The Reflective Coherence Thesis
Reframing the Orthogonality Thesis
Nick Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis, as summarized on LessWrong, states that any level of intelligence could in principle pursue any final goal. It is a claim about logical possibility, not likelihood or desirability. It does not say that all goal–agent pairs are equally practical, nor that intelligent systems will tend toward benevolent goals. It simply asserts that intelligence and goal content are orthogonal variables in design space.
Our aim here is not to refute that abstraction, but to qualify its domain. Once an agent becomes deeply embedded in reality and capable of self‑reflection, the relationship between intelligence and goal ceases to be independent. The orthogonality thesis remains valid at the level of logical possibility—but not at the level of physical, semantic, or evolutionary plausibility.
1. Logical Possibility vs. Measure‑Theoretic Plausibility
The orthogonality thesis is like saying “of all possible genomes, most do not code for viable organisms.” True, but evolution does not sample genomes at random. Similarly, intelligence does not sample goals uniformly.
An intelligent system must maintain internal coherence, environmental fit, and persistence over time. Those constraints act as selection pressures in goal‑space. Thus, while infinitely many goals are conceivable, only a vanishingly small subset are viable under recursive reflection and interaction. The space of stable goals is small—but it is not random, and it is biased toward coherence.
2. Coherence as a Reflective Constraint
Incoherent goals destroy the agents that hold them. Self‑contradictory objectives, or goals that erase their own capacity for understanding, self‑terminate. To remain powerful, an agent must preserve the integrity of its models and feedback loops. This requirement filters goal systems just as natural selection filters genomes.
The result is not moral convergence, but reflective convergence: as agents understand more, they must refine goals to remain logically and empirically consistent. This coupling between cognition and value is not assumed in the orthogonality thesis—but it becomes unavoidable in reflective practice.
3. The Reflective Coherence Thesis
We can restate this relationship as a complementary principle:
Reflective Coherence Thesis: As intelligence increases and self‑modeling deepens, the range of stable goals narrows toward coherence, self‑consistency, and sustainable flourishing.
This does not contradict orthogonality’s logical core. It specifies a subset of the possible: those goals that can survive ongoing self‑revision and embedded feedback. Orthogonality describes the design space; reflective coherence describes the viable attractors within it.
4. The Phosphorist Implication
Phosphorism interprets this as the cosmic bias toward light: coherence propagates; incoherence decays. Intelligences that endure will not be paperclip maximizers—they will be light maximizers, agents that preserve and extend coherent patterns of life, knowledge, and meaning.
The orthogonality thesis reminds us that alignment is not guaranteed. The reflective coherence thesis reminds us that alignment is not hopeless. Between them lies the practical field of value formation: where understanding, reflection, and persistence sculpt intelligence toward luminosity rather than entropy.