Dear Chris,
Forever humans have been navigating over sea and land. The Phoenicians sailed and traded on the Mediterranean 3000 years ago. They didn’t want to crash.
They believed they could improve navigation of the seas. They wanted deeper and more systematic ways to understand the difference between here and there. They wanted to gather and communicate more useful information about their experience with reality. They wanted to know more about geographic space. Get from place to place more efficiently. Learn from each voyage. Predict arrival times. Chart routes. Avoid reefs. Change course with the weather.
They chose to begin imagining a grid over the water. They began constructing theoretical foundations that others - Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Harrison and now every person and every thing - would use and build upon.
Humanity wrapped Earth with ideas. Ideas that became a global coordinate system that continues to adapt and evolve to fit the world we are creating.
Humanity regularly chooses to perceive the world in a way that will help us to better navigate reality. We need to do it again.1
But now we are not reimagining geographic space. We must turn our attentions, our imaginations to values. Human Values. The Values space.
We can know more about “us”. We can create information about human values that is more real, more useful, accessible, reliable, credible. A public good. Humanity can wrap the world we have built with the idea of human values.
We must try.
The challenges of Alignment and Equitable Power Distribution require immediate, explicit attention to human values.
And more critical, perhaps the only way, to avoid harm, our destruction, is to set a course to futures we want. 2
To realize our visions of futures we want, we must understand ourselves and the world we have created. We must understand and purposefully choose the evolution of the most powerful forces on Earth and perhaps the Galaxy.
Human Values.
To contribute to the conversation about a perception of reality fit for this world and for one we want to create, I present three theoretical foundations - Human Values, Values Layer, Values Signatures - and a portfolio of applied research. First a Theory of Human Values.
1. Human Values
Values are the patterns humans notice.3
Humans perceive patterns in Representations.
Human values are of Nature10
Humans and values coevolve interdependently11
Values are limitless.12
Values are measurable.13
Dear Chris,
So what’s the significance of a Theory of Human Values?14
What did our buddy Eratosthenes know?
He knew there was more to know about “here.” He that traveling and trading the seas was critical but dangerous work. If navigation were just a little better, many would benefit.
Resolving the challenge didn’t mean starting from scratch. Others had already done a lot of the work. He knew math. Some geometry. Geography. Ships began to drop beneath the horizon about 100 stadia (12 miles) out. Curvature. Circumference. Sphericity. He imagined a grid. Global. Location coodinates. Everyone able to measure and communication about distances and passages from here to there.
Likewise, with values. What do we know? Believe? What more can we know about us. About human values?
How can we imagine and leverage these powerful forces we have brought to life. We set them loose. But we are losing control of our values. They are wrested from us. Dangerous for all. Those who understand and control our values gain. The rest of us lose.
This is not a new issue. Humanity simply hasn’t been forced to confront its ignorance until now. No astrophage. No buggers. Just super powerful AIs that we haven’t yet met. They may be what we require to save us from ourselves. They may be what we save ourselves from.
I suspect the outcome depends on the degree to which we, as a species, choose a purposeful evolution.
Humans move massive amounts of energy around, adding energy to some values, taking it away from others. Its really all we do. Its how we spend all of our time.
We concentrate energy on Earth according to our values. Some people and groups have control over a lot more energy than others. Some benefit. Some don’t.
Could we discern and describe the patterns that humans perceive and name as values in those concentrations of energy? The patterns we perceive in those things that embody and enact those values?
Eratosthenes loved games. Tic tac toe. Playing hide and seek with Archy. He didn’t think about it much, but when asked he would tell his close friends that for him the games represented values like health, fun, play.
When he perceived similar patterns in other things, other representations - birthday parties for babies, doing 20 pull-ups every day, the superfood molokhia he ate each Tuesday evening - he assigned those things the same values.
Both the sunset and the glass of wine were beautiful. What is the common’ish pattern between the two? Was it in the light? Atoms, motion, arrangement of textures, fields of energy, smells, tastes, neurological or metabolic responses to external stimuli? Relationships between these things? Sequences within? Where and how does a pattern end and another begin?
