Funny, I just learned the term "Perennialism" yesterday reading someone's article critiquing the idea. Alpha-Prime isn't exactly that as hopefully will become clear. But yes, some similarities emerge.

"Alpha-Prime" really originates with the idea that we humans (and maybe all sentient social beings in the cosmos) evolve and optimize a universal 'ethical program' that we can decode, observe, examine, etc, etc like any other phenomenon in nature like the solar system, the zoo of subatomic particles, DNA, the cell or the eye (which has apparently evolved at least 5x independently but don't quote me on that).

This 'ethical program' is the loom upon which all of our relations are woven, including our personal friendships and associations, our religions, politics, debates between our ethical philosophies, etc, etc. It's simply invisible to us most of the time because we are immersed in it so totally and in a sense it "is" us. And since it's likely that it evolves independently over and over, perhaps it might even be a "universal language" like the other kinds of "universal languages" astrobiologists imagine there possibly being, like harmonics which gives us music, or mathematics which gives us prime numbers and all the rest. There may be 'local variations' in the 'program' from species to species (or planet to planet?), who knows, but ultimately universal principles would be distingushable.

And since there'd really be nothing in the universe to argue otherwise, why couldn't this "Alpha-Prime" not be some sort of emergent "Axis Mundi" or "Emergent divine?" Anyone who argues would be using "Alpha-Prime's" own terms to frame their arguments against it's existence.

For instance, when someone argues "people aren't good," how can they say "people aren't good" without some fundamental understanding of the concept of "good," which they can so readily already/always assume to have in common with the listener?

"Alpha-Prime" then would be the reason the "Golden Rule" keeps showing up again and again, regardless of culture, religious terminology, century or source of 'revelation.'

I leave it to the theologians, systems theorists and brain scientists to debate whether "Alpha-Prime" is evidence of design or emergence, cosmic intelligence or codmic randomness. In a way it doesn't really matter which because it turns out the same no matter what.... which is itself.... awesome.

What I'm simply suggesting, hypothesizing really, is that "Alpha-Prime" is there, and that we can trust it more fully than any demandings of some made up arbitrary authoritarian god (which itself will itaelf have been constructed using the language of Alpha-Prime anyway).

We can trust "Alpha-Prime," the hypothesis goes, like we can trust electricity enough to run computers, refrigerators and rovers that we send to Mars.

And the best part is that it IS a hypothesis. It can be falsified like any hypothesis, refined or revised like any hypothesis, and maybe details can be made clearer by people way more qualified than me. Maybe they already have and I'm just reinventing the wheel unknowingly (but somehow looking at the state of our world atm I'm finding that a little hard to believe).

And I didn't expect to drop the whole hypothesis here. So... this is the seed of another essay. Thanks for inspiring that!