Self-valuing

It does not seem right to pose self as an end.

Self is an inherited pattern of behavior, an identity, the value of which may be high or low.

Self isn’t an inherent good.

To posit self as an end, its preservation, is to posit its own value, be it high or low, as something to strive toward.

Don’t you want to become something better than what you already are?

By positing self as an end you can never become anything better than what you already are.

This is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s insistence that one should overcome oneself.

Self-valuing, it is clear to me, isn’t about self-overcoming, it is about self-preservation. It is about preserving one’s own value, be it high or low, it is about preserving everything good and everything bad about one’s self, without discrimination.

Self should be a means, not an end. A means to something greater. A means to over-self.

By positing self, something that already exists, as an end, you are doing nothing but positing equilibrium as an end. You are positing peace as an end.

But isn’t strength “an out-of-equilibrium dissipative system”, to use William Plank’s terms?

These self-centric philosophies are treating self-overcoming too harshly.

Self-overcoming, i.e. changing oneself, is a means, not an end, and as a means it is neutral in its value. Its value strictly depends on the end it is subordinated to.

Thus, if self-overcoming is used to make oneself weaker by eliminating everything strong about it, then it is clearly bad.

Similarly, if self-overcoming is used to make oneself stronger by eliminating everything weak about it, then it is clearly good.

In the universe of motion, which is the universe we inhabit, any self that has no goal higher than its own preservation will drown, will become extinct, will be consumed, for the simple reason that it refuses to make an effort to catch up with the reality of motion.

If you are not becoming better (= speeding up), you are becoming worse (= slowing down.)

The other problem with self-valuing is the insistence that everything is self-valuing. This is clearly a monist philosophy, and as any other monist philosophy, it is wrong for the simple reason that there is no such a thing as “fundamental drive” or “fundamental pattern of behavior” in reality.

In the universe of flux, nothing is equal, thus, nothing obeys one and the same principle. Instead, there is a multiplicity of patterns and varying degrees of difference between them.

Thus, rocks do not self-value. They are just being rocks. And no two rocks are being the same rock. Instead, each rock is being its own version of rock.

Furthermore, even if there was a shared pattern between rocks, it would still be strange to say that rocks are self-valuings. Rocks are not conscious beings capable of determining what is good and what is bad. They cannot value.

With all that said, one has to wonder: why do you still speak in terms of “self-valuing”? It’s apparently an inadequate and moreover stupid term.

Why do we want to evolve why I’ll tell you why.

The sole purpose of evolution is to acquire wisdom. With wisdom we can become the gaurdians. To become the gaurdian is the custodian of the heavenly entrances. Otherwise, it’s pointless. It’s that simple. We live in an object oriented world. The contents must be organized in a sublime manner, sublime.

We need to define self-valuing.

What I am going to do now is I am going to derive its definition purely from the term.

Self-valuing refers to an attitude of valuing oneself. To value oneself means to always judge one’s performance as being good.

For example, if a man who values himself shoots a three-pointer and misses it, he won’t say “oh no, that’s bad”, rather, he will pat himself on the back and tell himself something like “it’s not about winning, it’s about playing”.

This is how scrubs and other sore losers think, or rather, console themselves.

What this implies is that the individual is not capable of maintaining the dualism between the real (how things are) and the ideal (how things should be.) The high level of tension between the two forces him to abandon the ideal and completely surrender to the real.

The term can also be defined as “being yourself”, now suggesting that one should be no more than what one already is, or rather, was.

In the universe of motion, nothing remains what it is. Everything changes. What there is is a type of becoming, either towards the better (greater density, higher rate of vibration) or towards the worse (greater tenuity, lower rate of vibration.)

It boils down to the age old opposition between will and instinct, with will referring to active effort of gathering together one’s instincts in one place, thus increasing their interdependence and density, and instinct referring to passive no-effort of surrendering to individual instincts, thus increasing their independence and tenuity.

Self-valuing refers to instinct.

