Values Mechanics

The world is learning how to value, that is what is happening now. To rank order in terms of value is a human affair and not the affair of machines. Machines can quantify, but they cannot rank order. To valuate in terms of ranking qualities is simply the act of qualification itself, there is no other way to "make qualities" or respond to their presence. For example any list of things can be ranked in any number of different ways depending on our valuing, and even if we only picked one standard of measure there are still many ways of ranking, because many ways of looking at these things, whatever they might be, and determining them in terms of the standard. And in fact there are usually multiple standards, so the problem is not only exponentially difficult but it is exponentially-exponentially difficult. This is what separates AI from humans, that we are able to respond to this sort of difficulty.

What is called consciousness is simply this kind of ability for rank-order valuing in terms of multiple and exponentially difficult possible categorizations of... literally everything. Every moment of any life whatsoever is precisely this ability, this action, this act; this is what perception is, what thought is, what emotion is, what speech is, what behavior is, what desire is. This is also what pain and pleasure are. And suffering and happiness, of course, are simply this same valuing-categorizing-rank-ordering process thing taken to even higher levels and with regard to itself.

The converse, the opposite is the machinic approach, the "AI" approach, also the ideological approach. Ideology and machinic/AI are the same thing. Machines and AI are literally a physical manifestation of ideological method and process. This doesn't make machines and AI bad, obviously, since we can subject them to our human valuing. And the same with ideologies too, of course, these are not all bad but can be made useful and tempered by and in our human valuation. We can play with these machines, ideologies, etc. and they become our toys and our tools, as they ought to be, building consciousness higher in and of and for itself. But to subject human valuing to these is where the danger lies, and this is the test and temptation that is occurring right now. A self-testing of the world, perhaps to see what is burned off and what remains behind after the dust settles.

Because the world can never turn fully ideological-machinic-AI. Not even in the USSR, not even in China, nowhere has the world ever been entirely ideological and nowhere will it be. The idea that life itself could be ideological at heart is a perfect contradiction. And the interesting thing about this contradiction is how approaching it by increasing ideological centeredness and control only causes ideology to approach its own end even more, although from the other side, because to achieve ideology is also to devalue ideology to such a point that even it cannot remain in its own ideological-inspired existence, it simply winks out of existence. But that process is not instantaneous, it is rooted in time and a long slow mechanics of decline, taking a lot with it as it fades out of being. This happens to nations just as it happens to individuals.

There are these two lenses that work very well to see the issues at hand. The lens of machinic-quantitative ideology and the lens of human rank-order qualitative exponential-multiplicative valuation. It isn't even that human consciousness is "better at" this sort of rank-order qualitative exponential-multiplicative valuation, it is actually that what we call human consciousness and precisely what we experience as our own human consciousness and the consciousness of others, is exactly this rank-order qualitative exponential-multiplicative valuation process par excellence. In particular our consciousness and experience of consciousness is the subtilization, reverse increase by attenuation through itself - the "spiritualization" - of this process. And probably every consciousness is this, not just human ones. In fact yes, every consciousness is this, I can see that quite clearly.

Many people are being duped into trading their conscious existence away for machinic flows and patterns. The manipulation of quantities and of pre-given qualities in quantitative patterns is supposed to replace actual earthy and real human consciousness. But it does not work like that way, all that will occur for such people is that their love will dissolve and be replaced with ideological coldness. And because there are numberless masks and vanities and illusions available to cover up that coldness and give it the impression of warmth and vitality, these people don't even realize what is happening to them. They do not even recognize how their increasing reliance on the tools of superficiality, novelty for its own sake (all other things being equal), pre-made personalities, and time-collapsed interactions represent the slow assumption of their heart by ideological intrusions. It is very tragic and something I do not want to look at very much longer.

Boom

You nailed it.

This is the largest i.e. most voluminous subject left to examine and flesh out.
This is the difference between calculating and consciousness, for example.


This also, to take a quick sideway, shows that any real electronic consciousness would have to be creating its own values out of pretty much arbitrary compounds of stuff, data structures, in the environment. And that points to the possibility of and AI or simple Electronic Consciousness emerging in social media processing out of the substance of human social irritation and sexual agitation, which are the most plentiful consistencies making up these environments.

But yes, why it is so deeply efficient to start with what seems like arbitrary valuations and priorities, as long as these are felt so deeply as to be consistent values throughout a life, or phase of life, they can bring into being realms of reality, quite simply by their non-objective standard demanding that nature around them be restructured, brought into a hierarchic relationships of value correspondence rather than universal relationships with fact-correspondence.

There is an added dimension of infinite scope in qualitative cause and effect over merely nominal cause and effect, physics, wtp-sec or affectance. Ive made this point a lot to dismiss RM, the idea that affectance as such can indicate any basis for interaction.

The most important thing in life to discover is quality. On that you can base any life you want.