The Ontology of Value

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Language is a symbolic system of artificial signs and markers that lives inside of us, it allows parts and pieces of ourselves to flow out of ourselves and into the world or other people, as influence or force. Using language is like breaking off little pieces of ourselves and pushing these outside of ourselves. The language itself is not these pieces, but the language is what allows those pieces to become fragmented and pushed outside.

Language is four-dimensional because some pushing-outside goes farther than others, some is more complete than others, and some is larger in scope and content than others. Therefore we have this kind of secondary self where a virtual space or field of linguistically-delimited contents exists as a kind of invisible universe through which we symbolically cohere ourselves from one moment to the next. That universe tends to stabilize over time since even as it always grows larger it also continues to sustain former contents, thus time becomes the main factor of organization and relations form between old, older, and more recent stuff. “We” experience ourselves linguistically-speaking as the most salient edge of this whole space of relations, that edge feels to us like it pushes into the present moment and outside of ourselves, yet comes from our past. Because it does come from our past, and push into the present moment, and expand beyond ourselves – this is literally what the linguistic-symbolic system is, ontologically speaking. It exists in literally this way, and we tend to associate ourselves to it.

Saying language is a “cosmic code” is a poetic way of saying that the symbolic system is not arbitrary but rests upon more objective logic and structure, regardless of the coincidental vocal or written images we happen to have culturally evolved to represent this or that aspect of the language. The language itself is operating “universally” because symbols rise up upon the continuum of being and participate in the larger, hidden reality of thought, which was the center of Plato’s philosophical power. Socrates intimated the existence of this excess beyond our ability to know or sense, and he used this fact and the purely negative representation of it to undermine and open up everything else around him into more truthful encounter; Plato took Socrates’ insight and tried to formalize it into positive representation. He succeeded, more or less, at least in creating the seed of such a positivity-philosophy, and all philosophy after him has either been grappling with this fact and trying to understand and expand it, or simply remains ignorant of it and cannot even rise to this most basic level of philosophy. Wittgenstein is special because he bridges both of those categories.

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Here is the thing: you (Jakob and Sauwelios, the VO crew) suffer from the inability to admit the inevitability of arbitrariness in every decision making process.

By arbitrariness, I do not simply mean “dasein”. What iambiguous calls “dasein” is rooted in one’s past. Arbitrarines, however, isn’t rooted in one’s past. By arbitrariness, I mean randomness, and randomness means lack of relation to any past event.

To a degree, decision making process is random, which means, emergent, and that means not rooted in any prior event. This degree can be controlled, it can be increased or decresead, but it can never be eliminated. Moreover, this increasing and decreasing does not change the total amount of arbitrariness, it merely changes the local amount. In other words, arbitrariness can only be displaced: if you want to harden something, you have to soften something else, and vice versa.

You are trying to hide the fact that in all decision making process there is a degree of arbitrariness. You do this – and this is a distinctive feature of yours – by trying to anchor your decisions in circular logic.

You aim for logical consistency because logical consistency gives you the confidence, the anchor, the firmness, you desperately need. But this is delusional.

Here’s an example: we value, and can do nothing else but value, precisely because existence itself is valuing.

Here’s another example: everyone values valuation because valuing devaluation devalues such a valuation.

You want all of your decisions to be rational. And these are the consequences. You end up relying on circular, self-referential, logic in order to make it look like your decisions are rational.

But they aren’t. Decisions cannot be completely rational. They cannot be because the universe is flux, and this means, not strictly determined.

The universe isn’t a machine. We, ourselves, aren’t machines. There is no underlying mechanism. No human God, no fantastical God, no thing-in-itself God, no collective God, no mathematical God, no self-valuing God, nothing.

As iambiguous says, we live in a world sans God.

So how do we anchor our decisions in a world sans God? That is the question.

Let’s tackle the concept of rationality first. What does it refer to? What is a rational decision?

A rational decision is a decision that maximizes the progress towards a chosen goal. Without a goal, there can be no rationality in decision making process.

Rationality deals with HOW, and in order to be able to deal with HOW, it must know WHY.

Rationality cannot answer any WHY’s unless these WHY’s are posed as HOW’s to some other WHY’s.

But there is an end to this process, and at the top of the hierarchy, there is always a WHY that has nothing above it.

Here is another way to say the same thing.

