Values, Meaning, and the Future
expressions arrived at while searching ....

eLetter to Anthony Judge, Union of International Associations
3 July 1998

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"Tony,

Without waiting for a usable URL for 'values93.htm', I went hunting and started exploring your Human Values Project. Going where angels fear to tread I read through your 'definitions' section.

You make it damned difficult for me to find a niche, you are so thorough!      :-)

Your 2.1.6 comment is the most cogent question for humanity (not just 'complexity'):    "In some sense values may themselves take the form of an "emergent" phenomenon--a matter of concern if their future emergence is not to be inappropriately constrained. From this perspective, to what extent does chaos theory offer new insights through which a richer approach to values can emerge? This should presumably strike a more fruitful balance between the relativism of individual values and a measure of collective constraint in a turbulent society."   ...reconciling a singular concept that has plural applications.

I then looked at the quotes of 2.2.1. I'm sure you know this already, but I would assert that there is a very simple definition of "values" .. which relates to "meaning", that is the one common thread found underscoring all those
quotes and is even the common quality binding Baier's 2 distinctive classes of "values" ... the notion of "future use". This extends to all venues and concerns and applications ... pragmatic, transcendent or exploratative.

Meaning and value are indeed "emergent" in that sense, because the are relationships of 'anticipation'. Things, ideas, techniques, that can (future tense) have an interactive impact on some event, person, behavior ... are imbued with or assigned "value", "pertinence", "meaning", "connective reference" ... in a deterministic schemata flow.

That can be done accurately or inaccurately, but it doesn't matter, per se.  It can be done because we are involuntary reactors to pheromone recognition on a sub-cognitive level. It can be done because we accept
a life-model that includes astrological interconnections. It can be done because we are conceptual skeptics who "value" only empirical evidence.   It can be created via successsful pertinence to maintaining social order.etc.

Values, meanings, relevances are the the intangible "real" correlations between what we recognize in the "now" and anticipate as being pertinent to our lives - in some fashion or another - in the future.

I tend to see them as the "objective" qualities ... even though we can only experience them in volumes of "specific contexts". They are typically "culturally specific" while existing pandemically in every culture. They are social and personal simultaneously, because our lives are concurrances of so many different on-going 'relationships' that each has "values" important to their maintenence or alteration.

We need the stability of some extent of day-by-day mutual value structure, but, to exist using the essential quality of Evolution, humanity's survival will rely on - as you (and Laszlo and Banathy and others) point out - an adaptive ability. A comfortableness with moving through a variety of "local" value (organization) arrangements ... and priorities.

Not to be "cameleons" but to be "survivors-regardless-of-adaptation-challenges". There is such a proliferation of "Values" that some will have to be amended and some will endure and even the not-so-good for everyone values will have to be tolerated and maintained, because Broad Diversity is the strength of every Biota/Gaia ... including
the Human Social/Soma millieu.

Concensus is like an asymptote. Something we want to strive for but never want to reach ... because that is stasis and lack of diversity.

My version?  Values are our constant projections of what the future is or should be or can be. We only perceive "values" in terms of "here and now" because we have the context of past deliberations to assess each "present moment" by...and evaluate whether our previous considerations were good or not, accurate or not. As the stream of time goes on.

... some reflections spurred by your completness.

Jamie
July 3, 1998

 

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