I’m new in this community. Anyone interested in engaging with these sorts of questions? If so, share your thoughts.
My initial inclination is that intrinsic value is an illusion.
I’m new in this community. Anyone interested in engaging with these sorts of questions? If so, share your thoughts.
My initial inclination is that intrinsic value is an illusion.
Outside of physical properties, like mass, charge or spin, I don’t think so. It’s all made up by us. Which isn’t a bad thing, I think.
Yet we have no proof these physical properties exist without humans to experience and quantify them. So in some sense, could we not say that they exist because we experience and quantify them?
Well, I guess we have to accept that we both exist and we expirence a share a universe with some objective properties. At least I wouldn’t know how to make any argument outside of that premise.
But with that, I’d say we have a basic understanding of how this universe works. We know our eyes detect a certain electromagnetic spectrum which is the predominant mechanism to carry information around in this universe. And we managed to do quite a lot by inferring laws of nature from that, building them up and these days we can detect and meassure all kinds of forces that tells us things that allows us to build things, and it all … works (ignoring the many times it didn’t, but it’s part of the process). So that’s proof. But of course we invented the concept of proof …
One could ask, does the universe without humans have value? Does order over chaos have value? Does energy vs empty space have value?
If it would all still exist and go on this way without humans, it feels like someone or something must have seen value in it at least at some point. Or perhaps we do really exist in some manifestation of total chaos.
But there is where I end up in the same question as @[email protected]. What exactly do you mean by value?
I don’t know what you mean if order has value over chaos, but we have values for order and the general law is, that it’s going towards chaos. Entropy.
And according to physicists, empty space itself has an energy value. They call it dark energy. No one knows what it is.
Also, I think it’s a bit egocentric to think it’s all about humans. Who says we are the only ones with the concept of value, even just on our planet. Maybe we’re just an anomaly. Like mold growing on someone’s solar system model.