Doug,

Maybe computers can teach us something about life's complexities.

Ethics and morality are all about what is good and what is bad, yet good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience.

All the higher order social constructs; love, honor, trust, respect, responsibility, humility, as well as the negatives, evolved as necessary functions of our exeedingly complex organic and social structures.

So when we assume good to be aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts do become a race to the bottom, as all nuance and subjectivity becomes suspect. Rather than using such opportunities to grow further.

Trying to understand how we have come to be what we are, based on our own desires and ideals, is like assuming we understand computer programming, by playing video games.

Logically a spiritual absolute is the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the details of which we are aware.

This father figure lawgiver is a useful social contruct, for instilling a constantly regenerating population with respect for authority, but conflating the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental, does lead to the assumption of an absolutist monoculture, where the Other is an affront to one's own True God.

We have a mind to think, not just follow the herd.

Our tools do make effective metaphors, we just have to keep them as tools and not make them gods.

Like with Capitalism, when the medium becomes the message, you've lost sight of the process and the feedback, as you assume some goal and god.

The earth is round, not flat. Computers retain the whole loop, not just run along the path.