To make an arbitrary choice rational, you have to subordinate it to a goal. To subordinate it to a goal, you need to choose a goal. This choice is an arbitrary one unless you promote it to a rational one by subordinating it to another goal. So now you have a choice of a goal that is guided by some other goal. You can do this for as many goals as you wish, but at some point you have to stop the process by arbitrarily choosing the top-most goal.

I think this is known as “infinite regress”.

So how do we anchor our decisions given the above?

First, this isn’t necessary. There is no reason, only a need, to do so. That means that anchoring is a choice too. You can do it but you do not have to.

So why do it at all? Where’s your WHY for this decision?

Decisions can be made completely randomly. This is, however, made difficult by one’s past, which is to say, by one’s impulses. So while possible, it is rather improbable that one will remain consistent in one’s randomness. Still, that’s exactly what hedonists do. They are breeding a man of complete randomness.

A man of complete randomness is not self-valuing but self-devaluing because he values himself not in terms of himself – of his past – but in terms of what is not himself – of what is counter to his past.

What does it mean to self-value anyways?

To self-value means to value identity. And to value identity means to value order.

Metaphysically speaking, there is nothing but change. Within this change, there are slow currents of change, which we call order, and fast currents of change, which we call chaos.

To self-value means to value slow change.

Men of randomness value precisely the opposite: fast change.

Self-valuing isn’t the only kind of valuing there is, and the choice of one over the other is not a rational one.

You posit self-valuing as a building block – an atom – of reality. This is a derivative of Monistic Ontology that has absolutely nothing to do with Process Ontology. You do not really seem to understand what Process Ontology is.

You claim that there are no “things”, only probability states. It appears to me that the only distinction you are making here is that between static things and dynamic things. There are no static things, you say, only dynamic things that appear to be static to an untrained eye. This is a very simplistic understanding of Process Ontology.

Your self-valuing may be a dynamic thing, but it’s still a thing, an atom, a building block of the giant mechanism that is universe.

Process Ontology goes much further than that. It states that the universe is fundamentally indeterministic. The change does not occur according to some underlying mechanism, or algorithm, hidden or not. It occurs, quite literally, randomly.

If you accept that the universe is fundamentally random, then you must prepare for the emergence of phenomena that is not self-valuing.

Of course, what is possible is not necessarily probable, but you must not deny the possibility. Furthermore, self-devaluings are already a real phenomenon. In fact, it’s dominant phenomena (the universe, itself, is self-devaluing, for example.)

To think that everything is self-valuing is to blind yourself to reality that is not self-valuing.

There are living examples of self-devaluing right on this forum. See Zoot, for example. See his forum-deleting philosophy-hating it’s-all-just-a-joke attitude for an example of a strong, relatively consistent, self-devaluing.

Another mistake that you make is that you assume that self-valuing is necessarily a good thing. This isn’t true. There are people who value themselves too much. People who are too strict, too hard on themselves and others.

Conversely, it is a mistake to think that all self-devaluing is necessarily a bad thing. Since change is inevitable, self-devaluing is inevitable too. It is better to have a control over your devaluation, than not to have any control.

There is an art in suffering that consists in distributing the force of impact across the entire body, instead of placing it all in one place. The ideal is to engage the whole body, not merely a part of the body.

But of course, this is yet another arbitrary choice.

The question remains: how do you decide? How do you anchor your decisions? What do you use to anchor decisions?

Though one can offer alternatives, it is still up to the individual to make their own decision.

There is no rationality, no objective ground, to pick any one of them. It’s an arbitrary choice.

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is this a circle dance? skirt around the philosophical complaints by attempting to substantiate with third-party meanings.

What possible value can there be concerning something that is both a wave and a particle? That has multiple doppelgangers throughout the universe, and can be in multiple locations at the same time? That which has ‘value’ [information] are at a more defined and less fluid level of existence.

‘Value ontology’ assumes that values reach into the quantum flux - let us say, and make themselves take on more particular form in the world. Like an existential yo-yo or self yielding ladel. If I am not mistaken [!?] the philosophy continues such, that the collective of all values are a ‘force’ manifesting the physical macroscopic world. From there we do another inverse twist and now the will [-to power] is the upper level of the force. it then follows that this is a top down authoritism.

its [VO] a bit like a tree and nothing else needs to exist. :-"
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Just because there is order in every observable phenomenon does not mean we should designate every phenomenon as order.

Similarly, just because absolute chaos is an idealization that has never been observed in reality does not mean that no phenomenon should be designated as chaos.