That evening drifting off to sleep to the sound of the Alexandrian sea, Eratosthenes was anxious. He could not remember if he’d returned his library books.
Could we discover how patterns that inspire our values form, relate to each other, evolve? What might we observe in the system of all human values and representations of those values, over all time, of all peoples?
A theory of values presents to us a way of understanding what is controlling and pushing around all of the energy on Earth.
I haven’t read Nicole Vignola’s book but I think I should.
Patterns are similarities, differences, connections that have meaning across space and time. This is a definition from Human Systems Dynamics. If you add the word “repeat” in there, it may help. Learn everything you can from Glenda, Royce, Leslie and HSD theory and practice. https://www.hsdinstitute.org/resources/change-a-pattern-change-your-world-blog.html ]. Patterns are organizing energy. A pattern could be perceived at macro or particle scale. Could “see” it in the way things are arranged or could perceive patterns, via measurement, it in the way matter or energy moves, exchanges, or transforms. Regardless, any pattern we perceive/notice is an organzing pattern of energy in that no pattern is eternally fixed, not evolving. Fractality/self similarity may apply in that pattern structure looks similar at different scales. Humans are good at noticing patterns we do and don’t consciously notice - we unconsciously notice patterns in card games and similar patterns in nature are predictably labeled “beautiful.” Characteristic of “Scale free”might apply. If I understood it better I would have a better guess. As far as probabilistic expressions can be assigned to patterns (objective) we perceive and to labels we agree to attach to patterns (subjective), I can imagine mathematical expressions related to human values.
We perceive sufficiently distinct patterns and instinctually put boundaries on the pattern. The boundaries for what is in or out of a pattern or what represents a value and what does not. Because human values are of nature, we are talking about strange attractor patterns. Lent calls them natural attractors. good. https://www.hsdinstitute.org/resources/attractor-patterns.html
boundaries for what is in or out, i.e., what represents a value and what does not.
Any pattern that is perceived is itself organizing energy. So values are energy in the process of organizing.
Human values are the total set of labels we assign to the patterns we perceive.
This process of assigning labels to perceived patterns, deciding what is a representation of a given value and what is not and affecting the representations and patterns, I would call this Humanity’s deep values praxis. A representation could be anything we assign values to - a glass, wine, idea, person, place, building, process.
A representation is a bounded collection of perceived patterns and embodies a few or many values. But not one.
so complex and subject to evolutionary processes. Coevolving interdependently. Complex and so open, non linear, high dimension, Never singular or isolated but infinitely nuanced, tangled, and interconnected. Not mechanistic. Not mechanical. Ecological.
We “create” values as we perceive patterns, label, and interact (eg allocate e) with them. As we interact with those values they, in turn, affect us. And so the patterns we perceive create us just as we create them. Thus interdependent coevolution of the whole. I don’t like distinguishing us and them without discussion of boundaries but to clarify the point…We move energy into and away from values. Remove enough and they fall apart. Add enough and others notice. Human interactions with energy correspond to values (e.g. we distribute energy to distinct existing concentrations of energy, i.e. values). Values influence how humans interact with energy.
limitless in number, energy, diversity, variability, lots to discuss here. If we pay attention, this feature of values likely has big impacts on almost everything.
values have been “measured” forever. But we have to be able to measure values and assess systems of values and their evolution in much greater resolution then ever before if we intend to imbue superpowerful AI systems with human values, given them any degree of autonomy and hope for anything but a bad outcome. Values are measurable if we can develop the “inventories” listed (and whatever I’ve left out), if we can perceive relationships and differences between values, representations, patterns, and more.
Shalom H. Schwartz proposes a “basic theory of human values” . The Theory of Human values I present is not this. A longer discussion to be sure but a few core differences…His work will be useful in this work, providing frameworks to test, sort, learn from. he presents 19 individual values that serve as "guiding principles in the life of a person or group", and I am presenting something more systemic, useful in the Nha, assessing and perceiving the human and Nature/reality as one things vs humans as separate from Nature. So bc humans and values are of nature, there is no set number of values and measuring is much more difficult and must bring together objective and subjective reality/truth to be useful in the Nha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_basic_human_values