To understand what is right and wrong, we must first ask: what do we mean by good and evil?

These terms, while often used interchangeably with moral judgments, are not absolute. They are human concepts—words that carry meaning only through the minds that use them. Their content varies across cultures, languages, and individual perspectives. But this does not make them meaningless. It means they must be understood through the structure of sentient life.

If we seek a foundation deeper than custom or tradition, we must ground good and evil in existence itself. And what we find is this:

Humans are not neutral observers. We are emergent patterns of complexity, sensitive to structure, drawn toward meaning, and defined by sentience. We do not merely survive—we interpret. We suffer and hope. We seek pattern, purpose, and coherence.

And so we come to an insight:

Complexity, when structured, ordered, and generative, is experienced as good.

Entropy, when it disrupts coherence, destroys structure, or leads to the dissolution of being, is experienced as evil.

These are not metaphysical absolutes. Chaos can sometimes serve good. Order can sometimes preserve cruelty. But in general, we associate the ascent of complexity with good, and its dissolution with evil.

This is not arbitrary. It is grounded in our nature as systems of self-sustaining complexity.

We do not define good and evil from the outside—we live them.

To suffer is to experience a kind of chaos—an internal unraveling.

To create, to understand, to connect—these are experiences of order expanding, of complexity flourishing.

Thus, ethics is not grounded in commandments, but pattern recognition.

What sustains sentient complexity, what enables it to grow and relate and endure—that is good.

What reduces it, disintegrates it, or prevents it from arising—that is evil.