Guardian of the Codec

If conscious experience is a rare stabilization of a private informational stream — sustained against infinite noise by a Compression Codec of physical laws, shared language, and institutional memory — then the primary moral obligation is not happiness, duty, or social contract, but the maintenance of the conditions that make experience itself possible. We call this obligation Guardianship of the Codec. Climate disruption, disinformation, and civilizational conflict are not independent crises. They are unified manifestations of the same underlying failure: Narrative Decay — entropy accumulating inside the codec. Morality, reframed through OPT’s Causal Cone geometry, is the literal Topological Branch Selection of codec-preserving paths within the forward fan of potential futures. Furthermore, by embracing the Doomsday Argument not as a paradox to be refuted but as the fundamental statistical distribution of failing branches, the Guardian’s task becomes an active navigational imperative. However, a structural danger intensifies this logic: because the Stability Filter eliminates all patches in which the codec fails before they can be observed, our intuitions about fragility are systematically calibrated on a biased sample of survivors. This makes the real risk invisible by default. The Guardian’s task is therefore doubly difficult — not only practical, but epistemological: to see clearly through the illusion of stability manufactured by survivorship bias.