In all phenomena, there is a degree of order and a degree of chaos. The dominating element decides whether any particular phenomenon should be designated as chaos or as order.

You are denying the existence of chaos dominating order (the opposite of self-valuing) and are trying hard to (mis)interpret everything in terms of order dominating chaos (self-valuing.)

Subatomic particles do not self-value, they self-devalue.

Chaos is ontic, not epistemic, randomness.

Randomness is uncaused cause, or “causa sui”, though “causa sui” implies that the cause is caused by itself.

Metaphysically, the universe is chaos.

Process Ontology is Chaos Ontology, not Process Monism.

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Cross, this is what will happen. What always happens. I would ask you to write a summary of VO, then I would comb it for formal and informal fallacies, then you would respond to those fallacies, and then I would comb your response, etc.

Eventually the meaning of a word either begins and terminates in its immediate use and context, or it stretches out across a landscape of self-referential philosophical circularity wherein words take on their meanings through other words… rather than through their immediate use.

If you say “I value this piece of art”, I wouldn’t need to ask “what do you mean by value” to understand why you just bought it, or why you didn’t put your foot through it, or why you are smiling when you look at it, and so on. But if you were to use the word ‘value’ in one of your explicatives, I wouldn’t know what the word meant, or rather, I wouldn’t know which way you used it, among all the avaliable ways it could be used and meant.

Of course I could ask, but then the process would repeat.

I don’t know what to tell you man. If you can’t look at something you write and deconstruct it yourself, nobody will ever be able to do it for you.

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I think I just put that post in the wrong thread.

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Five bucks says Dusan the Mighty is Magnus Anderson.

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Amorphos, that’s beginning to look like the sort of logic I can work with.

It only follows by the decision to have it follow; the philosopher is the first point in which the reverse can take place.
Everything before was passively responsive to this reality; as soon as man knows of a law he starts to actively respond to it, reach for the heights in its terms. The will to power wasn’t really a law, it was the ethics of which the law was forged. If we assume its logic for a moment, there are some natural, unconsciously set goals implicit; The law is forged so as to place us deeper within our own sphere of experience an action. It is ‘meant’ to increase the power of man over his environment and himself. It is described by itself, it requires no pre existing logics to make sense, only a few alterations in how we perceive the rank of value, self and consciousness. And that re-arrangment itself is useful, instrumental, crucial, vital, philosophical.

Part of it self-valuing merit may be its being difficult to understand; usually philosophers do not manage to select the truly willing, powerful, and discard those who have no business in the ruthless arena of unfolding reason. Of course this is only one method, by no means determining every form of philosophical rank, but it does do its job; it trains, both you and me.

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That is why it is not an actual ontology, merely a perspective and ideology.

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Jakob

thanks, I like VO’s strength it gives you, but naturally I have to put it through its paces.

I

That’s a good philosophy [and I think its a war], but a philosophy [like VO] which exists in its own ‘cell’ wont give you mastery. Existing upon its own merits can only mean that VO cannot contrast itself against that which lies outside. A philosophy has to stand up in itself and to all others who would oppose it. Otherwise VO is like a trained boxer in the ring by himself?

It is not, it is very simple to understand [what it pertains to is not]. The difficulty is in getting anyone to say what it is and then engage in discourse, then more importantly the boxer has to meet his opponent and knock his lights out! There are very simple problems at base which cause VO to not get out of its own ‘vat’ - so to say. VO is not touching the real world and clasping hold of it, instead it holds the world to be in a ‘state of valuing’ denying its reality ~ its actual value. Buddhists and Hindus do a similar thing.

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As you say, Dusan, randomness means an uncaused cause or causa sui. Causa sui means “cause of itself” or “self-cause”. Now compare “self-cause” (self-causation, self-causing) to “self-valuing”. You see where I’m going with this?

What you don’t seem to grasp is that VO is “before the light”. In my view, existence is entirely deterministic (this is necessary for a modern scientific view, as modern science is paradigmatically mechanistic: consider the term “quantum mechanics”). However, in my view existence has come into existence out of nothing, through self-causation. In terms of WTP, existence, or all the wills of which existence consists, have willed themselves into existence… Yes, I view them as free wills. However, when free wills clash, they inhibit each other. It’s like that old song in which an irresistible force meets an immovable object: the object will resist the force and thereby be moved by it. In other words, it’s like an omnipotent God’s creating a stone He cannot lift and then lifting it: He can do so, but not effortlessly.

