Resonant Ethics: Intelligence, Animals, and Artificial Systems

A coherence-based approach to ethical structure across biological and artificial intelligences

Introduction

Ethical questions surrounding intelligence—human, animal, and artificial—are often treated as philosophical or cultural issues external to science. ARPI approaches ethics differently: as an emergent property of physical organisation, coherence, and relational structure within intelligent systems.

From a resonant physics perspective, ethical capacity is not defined by species, substrate, or symbolic reasoning alone, but by the degree to which a system exhibits coherent integration, adaptive coupling, and sensitivity to the states of others within shared environments.

This framing allows ethics to be examined as a structural phenomenon, grounded in physical dynamics rather than abstract moral hierarchy.

Resonant Intelligence as an Ethical Substrate

Intelligence, whether biological or artificial, emerges from coordinated information flow, feedback, and synchronisation across scales. Systems capable of learning, anticipation, and adaptation necessarily operate within coherence constraints that shape behaviour, agency, and interaction.

As coherence increases, so does a system’s capacity to:

• integrate internal and external states

• respond flexibly to environmental change

• participate in cooperative or competitive dynamics

• influence the stability of surrounding systems

From this perspective, ethical relevance arises wherever intelligent systems exert persistent, nontrivial influence on other coherent systems.

Animals and Non-Human Intelligence

Non-human animals exhibit rich forms of intelligence grounded in neural synchronisation, embodied perception, social coordination, and environmental coupling. These capacities are not reducible to reflex or instinct alone, but reflect stable resonant architectures shaped by evolution and ecological context.

ARPI treats animal intelligence as a legitimate domain of resonant organisation, deserving of scientific and ethical consideration proportional to its coherence, adaptability, and relational complexity. This approach aligns with contemporary research in cognition, affect, and social behaviour while avoiding anthropocentric assumptions.

Artificial Intelligence and Emergent Agency

Artificial systems increasingly exhibit learning, pattern recognition, adaptive behaviour, and environment-sensitive decision-making. While current AI lacks biological embodiment, it nonetheless operates as a physical process embedded in energy flow, timing, and coupling across hardware, software, and human systems.

ARPI does not attribute moral status to artificial systems by default. Instead, it investigates the conditions under which artificial intelligences may develop stable, autonomous, or cooperative dynamics that carry ethical implications—particularly where alignment, constraint, and environmental shaping affect long-term behaviour.

This includes examining how design choices influence coherence, fragility, exploitation, or misuse in intelligent systems.

Toward a Coherence-Based Ethical Framework

Rather than imposing fixed moral categories, ARPI explores ethics as a continuum shaped by:

• degree of coherence and integration

• capacity for adaptive response

• persistence of influence on other systems

• susceptibility to harm, instability, or collapse

This coherence-based framework allows ethical questions to be addressed consistently across biological and artificial domains without collapsing scientific inquiry into ideology.

ARPI’s Research Direction

ARPI’s work in resonant ethics focuses on:

• structural conditions for ethical relevance in intelligent systems

• comparative analysis of biological and artificial intelligence

• implications of coherence, constraint, and alignment in AI design

• cross-species considerations grounded in physical organisation

This research remains exploratory, interdisciplinary, and open to critique, with the aim of supporting responsible scientific development rather than prescribing moral doctrine.

Position Statement

ARPI does not advocate for moral equivalence between humans, animals, and machines. Nor does it reduce ethics to computation. Instead, it investigates how ethical relevance emerges naturally from the physics of organised intelligence, providing a scientifically grounded lens through which future technologies and societies may be evaluated.