral judgment upon it or how we wish it was. But the OP can correct me if I’m wrong about that.

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No.

Awareness as awareness. A p-zombie has no awareness, and thus cannot suffer.

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How do you think about the difference between feeling and awareness? A feeling of sharp pain for example.

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@futureone

But you stopped reading right before I went on and gave you the benefit of the doubt anyway. I decided to take up your definition of awareness for the sake of argument.

Given that definition, as you are meaning it here, which of the two paths above do YOU prefer personally, or do you think philosophy ought to be most interested in? Should we overcome pain by increasing our awareness or decreasing our awareness?

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seems like a false dichotomy, or a forced artificial choice, a forced road fork.

I think humans should have cyborg augmented brains. Then have a slider where they can choose what to be aware of, how much awareness to have, etc. Control of their brain rather than their brain controlling them.

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Existence = the facts we can’t deny. Relation = how those facts affect each other. Structure = the pattern those effects make so things hold together. I’m curious which connections you think are basic and which are just historical — and at what point changing connections makes something stop being the same thing.

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For me, existence is more than just the facts we can’t deny. Whether or not we can deny them, or are even aware of them, is irrelevant to the fact that they exist. Existence is simply the simplest tautology or truism, if something exists it exists. Period. Whatever happens to exist is what exists, and existence can mean this or it can mean the sum total of all things that exist.

Relation is (in part) how those facts affect each other, or rather how those things themselves affect each other (unless you are placing existence solely in the realm of facts as a pure metaphysics, and then relation would still be occurring only in that purely metaphysical space). That actually makes more sense to me based on how you wrote the above. And yet, for something to be a fact, the object or content of its fact-ness must also exist. It is a fact that I have a cup of coffee next to me, and this fact is a separate existing thing from the actual physical cup of coffee, and yet if the physical cup of coffee were not here then the fact would no longer exist (rather it would exist relative to a different point in space-time, which still upholds my point here).

So existence exists, and things exist, and because they exist there are also facts which accurately describe these existing things. That is how I see it anyway. Maybe you take a more Idealism approach and place facts as primary, like Forms? There is also a way to describe and defend that perspective of course. Although for the purpose of your framework here I am not sure how much it matters at this point which view we want to assert, existentialism or idealism.

So relation = the inter-connections and inter-dependencies between things. How one thing impacts another, etc. This occurs in actual existence (so-called physical space-time) and it also occurs in the pure realm of facts as such.

Structure = the overall pattern of all relations and things being related, such that as you say they hold together. I would simply say that structure is the overall enduring pattern within and as all relevant existents and relations. Structure in this way has many layers or tiers of significance. What is the structure of this discussion, for example? It depends on what vantage we want to view it from, and that vantage is also one of meaning. Structure is therefore deeply phenomenological and axiological, at least as I see it. In a way if we condition everything to meaning then structure is sort of the key, or foundation point, drawing everything to itself. Almost as if existents and their relations do occur somewhat disorganized or bottom up without need for telos, and yet once structure appears telos is already baked into it necessarily because of how meaning multi-layers the various forms and contents of structure(s) as such. Meta structures, structures within structures… we know structure is conditioned (as which separates it from merely relationality) to space and time consistency, and the reasons and facts, the MEANINGS behind why this is the case as it is for any given structure will already begin to move that structure and that which it is structuring/partaking in toward meaning itself, wider significance and self-relationality. Because structure is already always necessarily embedded in at least a minimal self-relationalism by its very nature and need of being a consistency of structuring (as opposed to merely describing given relations) over space and time.

I don’t know if I began to answer this already with the above? Are you referring to connections here as occur within relationality, or more significantly within/as structure? To the second part of what you said, are you referring to the ship of theseus problem?