“Freedom to be oneself” means “freedom to surrender to one’s impulses”.

Unless, of course, the term means something else, something positive, in which case, the term should be abandoned and replaced with a more appropriate term.

This implies that there is ‘better’? Someone can be more highly skilled or a better tactician or what have you, but its all learned. We have to first make the assumption that a self can become better than another self – even where its two examples of you. Yet we have already stated that everything is inherited, so if that’s true then self cannot be the thing which comes before. If self is outside the system, then how can it be the thing which determines change?

Don’t get me wrong, I think there is great value in making one’s ‘self’ into a finely tuned instrument or an intellectual sword if you like, but that is what it is, the instrument we are given. We don’t make any part of the living form we inherit, so if someone is deficient in form, thats not their fault, and there is not one thing which makes us better and others degenerate.

the body is the machine made by nature, the mind is the spirit made by God/given divinity, the self is the thing which inhabits and inherits said machine, it is what it [the machine] does, and not what it is!

• apart from all that I am sure Thor approves ~ if one does have the form and aptitude to do great things.

Why self-valuing and not self-affirming?

Self-valuing suggests that one is valuing oneself. When someone says “I value myself” this implies that he values himself in a positive manner. Thus, self-valuing refers to unconditional, and therefore unrealistic, positive judgment of the value of one’s actions.

Self-affirming, on the other hand, refers to unconditional acceptance and realistic, conditional, judgment of the value of one’s actions. It’s about accepting oneself as one is, good or bad, and then working toward the better, not surrendering to what already is/was.

Instead of self-valuings, VO’ers would be talking about self-affirmings, and instead of Value Ontology, they would be talking about Affirmation Ontology.

Nonetheless, they would still be wrong, because not everything is affirming itself. Indeed, not everything has the capacity to so much as consider the possibility of affirming itself.

Provided all of this is true, which it is, one should abandon the term, and any resistance to abandon the term would signal emotional attachment to it. In a way, this emotional attachment would confirm the suspicion that self-valuing refers to nothing other than self-preservation.

We are discussing words, that is true, but words are not just words. You cannot use them in any way you want. There are better and worse words, and if you’re a philosopher, you should make it your task to abandon the worse ones and adopt the better ones.

There is indeed such a thing as “better”.

Humans aren’t machines. We aren’t simply following some hidden instructions. The idea that humans are machines is an over-generalization made by those who make a living out of mapping their environment (e.g. scientists.)

Our bodies do obey rules, but by applying force, we can change these rules.

That said, people can live their lives any way they want. Of course, that does not mean they can get anything they want, it simply means they can struggle to get whatever they want.

Thus, values aren’t hard-wired, values are a free choice, in the sense that one can set any kind of goal one wants.

There is no “metaphysical obligation” to value this or that. It is us, and noone else but us, who decides what is of value to us.

None of this, however, means that values are, or should be, an arbitrary choice. They can be but they need not be. It’s up to the person making a choice.

The difference between arbitrary and non-arbitrary choices lies merely in the amount of stimuli that is processed.

Arbitrary choices are a product of shallow processing that involves little stimuli.

Non-arbitrary choices, on the other hand, are a product of deep processing that involves a lot of stimuli.

There really are only two fundamental value standards: the one according to which we should process as much stimuli as possible (masculine out-of-equilibrium standard) and the one according to which we should process as little stimuli as possible (feminine not-really-a-standard seeking equilibrium.)

Thus, masculine standards are absolutistic, believing that there is a rank in everything, whereas feminine standards are relativistic, believing that everything is equal and/or relative.

The above position is not the same as that of self-valuing.

Self-valuing is the idea that everyone values in terms of themselves. This means that there is a finite number of ways to value.

My position, on the other hand, is the idea that everyone values in the manner that they . . . value. This means that there is an infinite number of ways to value.

VO’ers have narrowed their perceptual horizon to “valuing in terms of oneself”. Whenever something outside of this perceptual horizon is presented to them they simply deny it by misinterpreting it as something within their own perceptual horizon.

