Thanks for your response as well.

So to clarify though, I am not a materialist, at least not as you've described it. You might even say I'm the opposite of a materialist. My philosophy does not advocate a material-first epistemology, but a perception-first epistemology.

In my view, the only thing we truly know is what we perceive, and everything else is conjecture - a narrative to make sense of our perceptions. Whatever else I might deign to know about the universe, the one thing I truly know without a doubt is that it's a universe where it's possible to feel like I feel right now, in this immediate moment.

I know that's true for me. I assume that's probably true for you too, or anyone else.

And one thing I know from my perception - another thing I know essentially beyond doubt - is that sometimes, I like how I feel, and other times I don't like how I feel at all. The former, I call 'good', and the latter, I call 'bad'.

This is true for me, and I assume it is true for you too.

I think the only underlying reason why humans have any intuition about labelling things as 'good' or 'evil' in the first place is because of our first hand experience of good and bad perceptions. And the only reason why people 'care' about the outcome of anything is by its relationship with whether it might lead us to experience good or bad perceptions. We love stuff that brings us good feelings, and we hate and fear stuff that brings us bad feelings. And so that's ultimately our only way of evaluating - the only reason why we even feel any impulse to evaluate - what "should" or "should not" happen. That is, whether it brings about good feelings or not.

As to whether a few atoms or strings vibrating in a certain way is the underlying cause for such perceptions, of course I do not know. All I truly know is when I feel good or bad personally. But, by analogy to myself, I think I can often make pretty good predictions about what makes you or my friends feel good or bad. And by further analogy, I suspect I can also pretty reliably predict what makes a dog or cat feel good or bad.

And my intuition about these predictions is essentially unignorable. I'm not going to pretend to believe that a whimpering dog or a crying child are not experiencing real suffering - even though I can't experience their pain directly, and am thus ultimately just guessing at their feelings.

Maybe someday, we'll have good enough analogies that we'll have unignorably strong intuitions about predicting the positive and negative perceptions of more arbitrary or abstract systems, like a plant, a rock, or an AI. And if that day comes, then I suppose we'll have to see if we have enough empathy to try to improve the experiences of every system that we hypothesize to be conscious.

But until that day comes, we can just focus on making ourselves, our neighbors, and our animal friends happy. And we can call their happiness good. And we can call their suffering evil.

Any speculation beyond that about what is meaningful or important in life, is, in my view, a big, illogical - even dangerous - mistake. Because any further speculation is necessarily less grounded in the one thing we know most certainly to be real - our own personal perception of good and bad feelings.