1. INTRO
I’d like to invite you to consider a new approach to explaining the objective basis for all value judgements. People have attempted to do this in the past using survival and evolution, as these are the only objective processes observed in nature that mimic a preference.
But it hasn’t worked. It doesn’t explain everything we value. There is a higher level of values that go beyond simple existence. For example, imagine the following choice:
Everything stays as it is, or
Everyone is given food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, safety, etc., but all spirituality, all play, and all artistic expression, including architecture, music, art, poetry, etc., is banned, wiped from the earth, and can never be created again.
Everyone I’ve asked was horrified at the idea of choosing option 2, even though that was most in line with survival. We intuitively know there is more to life!
However, survival is not that far off! What we need to do is take the next step of breaking down the qualities objectively necessary for existence. When we do that, we get the exact set of qualities that evolution selects for, not only in claws, jaws, and paws, but also in behaviours, instincts, drives and preferences.
Once we evolved preferences for these qualities, we started appreciating them everywhere we saw them, including in things unrelated to survival, such as art, music, play, and spirituality.
I identified seven such qualities which explain the preferences we evolved to have as individuals. They are also needed in relationships between, and systems of individuals, including natural systems such as ecosystems and symbiotic organisms, as well as systems we created, such as language, cultural norms, governments, religions, laws, economic systems, etc.. They all evolve towards better achieving these same qualities, since any relationship or system undermining these qualities would simply cease to exist.
These qualities explain everything we appreciate and prefer, find valuable, useful, helpful, beneficial, healthy, and moral, as well as what gives us a sense of purpose, meaning, success, fulfillment, etc.. Understanding them is understanding our hearts, allowing us to get our hearts and minds on the same page!
While other approaches attempt to determine what things are good, these objective qualities define what good is. They also objectively define what works in reality. They are what evolution selects for. They even offer a new lens to understand truth and why various epistemological methods work. This is why I called it The Big Answer. It’s a single answer to many of the biggest questions we’ve ever had!
Yes, there is more to this model! 1. The exact definitions of these qualities, without which they don’t quite work. 2. These qualities are like the ingredients of this model; we still need the “baking directions”! And 3. Introducing a few other new concepts, such as a better definition of chaos that makes it possible to increase order and chaos simultaneously. We’ll cover all this and much more in the upcoming overviews.
The next section will provide an introduction to each of these seven qualities.
