On Value and the Value of Women

lurkythelurkingbean · 2016-04-22T17:20:15+00:00

First, I'll say that I agree with the macroscopic points of your post, as far as how bringing value to the table is important in developing and maintaining social connections. Anything I say should not be taken as a defense of letting yourself be of no value to anyone else. But I do have a different perspective from you when it comes to the idea of intrinsic value on a "floating debris in space" level, and wrestling with these ideas really helped me on my personal journey, so the hope is that picking apart the underlying philosophy here might help someone in coming to grips with the reality that you need to provide value to people to be successful.

This is a concept that I struggled with for a while when I was going through my "ve belief in NOZZING" phase. I think it came down to the argument that on some deep, non-intuitive level, I truly believe that the stone and the man in your example hold the same level of sentience. There appears to be some distinction about the man, who seems to be able to form "thoughts" and "emotions," but what are these really? Ultimately, sentience is just a very complicated mechanized process that takes physical inputs, rearranges some energy, and spits out a physical output. To a physicist or Dr. Manhattan, there really isn't a difference in substance between a rock, a mosquito, a computer, a dog, or a human. They're all just slightly more complex versions of chemical reactions, which are, in turn, just perturbations of some pervasive energy field.

The book Godel, Escher, Bach deals with this subject extensively. In developing his incompleteness theorem, Godel showed that any number theory powerful enough to describe the behavior of the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, etc.) must by necessity be self-referential at some point. GEB argues that this self-reference is the basis of consciousness, or what we would call a sentient being. So at the very basic level, we could say that math is sentient. Math possesses the qualities that, when taken to a more complex level, we recognize as consciousness: forming patterns and having self-awareness.

Now this can quickly devolve into the debate about whether math is inherent in the universe or it's a man-made construct to describe the universe, but I think that debate is stupid and a waste of time. I see it as arguing around the point, which is that humans are basically just a really, really complicated robots that were built by natural processes over 13 billion years.

So how does this relate to this post?

This post is all about finding meaning, finding a subjective value to an object (fuck the SJWs, all people are objects). You argue that value is not inherent to anything, that it must be seen by some outside viewer to have any value. But my reservations with this thinking starts with this:

Indeed, the term value is, in a universe sans consciousness, meaningless.

Is a universe sans consciousness even possible? What constitutes an outside observer? If we believe GEB's claim that math itself can be considered a rudimentary form of consciousness, it seems to me that we can't view the universe at any point as being without some form of self-awareness. When you say

Some become autonomous. Some not.

you skip over the most interesting part! Does meaning appear when rocks form? Apparently your answer is no. What about the first molecule of life? It must have had a completely different experience than what we know as life today; was it capable of establishing meaning? A mosquito? Does my arm mean something to a mosquito, or is it just running an algorithm that attracts it to flesh? A computer? Is AI capable of establishing meaning in any non-trivial way?

What about words? Does a word have a meaning with no one around to read it? The obvious answer is no, but think about what constitutes a word. These words are black pixels arranged in a specific pattern. There must be something about that particular arrangement that holds significance, as it still retains the quality of being able to be interpreted. Would an alien 5 million years in the future be able to process these words without a knowledge of English and discern some of the meaning behind them? If so, are the words themselves important, or do they carry some intrinsic meaning?

My answer, I guess, would be somewhere between yours and an SJWs: everything has intrinsic value, as we are all part of the same, inseparable system. But this should not lead anyone to the SJW conclusion that all people are special snowflakes who deserve equal treatment for sitting on your ass all day and not bringing anything to society. On the contrary, coming to this point of view helped me establish my place in the world as one of many "separate" consciousnesses (in quotes because I believe the separateness is an illusion based in our limited perspective as organic machines), and it really pushed me to think of value in terms of the human race, and life in general, as a whole. How can I, as one individual meat sack, produce something that will help sustain not only the other meat sacks around me, but the inorganic stuff around me as well?

The outcome is the same: bringing value to those around you>being a lazy sack of shit. I'm nit-picking on purpose, because I really struggled for a while with the whole philosophy of people exchanging value in what seemed like such a selfish way. Now, I can appreciate selfishness as part of a larger whole that I was unable to see when I viewed people as some kind of special organism that gets to determine whether or not other objects are worth anything.

domoremath · 2016-06-28T16:38:43+00:00

Redpillschool's post above is a response to an original post about a rock. That post about the rock has now been deleted in the sidebar thread. If someone has a copy of that original rock post, could they upload it thanks.

2016-04-22T17:43:56+00:00

Things have value, when we say they have value. We take a lot of things for granted on a daily basis. For one thing, water. Water is something that is becoming more and more scarce throughout the US. On the west coast, there is a looming shortage, in Flint, Michigan its contaminated. But isn't it something we find everywhere? We pull it from the ground, it falls from the sky, and we swim in it. But, now there are different grades and pHs you can buy bottled, you can't drink tap because it's "not clean", you need a filtration system just to drink some. And that's another thing, when something holds value to you, you will try to control it.

A lot of people can agree that something holds value, but it's only when you agree that something holds value, is when it actually begins to hold value.

We don't need a lot to survive, food, water, clothes, shelter, everything else is just made-up.

Title	On Value and the Value of Women
Author	redpillschool
Upvotes	66
Comments	6
Date	April 22, 2016 1:19 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/TheRedPill
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/4fw82z/on_value_and_the_value_of_women/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/TheRedPill/on-value-and-the-value-of-women.57950 https://theredarchive.com/post/57950