A person who has decided to live his life by slowly destroying himself is not valuing in terms of himself. The fact that one can find parallels between the two is not a proof of anything other than the fact that there is a degree of similarity, no matter how low, between any two things.

beforethelight.forumotion.com/t1 … e-ontology

What this suggests is that there are two capacities that are inherent to the universe, which is to say, that every being possesses these two capacities and that no being cannot not possess them.

The two capacities are:

1. the capacity to judge what is good and what is bad (to know what one has to do)

2. the capacity to execute, or the capacity to do what is good and to not do what is bad (to do what one knows what one has to do)

VO goes further than this – indeed, this is its main thesis – and claims that there is only one method of judgment, which they call “self-valuing”, or “valuing in terms of oneself”.

None of this is true, of course, because there are no fixed configurations (capacities, methods, etc.) There is no configuration that is not subject to change, which is to say, there is no configuration that cannot evolve into a higher configuration or devolve into a lower configuration.

From this it follows that any configuration shared between beings is shared only due to an accident and not because it is something inherent to the universe, which is to say, something that cannot not be shared.

Only conscious beings possess the capacity to judge, and even then, only some possess the ability to use this capacity.

Only living beings possess the capacity to execute, and even then, only some possess the ability to use this capacity.

There are conscious beings that can judge but cannot execute.

There are conscious beings that can execute but cannot judge.

Finally, not every conscious being capable of judgment uses the same method of judgment.

Nothing is fixed. Not even cross.

What is shared among beings is potential to acquire various configurations. This potential, though shared, is not equal.

Thus, beings persist not because there is some fixed mechanism within them that struggles to keep them persisting, but quite simply because the outcome of their interaction with the world is such that they persist.

This may be because they are making an internal effort to persist, but it also may be because the external environment is making an effort to make them persist.

There is any number of possible reasons.

The purpose of values is to determine the direction of our development. Good and bad are words we use to speak of pathways of development and their rank.

There is an infinite number of possible ways to develop, therefore, there is an infinite number of possible ways to value.

There is no single direction of development.

There are multiple directions of development that cannot be reduced to a single direction of development.

There is no “original direction of development” from which subsequent directions of development deviated and to which they must return.

There is indeed such a thing as deviation, but there is no such a thing as “original direction of development”.

There is neither one original direction of development that applies to all beings nor multiple original directions of development that apply to their corresponding types of beings.

What there is can be loosely associated with one of the two, we can say, fundamental directions of development: the one toward self-overcoming (power, centripetal motion) and the one toward self-preservation (weakness, centrifugal motion.)

Power is the degree to which one can change (= stress oneself) without breaking.

Breaking here refers to loss of what Fixed calls “structural integrity”.

Power, then, can be defined as the degree of integrity-preserving flexibility. This is what people mean when they say that “power is choice” (I reject such a definition because it is not sufficiently precise.)

To pursue power, then, would mean to make an active effort to increase the degree of integrity-preserving flexibility. To do so, one would have to heal one’s wounds created by prior stress, or in the case that one has no wounds, one would have to expose oneself to stress in order to create new wounds that one can then heal.

Thus, in order to increase power, one must overcome one’s self by breaking structural integrity.

This makes it clear that he who pursues power treats structural integrity, not as end, but as a means.

Power seeks to maximize stress, not to minimize it.

It is weakness that seeks to minimize stress. And the most efficient manner to minimize stress is by positing structural integrity as an end.

We need to understand what structural integrity is, and to do so, we need to understand the kinaesthetic composition of human beings.

Let us say that human beings are made out of multiplicity of energy flows each one of which is vibrating at a certain rate.

What do these energy flows refer to in reality? They refer to any kind of movement within our bodies. Think of heartbeat, breathing, digestion, blood circulation, feelings, thoughts, drives in general, macro-movements such as changes from one body position to another, and so on and so forth.

Structural integrity refers to a state of energy flows vibrating in unison. This means they are vibrating at the same rate.