Now obviously this is not logical. Like the axioms of logic (a.k.a. the laws of thought) themselves, it’s pre-logical. The law of identity (A=A), for example, is an assertion: the assertion of a self-identical “A”. This is perfectly parallel to a self-valuing’s assertion of a self, its self-assertion as a self-valuing.

Incidentally, your posts also consist of assertions. Your second-last one in this thread is an extremely long list of assertions. In this you are entirely reminiscent of Satyr. And like his, your “philosophy” is an ontology of Vagueness. Your terms like “flux” and “randomness” are supposed to evoke a sense of foreboding; your readers are supposed to say, or feel, “Oooo” and “Aaah” when you use them. Likewise, your spacing: hit enter once or twice after every few sentences, leave your reader a pause to let your “profound” statements sink in. Oooo…

Like you KTS people, we, the VO crew, insist on the primacy of values over facts, of will over reason. Contrary to you guys, however, we value existence, which is not just flux but also that which issues forth from that flux; not just the Titanic or barbaric element but also the Apollinian. You guys mistake the Titanic or barbaric for the Dionysian, whereas it’s only the Apollinian that makes it Dionysian. We love appearance or illusion as such, i.e., as an imposition.

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And the question that has to be asked : why? (Impose)

The answer is, to dispose of the non-evaluative ontologies, those which do not enimate , or willed by
the basic ontology of equivalence.
What of, the differential ontology of value? One’s, that do not come before the light? Where is the equivalance then? The pre existing ontology of value?

It is then, axiomatic, then, that it would have to be illusionary. I can see the point, but it’s is transparent to a degree, and thus, similarly, paradaigmnically self
depreciative, albeit, minutely.

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Causa sui, or self-caused cause, is slightly distinct from uncaused cause in that it implies a cause and attributes it to self.

Randomness implies no cause and no self.

Self-valuing is diametrically opposed to self-causing (here understood as self-randomization.) In fact, it is this self-causing that you deny by reducing everything to self-valuing.

The law of identity isn’t a mere assertion. It holds true so as long you do not take equality literally. It’s not a mere value. Sauwelios isn’t Sauwelios simply because I want it to be so.

My philosophy can be described as Vague Ontology? Does this mean I am a self-vaguing?

The concept of flux is pretty clear. The concept of randomness even more so.

Random: that which lacks (or disobeys) pattern.
Flux: the universe is disobeying patterns.

Science does not require that the universe is entirely (= strictly) determined but that it is sufficiently determined. Besides that, noone cares about the requirements of science. Either the universe permits it or it does not. If it does, as it does, it does not mean it is strictly determined.

Values being more important than facts sounds like subjectivism to me.

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That which appears to lack or disobey patterns.
But who knows what real patterns may exist in the random?
We can’t always see the patterns - we can’t always observe cause and effect and the whole panoramic view in one clean sweep.
We’re not all like Sherlock Holmes :mrgreen: who could see patterns in what to us might be considerd random.

I may be wrong here but you see no pattern in let’s say the flow of the river - flux

the ebb and tide of the ocean - flux and flow

The changing seasons which repeat their selves '- for instance the leaves on the trees changing color then letting go.
You see no flux - no flow?

I would say that the wind is flux - it flows. There is a pattern to that too.

From my perspective, the universe through the laws of nature are obeying patterns.

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What we recognize as random can very well be part of a larger order that we can’t recognize. For instance, 00100100000100100. The bold 0 appears to be random because it is in the place of something else that was expected (we were expecting a 1 there).

But if I extended that series twice or more the appearance of the bold 0 would no longer be random because it has become a repetition now… there is a pattern, a bold 0 occurs every nineth number.

Other than that to say something is ‘causally random’ is nonsense. Causality can only proceed linearally throw an arrow of time, so every event that happens along the way is part of an irreducible order… think of chain links.

Nothing random can happen in this arrangement because what happens, and the antecedent conditions prior to its happening, cannot not have happened otherwise.

When we use the word random we are usually misunderstanding what it means, with what we mean to say. It’s just that the word random seems to be the best word for it… that idea we are trying to articulate when we use the word.

In any event, to be able to know if something is random, one would have to observe an entire sequence through time with a beginning and an end. But because the universe is infinite the entire series never repeats… only little series (patterns) within the larger, open ended series repeat.

I will now take your questions.

