What is selected for, in biological evolution, are those creatures that do what survival requires. At a certain point in evolutionary development, that required "doing" starts being driven by "motivation." Wanting to do what's necessary for survival helps. Wanting to avoid what threatens survival is also a plus.
Along with motivation, then, comes this wanting. Which, in turn, means emergence of an experiential dimension of things "mattering." To the motivated creature, some outcomes and some experiences are preferred to others.
In this way, evolution's "choosing" of life over death leads directly to the next step in the emergence of value. That step brings us to that third and crucial point above -- the one about the connection between "value" and the fulfillment of sentient creatures.
The Central Reality of the 'In Here'
It mystifies me how so many smart people have stumbled over this movement from this step from the "out there" domain of "objectivity" to the "in here" domain of "experience." As if value could not be "real" unless it was "out there." But it seems clear enough to me that value could only make sense in terms of the (subjective) experience of sentient beings, and that it is no less real for that.
The idea that for something to be "real" it must be "objective," like the stars in the heavens or the rock on the road, seems to me a complete non sequitur.
Value means that some things are better than other things. In a lifeless universe, devoid of any beings to whom things matter -- i.e. for whom some things are experienced as "better" than others -- how could there be any kind of value? (A God could count here as one such being, if He were "well pleased" with one thing, and displeased with another.) But in the absence of any such creatures, and any such experiencing, how could anything be "better" than anything else?
There can be no "value" unless something matters -- something is better or worse--to someone.
(In a universe with a God who makes pronouncements about the better and the worse, would that mean that it matters to Him? That He thinks it will be good for His creatures? And for His creatures to accept such pronouncements, would that not have to mean that they accept that God's assessments. Unless, that is, it is just out of fear or deference to authority. Only in an authoritarian framework does the positing of God solve any problem about value not equally solved in a secular framework.)
And in a universe without a God -- the universe as cosmological science has been able to see it -- then one can say that value is an "emergent" reality in the universe, once creatures (like us, but not only us) emerge to which some experiences are preferable to others.
In sum: Value is inherent in the experience of creatures like us, and value must necessarily register in the domain of experience.
At this point, we might encounter the challenge according to which experience, being subjective, cannot be really real. To which my response is: To say that value is not real, because it's "merely" based in experience, makes as much sense as to say that pain is not real.
Nor does "subjective" mean "merely idiosyncratic. Just as it is fallacious to argue -- from the fact that we each have different bodies -- that there's no such thing as "human anatomy."
Beneath our differences -- between individuals, between cultures -- there is a fundamental stratum of our experience, and of our sense of how things matter, on either the positive side or the negative, that is grounded in how evolution has shaped our human nature.
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The Two-Level Game of Evolved Human Life
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