Loss of structural integrity, which is sensed as dissonance, and in extreme cases as horrible pain, refers to a state in which energy flows are not vibrating at the same rate. Some flows are vibrating too fast and other flows are vibrating too slow.

Note that in the universe of motion there is nothing that remains the same. Everything changes. Thus, there is no such a thing as equal rate of vibration. Each energy flow vibrates at its own rate. There is thus no true unison. What there is, instead, is an illusion of equality produced by creating a gradient of energy flows that vibrate at their own rate. The smoother this gradient is, the greater the sense of consistency, of being true to one’s self.

The gap between the two energy flows vibrating at a considerably different rate is what is known as wound.

A wound can be healed by lifting up the slower flow(s) towards the faster flow(s).

Or it can be numbed by dragging down the faster flow(s) towards the slower flow(s).

In both cases, structural integrity is restored.

What this means is that both living and dying men can achieve structural integrity.

This is because structural integrity merely indicates that energy flows are in unison. It does not indicate whether these energy flows are speeding up (= living) or slowing down (= dying.)

Thus, whoever posits structural integrity as an end, it can be said, is dying.

All of nature is machines, …but that’s another topic perhaps.

For sure, I meant that there is no soul which gets better or worse. You get causality x,y,z, and you then are that, you get instead say, causality k,p,f and you will be that. So ‘better’ is a measure of ones ‘causal effectiveness’, and people are just people. For example you can have all the choice in the world, but choose to be say an artisan, and become good/better at that. If you adapt, then your code has that adaptation in it, that ability. …but I know that sounds like I am saying we are machines, thats just my way of wrapping my head around all the functions. What I mean though, is that e.g. being a good carpenter doesn’t change what and who you are as an individual.

_

Amor wrote

Irony above. Would have been a welcomed personalized expression in my essence thread that is if you ever get the bottom of Amor.

I assume you refer to VO.
VO posits self-valuing as a de facto end. “Self” does not figure into VO. There is no such thing really, so it couldn’t be valued.
The "self-+ in te compound word refers to the valuing. The valuing is what, through valuing the world in a certain way, ends up sustaining itself, thus implicitly valuing itself.

Very few here have ever gotten anywhere near to absorbing the composite term in its entirity.
I dont want to slander you, but I have a vague feeling you’ve been reading either Satyrs or Lyssa’s post on VO.
They are enslaved to it, resent this, and do everything in their power (and it is all they now do in their life) to make people like you approach it in their stunted ways.

Regardless, the idiotic interpretations all over the place have gotten me thinking about picking another term.
Actually, Ive already decided a year or so ago that I wasn’t going to explain any o this to people who dont pay for it, but then some one got me to respond to Kenny and I said somethings.
At least Kenny did read what I recommended, and seemed to actually have done some thinking. He wasnt close to getting the full scope, but he began to get njoticeably dizzy from the implications of what he was beginning to grasp, and ran off to transfigure in private. That betrays a trace of something, a strain of profundity of some sort.

It is – value to whom or what?

Valuing however precedes ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

‘good’ is a (human) value judgment.
Did Sordur talk to you about ‘the inherent value of a self-valuing’?
The guy is OBSCENELY STUPID.
get that in your heads, kids.
Dont get his intellectual HIV.

And this is not what VO does.

Hence, valuing.
Valuing is an ascending process.

Please read my posts on VO, not Snottirs.

Ok - you do no understand your own ends as values?

That would be a problem standing in the way of a logical mindframe.

That would explain a lot.

Ends, friends, are values. Even: final values.
A being is entirely conditional to its ends.

The future carries what a man is, as much as the past.

Responding further beyond this point would sick, I first need you to cure yourself of the truly stupid elements you’re close to.
Understanding VO will require hard years of wielding the hammer on yourself. First of all to wreck that hard but porous, itchy pasty layer that you’ve acquired from bathing in Satyrs droppings.