…

Yes but there is nothing that commands and nothing that obeys in nature, Arc. Just like there is nothing that ‘determines’ anything. These words have anthropomorphic subtext.

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You are repeating yourself, Zoot. It is the definition of insanity. You do not adapt, you merely repeat while expecting different results.

In order to further the discussion, you need to address what I am saying. You are not doing this, even though that’s what you should be doing. Otherwise, I’d have to repeat myself too, which isn’t rewarding, which is why I have to add something new into the mix, so that I don’t die from boredom.

Please, don’t be like Biguous.

Your logic amounts to “it is possible”. You are simply showing that it is possible that everything is a part of larger order. You are NOT showing that it is probable.

Fun fact: you can do this with anything.

You can sit down, and using imagination, demonstrate that anything you want to believe in is possible.

God, for example. Or solipsism.

However, as fun as that it is, at the end of the day, we are really only interested in what is probable, not in what is merely possible.

If something appears to be random (i.e. lacking pattern) then it is random until proven otherwise. This is Occam’s Razor at work: you do not make any extra assumptions. Hidden order is one such assumption.

You start with the apparent. If what is apparent is randomness, not order, then it is random, not ordered.

Hidden order is hidden, not apparent, which is why it is called hidden and not apparent.

You start with nothing – with zero – and gradually build from there.

You start with the “negative”.

Randomness is absence of order in the same way atheism is absence of belief. These are “zeros” you start from.

When you ask me to prove that the universe is random, when it is apparently random, you are, in effect, asking me to prove a negative – to prove that it is not ordered.

You are trying to put the two claims, that there is no order and that there is order, on the same pedestal, when in reality, they are different in rank. The first claim, that there is no order, makes no assumptions, whereas the second claim, that there is order, does. The onus is on you to prove that what you assume is true.

You consider order to be apparent not because it is apparent (it is apparently hidden) but because you are dominated by instinct.

It is apparent to you merely because you cannot think otherwise, merely because you cannot eliminate the unnecessary assumption of hidden order.

Satyr plays part in this, I am sure, because by eliminating this assumption you will have to face the fact that you were dominated by him.

There is as much mysticism here as there is in atheism.

I make no assumptions. You do.

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Sauwelios

Then there must have been something in the nothing! Even if it could perform the miracle of ‘self-cause’, the means to how it done that would have been there in that space and formed its potential. In other words, if one particle can pop into existence, then another can do so in the same way, including prior to it.
The ‘self-cause’ you propose as being the base layer beneath the quantum mechanistic layer, is like a point of the existential mountain; whereas quantum duality says that the same particle can be in multiple locations, there can be more than one of the same particle etc, which means there is no apex to the mountain, only an ever greater fluidity.

There are natural limits, and once we pass them the whole thing has to find a way to resolve into eternity/infinity. There can be no beginning, and so there can be no beginning of an existential tree with ‘value ontology’ at its base! …especially one that’s a self serving ladle.

  • I agree about the spacing lol ~ though I am not aiming for effect, as that would be childish and my lion wouldn’t allow for that. I think of philosophical statements a bit like formulas/compositions.

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An event is said to be random if it cannot be predicted from its past.

Such an event can be said to have little or no connections to its past.

Ordering is the strengthening of one’s connections to the past (increase in predictability, though not necessarily an increase in the ease of predictability.) Disordering, on the other hand, refers to the weakening of one’s connections to the past (becoming less and less predictable though not necessarily more and more difficult to predict.)

Self-valuing refers to ordering.

By reducing everything to self-valuing one denies the phenomenon of disordering, which in the case of people manifests as nihilism.

Notice how Yuckob denies that nihilists have no values and simply interprets them as those who have low values.

But nihilists are anti-valuings, not simply lower self-valuings.

This is pleasant to people because it allows them to avoid responsibility for their actions.

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Can/cannot be predicted in practice, or can/cannot be predicted in principle, are two very different things.

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I’m using that Google Voice thing right now so we’re going to experiment to see how it works think of it like this Magnus Numerical quantifiable events are never random but meaningful events can be random. at every moment in time everything is ordered and reordered and things that appear to be random are only new novel reorderings of the original material. physical facts are never random and everything is conditioned buy something else. this conditioning is is very definite and involves very definite measures of force. nothing ever squeezes in by chance in this series. nothing comes into this relationship unconditioned.the values of these forces are numerical and quantifiable and as long as there a statistical regularity in the universe they will remain. remember, what appears chaotic can actually be part of a larger rhythm