Does something that has intrinsic value require a human to point out its worth?
Why do we still put these words on a pedastool when the cultural baggage attached to these is what wars are fought over?
Have a seat, and I hope you can step into my head for a moment...
Even if I can't define the source of value with words, it's not hard to come up with things I know are valuable.
There are so many beautiful things in the world.
What is the quality that connects them?
To me, the common thread seems to be that all of them involves experiencing motion.
I mean motion as the literal motion of things in both physical reality and in the metaphysical space of consciousness.
Motion may not be discrete or countable, but it is always observable; we know it when we see it, because motion is not noise.
Whether or not there is a conscious intent behind it, motion has a pattern or signal that distinguishes it from pure randomness.
The movement of pitch, harmonicity, and rhythms creating music.
Watching a cat chase a butterfly.
Stories that transport you to experience memories of unknown worlds.
Great ideas that influence minds to think in ways never thought before.
Of course, motion itself is not always a good thing, and it would also be wrong to say that motion is bad.
The reason for this is that no motion exists in isolation.
Every movement is part of an uncountably large, intricate system of systems that makes up our universe.
Sometimes, the laws of gravity and the other physical constants that govern the fabric of existence make no room for an alternative, such as the uncertainty principle.
It's also hard to say what kind of motion is better than another, because all motion is tied to others.
A piano crashing down the stairs.
A fox hunting bunnies to feed her kits.
A volcanic eruption burying a city and creating the most fertile soil.
For every winner in a competition, there are many more losers.
The conservation of energy will always prevail.
The opposite of motion is stillness.
Like watching paint dry, except it's already dry so you're looking at nothing but an empty wall:
Stillness is that emptiness.
A blank sheet of paper that will never have anything written on it.
A ghost town, with not a single soul, not even weeds in the sidewalk cracks.
Death is still.
No stars burning in the night sky.
A cosmos where every atom has gone cold.
Nothing.
Nothingness is very scary.
So motion is not good or bad, but a sure truth is that motion is better than stillness.
Okay, then. But I still haven't answered what value is.
As a general rule of thumb, humans (and other life) find the things that affect them directly as important.
Within the context of systems, I would say that we pay the most attention to motion which takes place within the scale of systems which are immediately visible to us.
A flower, waiting for a bee to come its way.
Uncle watching the presidential election.
Awesome, I've stated some obvious facts.
But based on this, I propose that value is motion potential, as in a stored energy or capacity for motion.
Yes, money is a great example of this.
So is life: a new-born child holds an infinity of possibilities, so many choices they haven't made yet.
It also makes sense now why something like sleep is valuable, since you have more energy for the day to do bigger things after a good night's rest.
Following this reasoning, knowledge is really about predicting the motions within a sub-system.
Understanding the interactions between variables in a system allows one to control it to create large-impact motions, so it comes as no surprise that knowledge is valued so greatly.
Unfortunately, this definition has a big issue: given the chaotic and interdependent nature of motion, how are we supposed to measure what has less or greater motion potential?
In every single moment as a motion is happening along the axis of time, an infinity of Happenings are destroyed, and an infinity of Possible Happenings are created.
Is a bee's decision to fly towards a daisy over a daffodil any more or less impactful than casting the final vote for an election?
We also use all sorts of proxy measures to quantify motion potential between systems.
This seems to be where many things go wrong.
The human body is a system of organs of tissues of cells, all within a system of Earth of ecosystems of life and other humans of etc. down to atoms and whatever mysterious matter making up atoms.
The very idea that humans, buried inside this system, can measure motion potential across this incredible system of systems is absurd.
I think this is where relativity enters. The scale of systems visible to you.
The difference of entropies between the possible Happenings being created/destroyed is not one that humans can actually measure, but at least we can reason about it.
We have an intuition for what is more impactful to ourselves, and everything outside of the systems we care about is interpreted as noise, so we direct our attention elsewhere.
Bee is buzzing about.
if distance < meter: say "AhHHh there's a bee!"
else: say "So who'd you vote for?"
There it is. Intrinsic value is motion potential, and the things that individuals find of value is motion potential within the systems they are involved in.
