Alignment ⑥ Values are an effort not a coin
exampling trust
My writing on alignment, a sub-project of the taphonomy of worlding, is now at part 6, and while I was going to publish about causality next, I decided to get back to the first notes on alignment I wrote a couple of months ago, while travelling across Canada.
And there was no clear starting point, it just drifted more and more into my notes gradually taken over from writing about values (exampling trust) as an effort, as a labour, as an activity of life, as the resultant (re)action of living. That, with this example of trust, all that we call values, all that we end up at when our words run out, is an effort we have to repeat if we are to maintain it, and that trust as a value is not a coin to be hoarded or spent. For people do not really loose or gain trust. They make the effort to trust, or at least form such habits that routines the day into stability and ‘order’, and make the same effort in deciding not to trust.
(If you trust someone you value them.)
Now in losing trust one may lose many things, but those outcomes are the result of an effort we constantly do with a state of mind which “takes for granted” the outcomes. Trusting people will stay on their side of the road while driving. Trust is not just a hindsight.
We can occlude our activity in these habits, for agency is a spectrum in a tidal consciousness, thus we often count the outcomes as the process, and come to see a value as the thing, when really it is just a way we cut our selves into the world… curiously in order to do other things perhaps more consciously. Our worlding layers spells of illusion as short-cuts so we do not get too distracted getting on with other more necessary or interesting things. Other priorities.
Yesterday my ABS brakes failed but in that moment other drivers still trusted I would stay on my side of the road. Unfortunately their taken-things-for granted will not fix my car. (No one was hurt, and I chatted to a reformed oceanographer for an hour while waiting for the truck.)
Intakes
It is this axiological concern in alignment that recognizes all values are an effort, and thus all values, like trust have some equivalent to the phrase that trust is not a coin. Thus values are a discernment to give notice to something within the time and tide of consciousness (life’s re-activity through to agency and conscientiousness that an animal enjoins) that directly informs the take-ways from the three minimum bits that make an alignment. With the addition that we get to do short-cuts as we choose, to do or in forgetting do not.. We occlude one of our elements on order to get on with our life… on the others things judge to be of greater priority.
In this axiology of life’s activity: values’ “effort” and s “point of view” are interchangeable terms.
Axiological studies in issue-based ethics, moral psychology’s statistics, or philosophical phenomenology, worry about all that in slightly different ways. They take for granted different things, or, rather, have a different frames which occlude different elements, which can, of course, include occluding: by choice, by framing, by efforts in other areas.
One may occlude a point of view, but not effort, or one may occlude both. I’ll let the reader work their way through the sciences and arts and philosophies as to what they occlude and how and why. A lot of polemic is about those framings, held dear in the effort of belief or even in the the ‘laziness’ of practicality. And a lot of that is interesting make-work, though perhaps useful in way that cultivated discernment can get caught up judng peacock's tails.
I use the word occlude because taking-things-for-granted does not only mean it is repressed, rejected, object, abjected, oblated, erased, used-up, covered-up, ab-used, gilded, suppressed or forgotten. By occlude I mean all of those, and more when I can think of them. For we need more words that are similar to taken-for-grant, that are not quite like NO! That conscious effort of rejection. A new term for all the semi-conscious habitual moves and slitherings that we make in our life's processes in the time and tide that spectrums our animal activity right through to conscientiousness of mindfulness and the flow that forgets the self while selfing, or drifts off out of this world while worlding.
The world is much easily to 'forget' than ourselves. From an evolutionary point of view, considering the effort that living requires, this makes completes sense. It is well aligned, this bias, this sin, to align our short-cuts with survival.
This axiology, reframed as the study of effort, studies a type of (im)pure animal logic, of which our understanding of causality is an outcome, or short-cut. I will delay a discussion of animal logicks for another time, until I clear out on values as an effort in terms of the metaphors of this project on alignment. Causality may be next.
Through-takes
It is important to see, to remember, to not take for granted, that alignment as an effort of a point of view, is already the result of other previous efforts, that our labours rest on the efforts of others, this work, in both function and utility, is what we often take for granted and see, like we do for trust, as a type of coin. We capitalise it and may then short-cut its past history (as a record of things) as we see fit from our point of view (now).
To understand this is to begin to enter the taphonomy of worlding.
In primary school we wrote stories from the point of view of a penny in circulation. My story started with it being found in a gutter, outside my grandparents house in Revesby (NSW), and not the royal mint.Values get minted, and they then circulate (exchange and gifting is an effort that can thus occlude prior efforts) much like the way we have turned a flow of protons into life, and life into multicellular lifeforms, and those into nervous systems and brains mindful of what they forget or reject (hopefully) as partial bits of the world they self (especially if they see the world out there as an objective thing by occluding the self in their worlding alignments… intersubjectively… in search of…).
Life processes ‘capitalise’ all our movements and call these newly coined things… a history, …call it the body, …call it identity. The same way we think of trust as a coin and not an activity requiring effort. We short cut the value, and it is a form of lossy compression. A coin is always a token.
A taphonomy of worlding seeks to understand and uncover all of that process by reading into (unfortunately) the history of our shortcuts, to uncover coins we used as harden levers to move against or pivot. Even if the loss cannot be recovered, we must recognise the effort lost.
Bones are our first 'coins'. Muscles are our ability to discern, that effort shapes the bones by our movement. Our movement, our animal nature, is lived by our efforts. That effort is utterly informed by the partial view of the world we have, the point of view which in part constructs it with the effort of others past, but mostly present— as well as imagined. For in a social learning species, that umwelt includes everyone's umwelt.
But the skeleton is not the life, it is the hard memory of a life. Trust is not a coin.
For those efforts tend to utilise other efforts and each effort is a choice, and while humans can get the credit/blame (Homo species' social learning's preferred methodology as they 'should') for being able to live more recursively (in the tool-use sense) for this ability is more develop in us than in other animals, but it is not unique to us. We are not outside evolution, we are the beneficiaries of an evolution of effort as a point of view.
Life is a struggle, and it is in that effort that values arise with an inheritance of things discerned. Which we can, if we make the effort, read as forming a record that we can then transcribe in a taphonomy of worlding.
Values, which come to be regarded as common “to all”, that are trusted to be held by all, arise in recognising effort and effort’s returns for the greater good. This effort, in large measure, allows that partiality we live to self into the world, embodying a individual into its umwelt. A life that requires neither being and nothingness, nor even both, even if we enjoy painting our faces with these recursive toys (identitarianism, nihilism, woe-ism etc).
Some final out-takes
Alignment is in part an effort/attempt to reduce the effort of living by getting your ducks in a row. Efficiency is never accurate, even as you hit your targets.
Alignment as a life's activity is thus a producer of values as judged by the return on that activity, if now recursively constituted and used as a coin (taken-for-granted).
Alignment itself, the activity, then becomes a valuing value (also known as Order, Truth, Beauty, God etc. when doubled-down into belief or some such nonsense, which can then be doubled-down on yet again, into into identitarianism or nihilism, depression or repression, or other pits without constraint).
Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com. This is a part of a series on Alignment, in the project [taphonomy of worlding,].