Overcome your puny, puny addiction to that place where you can feel superior.
Your IQ is likely above 100. VO requires at least 130/140 IQ.
(Mine is off the charts)

The term self-valuing implies that one is valuing one’s self. If you are claiming that this isn’t so, then you need to find a better term.

Now, you are saying that what one values is valuing itself. That would make it something like valuing-valuing, no?

Very strange.

• What do you value, sir?
• Why, I value valuing!

You are saying that valuing is an ascending process. Strange. Valuing is neither ascending nor descending. To value simply means to determine what one considers to be good and what one considers to be bad. What one considers to be good need not be ascent.

To say that one is valuing valuing is to say that one has no other purpose in life than to value i.e. to determine worth.

What kind of person spends his entire life doing nothing but pondering what is good and what is bad?

You should choose better terms, I agree with that, but the reason you should be choosing better terms should not be because people are criticizing your terms, nor because people are failing, or supposedly failing, to understand what you’re trying to say, but because you want to reflect reality as accurately as possible.

The rest of your post is comedy. I am not going to touch that.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyEE0qpfeig[/youtube]

You mentioned hammer, didn’t you?

I would prefer if you could actually tackle my points.

Beings are not fundamentally valuing. Valuing is a later development.

Before Fixed Cross himself responded, I wrote this:

::

Self-valuing does not just mean valuing oneself or “being yourself”. It also literally means the valuing of valuing. Not of any valuing, but of the valuing of valuing, etc. In other words, not of valuing in general but of that specific valuing of valuing, which is then the valuing (1) of valuing # 1.

Now not only is this a circularity and thereby absurd, but it would indeed be mere self-preservation (even if that self-preservation is at the same time a self-creating out of nothing) if it weren’t at the same time the valuing of an ideal self. The valuing (1) of valuing # 1 is the real self of the self-valuing in question, but this real self implies an ideal self which it approaches or from which it strays.

Real selves imply ideal selves paradoxically inasmuch as they haven’t realized themselves as valuing-valuings as expounded above. They have a self-image that is not the image of a valuing, but merely of a “self”, a “being”.

Though this seems to be a point on which Fixed Cross and I disagree, I think it follows from this self-valuing logic that there is a peak that cannot be overcome: the mode of being that realizes itself as a self-valuing in the full sense expounded above. Then there is no difference between the real self and the ideal self.

::

I wonder what Fixed Cross thinks of this.

I think what Fixed means by the word “self-valuing” is like the word “rear” and “rear”, two words spelled the same but with different meanings.

From what I interpret, he means it along the lines of “auto-valuing”, like some kind of inherent automatic valuing process in the organism, a “self-valuing”.

I never really dug much deeper in the ontology, from the surface description of the word, it doesn’t seem possible for it to explain any secrets or mysteries of consciousness and the universe, so I kind of just let the ontology sit and simmer and do it’s own thing. I don’t bother it, it doesn’t bother me.

It’s important to try to understand the meaning of the concept of “valuing”. To do so, we have to make a difference between what “valuing” means in reality and what “valuing” means in VO.

TRUE VALUING

In reality, valuing refers to a conscious activity of going through possible pathways of becoming in order to determine their worth. This means assigning them value in terms of good/bad indicating whether we should seek or avoid them. (It’s a much more complicated mechanism in reality, but for the purposes of this post, this simplified version would suffice.)

There is an infinite number of ways to determine value. There is no necessary method of judgment. (There is, in fact, nothing that is necessary.)

Thus one and the same method of judgment can be shared among people, or not. And even when it is not shared, there is no “metaphysical obligation” that can motivate beings to strive to return to some “original method of judgment”.

Valuing, defined in this manner, is a later evolutionary development. Many beings do not have the capacity to determine what is good and what is bad.

FALSE VALUING

You, on the other hand, define valuing as an unconscious activity that is fundamental to the universe in the sense that every living, i.e. persisting, being is operated and kept alive by this underlying mechanism.

