Seeing lots of blog posts today with pictures of children looking for eggs, geeky analyses of the results of microwaving various Easter candy, et cetera, ad nauseam. Anything to avoid discussing what Easter is really supposed to be about - Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

There were numerous active cults and sects in the Holy Land and Europe around Jesus’ time. There is no particular reason why Christianity was destined to be more or less successful than any other religious group. But it was. The values and stories of Christianity reflect what people want from a spirituality. A deeply resonant psychological archetype, possibly even developmentally predestined.

Rags to riches. A prodigy who held the attention of wise men with his philosophical and intellectual skill as a young boy. A prince whose father was not merely a king but the King of Kings. Compassionate acts of healing, even revival of Lazarus from the dead. Feeding thousands from a few loaves of bread and catches of fish. Strength in the face of temptation. A strong adherence to fundamental values, including love for one’s enemies. Betrayal and self-sacrifice. And ultimately revival from the dead and ascension into a holy realm of eternal light.

The story of Jesus of Nazareth is ultimately more about humanity and human psychology than anything having to do with incorporeal entities that even most Christians don’t take seriously anymore. Ask your Christian friends - would kindness, and brotherhood, and all these other values have meaning even if it were known for a fact that they didn’t come from a divine source? Or perhaps that good feeling we get when practicing these teachings is where the divinity comes from. We think it comes from an external source, God, when it’s actually emanating from within our brains. But some would argue that the nonexistence of God doesn’t make these values any less divine.

Jesus’ teachings, along with everyday common sense and the teachings of millions of other wise people, are part of what has been called the “human moral frame of reference”. The human moral frame of reference can’t be written down as a list of well-defined rules, but rather makes up a cluster of tendencies and feelings which we know when we see them.

We’re all a part of the same species. As such, we share far more in common with each other than with any other species, living or dead. Unless plagued by a developmental defect, we all have two arms, two legs, a pupil and a retina, a spleen and kidneys, opposable thumbs and an enlarged prefrontal cortex. There are moving parts within our brains, like the moving parts that help us choose between “right” and “wrong”, that are species-universal in exactly the same way that our other organs are.

Yes, you and George W. Bush have the same basic mental hardware for choosing between right and wrong. Part of the problem is that the human moral frame of reference is tied to the individual. But if you subtract observer-centricity, different human goal systems start looking a heck of a lot more similar. If you calibrate for access to objective facts and differences in intelligence, even more similarity emerges. In the end, the greatest objective gap in the human moral frame of reference is probably between men and women, who have brains that differ slightly on a neurological level, not between any two men or any two women. But still, in comparison to every other intelligent species that can theoretically exist, all humans - men and women alike - basically have the same underlying hardware used to make moral choices.

This species-universality of morality has made some people hopeful that we will be able to successfully build an intelligent machine that shares humanity’s basic values, without being biased in favor of the programmers. It turns out that this could probably be possible even if several different intelligent species lived together on earth, but all being members of the same species sure doesn’t hurt.

For people thinking through the necessary features of a Friendly AI, the question to ask is not “what separates humans from each other?” but rather, “what do we fundamentally have in common?” This question is the province of cognitive psychology and social science, not politics or water-cooler gossip. We need to have a rich, information-theoretic description of human goal systems so we can teach these newcomers which changes we’d see as good and which we’d see as bad. They might seem obvious to us, but for an entity starting with literally zero cognitive content, the stretch to even a basic form of morality is a long one.

Does this line of inquiry interest you? Try continuing with the eminently readable Dialogue on Friendliness, which explores fundamental issues surrounding morality and goal systems.