The Value of Value (or "cogito ergo efficio")

Why am I looking for value? I am looking for it, after all. It may be a modified concept of "value," but it seems that I must value something! So why do I value value?

"I think not!"

The simple answer is that I am fighting off Schrödinger's zombie. I have agency for some reason that is beyond me, but I do not have the tools with which to use it. For some reason I have arrived where I am now, able to think and be self aware. I am not only able to make decisions, but I must make decisions and that requires evaluating all sorts of things. From the point at which I now sit, I have a certain lifeless, momentum of being existentially undead.

Without a foundation for value, my options are all as trivial as to turn right or turn left along an unending series of forks in the road, past unmarked signs leading to something (or nothing). This is the Void.

To be without value is to be robbed of agency. It is not possible to voluntarily do this, as that would require choice, and thus agency, and thus value. It seems that value is an imperative for anything that is self aware. As soon as cogito ergo sum, then cogito ergo efficio.

Unfounded Rationality Found

I have hereto rejected the transcendent in favour of the imminent as the basis for [my understanding and/or belief in] reality, and for what can form a ground of value. The transcendent often suffers from the fact that it cannot be measured scientifically, and thus could be a trick of the mind... poor biological programming if you will. Certainly not a solid foundation for universal truths.

That is not to say that the transcendent is not a type of truth, it's just that it's a subjective truth, and thus "true" in the same sense as experiencing things that may not be there. It is true to say that one experiences something, but truths that are not self evident are really only beliefs. I cannot find the transcendent in rational a priori reasoning. It can only be verified  by some people in some a posteriori ways. Thus, the transcendent is hardly a solid foundation from which to build the foundation of one's reality. Or perhaps that is some shortcoming in the scope of reason, as "reason" has broadened over the centuries. Or perhaps I am deficient in some way.

Why do I use rational judgement? Won't the only thing I find with this method be things that fit within its scope, namely rationality and logic? At the surface it seems most plausible that it is because I live in reality (whether I perceive it accurately or not), and so logic shows truths which reveal indisputable parts reality to me. It's a practical tool. But why value practicality? In fact, practicality has built within it the concept of value hierarchy and assumptions about what is "good." So I have the "defining function defining itself again" problem again.

I'll break down my conditions for success:

1. It must define a ground for value, or provide another paradigm to justify agency (I will write a post on this in a few days)
2. The end result must be one that I understand
3. I can understand in a variety of ways, but the most reliable is intellectual because it has the capacity to be coherent and irrefutable

It then follows that rational thought is the most reliable way to approach this issue, though it is not necessarily what will bring the correct answer. It just has the highest likelihood of success based on the conditions outlined above.

Status Quo: 101

I had my first sociology class today. This is my second shot at post-secondary, and dear me is it sloooooooow.

I skipped first year the first time around because I completed the International Baccalaureate program, and was given that privilege. Plus I challenged my way through most of the classes that I already knew the material for. In other words, I skipped all the intro classes.

My professor seems like a nice enough guy. A little self-deprecating, but on the whole I get the sense that he's quite a competent professor. He did say something severely problematic though.

"...I could give you an entire lecture on a cup of coffee. I could talk about all of the injustices that happened in order to bring your coffee here. But you shouldn't change behaviour because of analysis. Some of us still need coffee to function this early in the morning."

Okay... WHAT? He had just talked at length about Canadian First Nations apartheid, and how it creates social inequalities. But don't do anything about it. You still enjoy the privileges that this system gives you (if you are of another ethic group that is). He said that a doctor who identifies a product as causing cancer has no responsibility, and in fact cannot do anything about the fact that it is on the market and that the public is not aware of how harmful it can be. He directly said that you wouldn't be able to live your life if you go about things this way. If you challenge what your friends say, you will become very unpopular.

My view:

1. The doctor in his example has an ethical responsibility to take action
• Because of their claim to authority, this doctor has many tools available to them
• Conduct a scientific study
• Get the media interested
• Start an advocacy group
• Talk to existing advocacy groups
2. Individuals constitute society. If enough individuals change their views, this becomes subculture, and eventually it becomes de facto culture.
• If you have the privilege of being charismatic, you can cause change in many people
• You need to be the change you wish to see in the world
• What is generally an unpopular mode of interaction today (high degree of analysis) could become the social norm
3. My professor is advocating for the status quo. As a sociologist, he should know that social change happens, and that it happens because of people challenging the status quo. Every new idea does this.

My professor has managed to resurrect the beast that was my insatiable drive of my first time in post-secondary 5 years ago. He has an adversary. I will challenge this view of his using the tools that he supplies. I will do the course readings, I will do the suggested extra course readings, and I will go the the original texts that these are based on to further my understanding of the material vastly beyond what he will expect from a first-year student. And I will use it to challenge him publicly (in class) and privately (office hours). He will not enjoy it.

I will teach my teacher.

Schrödinger's Ethic

Nihilism is a funny thing. Simply put, life has no inherent meaning. But that fact in itself has no inherent meaning if it is to be true. So when people are upset by the lack of inherent meaning in the world, they should just as easily be happy about it. It's no justification to go kill yourself. It's no justification to keep living either. You just remain a ghost. I sometimes feel like Schrödinger's cat, simultaneously alive and dead, living in contradiction. Yay for cognitive dissonance.

