Est. 2023
Value
Linguistic nuance aside, the fundamental unit of value in our universe, which is relevant to humanity, is energy. From energy there is motion, from motion there is matter, from matter there is sentience, from sentience there is action, from action there is survival, from survival there is persistence and from persistence there is society.
When considering linguistic metas, the term value becomes a highly personalized experience. It is mostly a matter of perspective. When the word value is generally used, it rarely describes some fundamental conception of value (as determined by natural laws). Most of the ways we use the term refers to relative value, no matter the confidence interval of the model we may reference. Is there even something like universal value? Does an ageless star worry about how much energy it has? Or by embracing philosophy, we might say things such as “life is valuable.” But from the perspective of the Earth, perhaps life (human life in particular) is parasitic, or more likely, immaterial to our host.
Existence from our perspective seems full of such complexities, dualities, and paradoxes. Opposing forces which not only exist together, but by some natural design enable and require each other. The advent of everything implies the existence of nothing, an interesting, complex, meta observation of the logic and structure which expressing ideas through language creates. We point this out to implore more thoughtfulness and responsibility to the ways we choose to describe things.
All of human abstractions, society and mythology exists in this layer of difficult to consider nuance, which is what drives us forward (the pursuit of speaking the unspeakable, and reconciling the fallacies upon speaking such things). We say that man is created in the image of God, but God could not be spoken of without the conceptions of man. We submit ourselves to the inevitabilities, the understanding of forces beyond us, yet over time we master them. In fact, our conscious progression seems to be determined simply as a matter of time, the current which creates, perhaps, the fundamental motion that all things originate from. Without linear time, there would be no sense of difference between states in our physical world, and the word progress could not exist to us.
It is likely though, that time is generalized as linear because our perspectives are linear. The way we process information requires observation, which therein forces a net collective set of observed outcomes that tends to be consistent for all. What we do not see are the infinite sets of states which did not materialize into our perspective, some due to deterministic forces, others due to sentient actions. And further, we do not know all the sets of observations (including actions) which forced the collapse of the multitude of possible states to the singular, chronological one we experience and observe.
Here an important paradox emerges, wherein as sentient beings, we observe ourselves pulled by the current of time, in an environment of infinite proportions and complexity which we have little control over. Yet we ourselves, through the power of action, become small weavers of this progress, or perhaps, the local navigators of the possible paths of time in the infinite possible seas of our dimensional existence.
In this context, what is it that we say is of value now? Understanding the perspective which we exist in, we can say, like all particles or waves (or wave-particles) that meet, that our reality in the long run faces two outcomes, construction or annihilation.
Within this context we could say that we go as the universe goes. Perhaps there is no set of outcomes which allow us to escape the universe’s apparent trajectory towards eventual annihilation. However, the narrative of human history has demonstrated, if nothing else, an unwillingness to simply accept the constraints of nature placed upon us. And if, in the face of such an endgame, we do not allow ourselves the audacity of optimism, it is easily derived that existence would have little purpose in itself, and that it would be detrimental to spend further energy on futile endeavors beyond simple hedonism.
So, allowing ourselves to assume that an optimistic lens, at least in the broadest frameworks of purpose, is necessary, we can reevaluate value in our context described. Value stems from the things which create options, possibilities, branches that broaden the set of possible paths for our linear timeline to travel through. Value occurs when we create more possible states than existed before. Value is inherently in the things which stave off annihilation, the foreclosure of possible paths of time to the point of the end of time itself.
Pure randomness can create outcomes which achieve this, the domain expansion of tangentially possible dimensional paths that our timeline can reach. Life is a miracle of such randomness. But if we are to assign ourselves purpose, which therein must be aligned with the universal purpose to which we belong, then we inherit this responsibility as well.
As sentient consumers of universal energy with the ability for deliberate intention, we have long embraced our biological imperative to survive, an extension perhaps, of the desires of the universe itself to avoid annihilation. And faced with such obligation, which we owe to the universe for both the pleasure and pain which all life must experience, we can then say it is our responsibility to create value, the discovery or creation of new possible sets of outcomes for which the universe can inhabit and persist in. We are tasked with creating optionality for the universe, and in doing so, create fundamental value.
Sincerely,
Demosthenes