Valuing, defined in this manner, is pure fiction, as there are no necessary mechanisms in the universe of flux (= every rule has a counter-rule.)

It might be a pattern shared among some beings, that much I can admit, but I doubt that there is a single being behaving according to it in the present day. It’s pure fiction. Moreover, I believe it is a fiction invented in order to cover reality. Instead of perceiving your pattern of behavior realistically, you are misperceiving it by attributing it to some mechanism that is fundamental to the universe. In this manner, you hide behind a proxy in order to avoid taking responsibility for your actions.

Growth is a change from one state to another in which what was in the previos state is translated into the next state as the same thing but bigger. Though the thing that grows remains the same in most aspects, it nonetheless changes in at least one aspect, such as, for example, volume.

Apparently, if one values one’s self, which means, if one strives to preserve one’s self in its original state, then growth is not desirable. It might be accepted as a necessity, but it is not, and will never be, a preference.

This is, of course, if we understand self as some sort of previous, or original, state.

But there is another way to understand self, and this is the way which interests us the most. Indeed, it is the way in which I understood it when I started this topic.

Self understood, not as some kind of state, but as pattern of change.

If we understand self in this way, then growth and any other kind of change would not necessarily be opposed to self-valuing. They would be, but only in the case that such a change is not part of the pattern that defines the self.

Thus, in this sense, to value one’s self means to change one’s self in accordance with one’s natural (= internal = inherited) pattern of change.

This appears to show that self-valuing, understood in this manner, as natural-pattern-of-change-valuing, is not the same thing as self-preservation. But it is, and I am going to show why it is.

WTP is not the same as self-valuing because WTP values growth unconditionally. Self-valuing only values it conditionally, naturally of course, since its supreme value is not growth, but self (in the sense of natural pattern of change.)

What does it mean that growth is a conditional value?

It means that whether one values growth or not depends on whether it supprots one’s supreme, which is to say unconditional, value.

In the case of VO, this supreme value is SELF, or ONE’S OWN NATURAL PATTERN OF CHANGE.

This means that one will grow only under the condition that growth is part of one’s natural pattern of change.

In the case that it isn’t, one won’t grow.

Similarly, the pattern of growth is wholy determined by one’s natural pattern of change. One won’t grow when one’s body does not tell one to grow. One will only grow when one’s body tells one to grow.

If by some accident one’s instinct for growth – instincts being how this natural pattern of change is encoded – disappear then one will cease to grow.

Indeed, unless it is within one’s genetic code, one won’t bother trying to animate the dead instinct for growth. (The instinct must animate itself, otherwise it is not part of one’s true self . . .)

In VO, body decides what to do and what not to do.

In WTP, one’s own mind decides what to do and what not to do, whereas body merely SETS LIMITS.

Thus, self-valuing is another word for self-preservation.

Note that in the universe of flux there is no such a thing as self-preservation. Nothing is ever preserved. However, what there is self-retardation, and that’s what is meant when people say self-preservation.

Valuing → ‘auto-evaluating’, is literally the subconscious calibrating function of intellect/brain. It is not like a mystical will-to-power or something, it just is what it is and nothing more. All of the senses have their corresponding instrumentation, all of which has to be calibrated such for the brain to build a single signal, such to build an experience of a ‘rolling’ [continual] world.

Pretty much spot on. But you still emphasize the ideal self more than I would. Perhaps that is necessary because people massally believe in it.

Indeed the term is intended to mean only the valuing of valuing. It has the dash, “-”. Magnus doesnt see the dash. He is bizarrely incapable of reading or using the term “self-” in a grammatically correct way.

It is too tedious. This is my last post in response to Magnus for this year… giving them something invariably results in them getting all entitled.

All these people on that forum have been writing about my logos for over 3 years straight and none of them has come close to cracking it.

It is a zoo.
But that is the best illustration of what all of them are trying to twist and make easier and less hard, they are now all functions of me.

This is what pisses me off: they fucking falter all the time. Magnus is nothing more than a bolt in some machine that tries to become my servant.