The evolutionary process that has crafted us has imbued "value" into the very structure of our humanity. Value may not have been part of the lifeless universe originally. But it is a dimension of reality that has been "emergent," just as life too emerged.
Value is a by-product of the selective process, which favors what survives over what does not. The evolutionary process has built us to experience "value." We have been molded, that is, to experience as having positive value what has served the survival of our ancestral kind, and thus tends to meet our needs and make us feel fulfilled. And what has been associated ancestrally with the death of our kind -- with injury, frustration, misery -- we experience as having negative value.
The meeting of the needs sentient creatures - with its associated positive experience - may not take place "out there." But value can only mean something as it registers in the experiential dimension. Things can matter only to creatures capable of experiencing their mattering.
To say that there is no such thing as "value" makes as much sense as to say that there is no such thing as pain.
(You can find this idea more fully developed here. A related and still more substantial treatment of this issue can be found in this chapter, "What Makes Something Good", from an unpublished book of mine.)
Value is a by-product of the selective process, which favors what survives over what does not. The evolutionary process has built us to experience "value." We have been molded, that is, to experience as having positive value what has served the survival of our ancestral kind, and thus tends to meet our needs and make us feel fulfilled. And what has been associated ancestrally with the death of our kind -- with injury, frustration, misery -- we experience as having negative value.
To say that there is no such thing as "value" makes as much sense as to say that there is no such thing as pain.
(You can find this idea more fully developed here. A related and still more substantial treatment of this issue can be found in this chapter, "What Makes Something Good", from an unpublished book of mine.)
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