I continue live my life as I otherwise would, as a way to hedge my bets. If I find a good reason to live, I'll want to have a job and an eduction. If I find reason to die, then I have nothing anyway. It's as close to win-win as you can get in this situation, it just means that I have to put in effort and invest in the possibility that I will find justification for living.

Zen and the Art of Robot Maintenance

Pirsig says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that a good test of whether or not something exists is to do a thought experiment in which the thing in question is removed from the world, and to see how that version of the world compares to reality. He finds that by removing value (he calls it "quality"), you lose art (what makes one paining better than another, or better than a blank wall?), interesting food, most professions, and so on, and are only left with some philosophy and pure mathematics.

I would extend this further and say that without hierarchal value (or "quality"), society would cease to function as it currently does and we would be reduced to a animalistic... no, we'd live a robotic, mechanical state of being, as simple machines. We would lose our ability to evaluate the things around us. We would lose the essence of what it is that makes us human. We'd also lose all motivation aside of our basic urges (biologic programming.)

Value exists entirely in the human mind. It is an effect of consciousness. No consciousness means no value judgements. Consciousness at least has an a priori basis. And thus so does existence. And so does truth (which is another term for reality). Is value simply an adaptable programming that we've evolved along the way? If so, then it reduces to evolution and biology. But in that case it has it become so maladaptive that people are willing to die for their values and thus remove themselves from the gene pool, which seems counter-productive. Or they make aesthetic judgements about art that often have nothing to do with finding a mate. So then it would be one of those strange quirks that evolve because it is evolutionarily neutral. It neither works to our advantage or disadvantage evolutionarily.

My hope is to find an a priori basis for value. Perhaps truth could work, but I'm not sure yet. Truth is another way of referring to reality, which I exist in. I know that exist because I think, right? But is it better to be in reality, or to be profoundly schizophrenic?

The problem is assumption

I'm in the midst of an existential crisis. I have been for years, and I keep distracting myself away from it, but it keeps returning, and it keeps getting stronger each time. This time I've decided to face it and actually do the heavy lifting in hopes that I can find some basis for my life.

The Polish psychologist Dąbrowski came up with a theory to help explain the stages and outcomes of such dilemmas. Like myself, he felt that existential crisis could be a constructed as a positive thing: as a way of personal development. He calls this "Positive Disintegration." I sure hope that his theory is right, or else I'm on my way to the madhouse >.> I've been getting distracted these past few years, and collapsing back to Dąbrowski's "Level 1", but I keep popping back up to "Level 2" as if by some internal need.

The core of my dilemma is that I cannot find any basis for meaning in my life that is sufficiently solid. I'll start with the fact that I'm a staunch atheist, so a nonexistent god can't give me meaning. Most people build their meaning on a foundation that really is just a pile of assumptions hanging midair with no ground, and most people absolutely refuse to question it. I can understand why. Life is comfortable for them. They typically have no motivation to look further.

Let's take an example: "it's better to be happy than unhappy." This reduces down to the pleasure principle, and that in pure form leads to hedonism, which most people would disagree with being ideal. Furthermore, the pleasure principle is nothing but happy chemicals running through your brain. Why not take ecstasy all day? Most people would argue that this is because it's not "real" happiness, by which they mean it wasn't earned. But there are plenty of situations of people enjoying things that they haven't earned, and it also looks at happiness as a form of fixed commodity, which it clearly is not because you can often become happier by changing your perspective on something. Plus, what about a sociopath that finds joy in causing suffering in others?

Ethics in themselves make sense to me: they are what produces a functioning society. But why do we want a functioning society? To improve the quality of life? Why is that better? Is life somehow innately better than non-living things?

Meaning reduces down to value, which is by its nature hierarchal. So what do we value? And further, why do we value the things that we value? Why do we value life over death? The problem in this analysis is that you cannot place value before itself. You are applying the function "value hierarchy" to itself, and thus altering the function that is acting on itself in an infinite loop. The school of analytic philosophy puts it another way: you cannot ask "what is the meaning of existence" because that places put meaning before existence, but meaning has to exists too, so existence is actually prior to meaning!

Inaugural Post

Hello world,

I've been thinking about blogging for some time now. In fact, I've even blogged a few times before, but it never seemed to really stick. But lately I've been doing a lot of thinking, and have felt the need to perhaps put it in print as a way of evaluating my ideas, and (hopefully) to have my ideas peer-reviewed.

Lately I've been thinking primarily about:

• Philosophy
• Value theory
• Ethics
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• (Post-)Feminism
• Music theory
• Transformational theory
• Pitch space
• Form
• Functional neo-tonal harmony & voice-leading

Of course I have also been thinking about other things as well, and those will probably wind up on the blog too. As many of these areas are quite specific, tagging will probably be quite important for any readers to keep interest ;)

It has been recommended to me that I "friend-lock" my blogs. I feel that my writing style tends to be rather dry and abstract, so I probably won't need to do that.

Anyhow, this is me. Enjoy.