A personal reading of the essay:.
My third NotebookLM podcast, added May 18, 2025, and again I am happy with the result:
By Eric Borg
March 3, 2025
I’ve set myself up with an incredibly ambitious project here, and one that professionals should generally have reason to oppose. Could it be that feeling good/bad exists essentially as the fuel which drives our function, and yet our societies have not yet generally permitted our mental and behavioral forms of science to become founded upon this motivational premise thus mandating their current primitive state? My initial teaser to this effect has been to observe the opposing situation in the science of economics. Economists have been able to develop a vast collection of professionally undisputed models, and all founded upon the simple premise that feeling good/bad constitutes the value of existing. Today the field’s success might even be likened with the success of modern weather forecasting. Conversely our various disjointed models in psychology might be likened with pre-Newtonian physics — highly complex as well as highly disputed. But doesn’t economics supervene upon psychology, which is to say, doesn’t economics function on the basis of psychology? Yes it does. Therefore I’m suggesting at least in a foundational sense that economists grasp psychology better than psychologists do.
I suspect that society has permitted economists to found their science upon this hedonistic principle because the field isn’t central enough to challenge the evolved social tool of morality, though the centrality of psychology has put it in far greater conflict. But even if so, haven’t psychiatrists developed a reasonably important service for humanity? I agree that they have, though not because they’ve developed effective models of our nature. Instead their success seems essentially pharmacological — they’ve become the specialists who decide which drugs might help counter a given psychiatric disturbance. The difference between developing effective psychological models versus merely being familiar with the potential effects of mood altering drugs, corresponds with my general premise that something here remains quite wrong.
Teasers aside, it’s been difficult for me to decide a next move for my general presentation. After rejecting several drafts for this second post, I’ve decided to demonstrate that the value of existing should be considered more fundamentally knowable than thought, which is to say a potential improvement upon Rene Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”. And though I fully agree with Descartes that my thought itself does mandate my existence and thus cannot possibly be a false element of what exists, here I’m proposing that the value of my own existence should be considered more primary and so should exist as a more knowable truth about what’s real than thought.
Consider the most horrific scenario that I can imagine in a personal sense. You’re captured and confined with extreme sensory deprivation, fed intravenously to keep you alive for as long as possible in this general state of sensory void, and horribly tortured by means of skilled nerve aggravation from around your body to the maximum ultimate effect, and extended until you ultimately die of old age. After years of such insane agony perhaps you’d in some technical sense still be able to “think”, but I certainly wouldn’t expect your thought to have enough coherence for you to know that you exist by means of it. Instead I’d expect you to have already declined into a miserable full state of madness. But here it seems to me that the pain that you’d continue to feel should still mandate your existence to you since you’d be the one feeling it from moment to moment. Wouldn’t this pain be a more knowable and real aspect of what you are than whatever could be said to remain of your thought? Here I’m suggesting that value exists as an input to the thought processor and so should be considered more basic than thought. Indeed, in the end I consider value identical with “self”. Only when all value ends should your existence also end. Or if value returns then you should too, but never otherwise I think.
One challenge to this position would be to assert that perhaps a person who resides in a perfect void of value would still be able to think thoughts? Actually yes, if this were empirically demonstrated well enough then I’d be forced to concede that thought should be considered more fundamental than value. In my general modeling however I do theorize value to drive thought and so without value it shouldn’t be said to occur. If not however then I am still at least pleased with the argument above that value does seem extremely fundamental for mandating one’s existence. I suppose another way to suggest the significance of value would be to observe the effect of mood altering drugs. Though under such influences one’s thought might devolve into pure nonsense, one’s existence should remain on the basis of any good/bad experience which is thus felt. Only when value ends do I think we should say that one’s existence ends. Or if value returns, then existence should be said to return. Anesthesia seems to display this gyration between a given self existing or not by means of personally felt value.
This theme corresponds with my last post which held that we only exist as a present state of value, though hope and worry about the future effectively bonds us with the selves we might potentially become by providing present positive to negative sensations regarding the future. Furthermore the present self should tend to feel connected with past selves through memory. If my argument does effectively suggest that the value of existing as yourself should be the most fundamental element of what you are, then what does this imply about the value of existing over time? This implies that each positive to negative sensation over time theoretically could be numerically compiled to provide an aggregate score that constitutes the value of existing as each of them together in full. The existence of some of us over time should be very good, while for others existence should have lesser value that might even constitute quite unfortunate existence, and theoretically even to the degree of the scenario mentioned above. Furthermore for social scores reflecting the value of existing as a group in full, theoretically any number of subjects might be assessed together regarding how good to bad they feel over a given period of time.
Here one might wonder if there is a difference between the value of existing as I present this idea, versus what utilitarians present? Though utilitarians do essentially use the same math regarding value, my understanding is that they seek a different objective. While I’m referring to the value of existing in itself, they’re concerned about effective ways to judge one’s behavior, or the main objective that philosophers have seemed concerned about at least since the rise of Christianity. Essentially utilitarians posit “right” or “moral” behavior as the kind which promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number, with “wrong” or “immoral” behavior to be the kind which detracts from such value. Conversely there is no inherent calculus of judgement regarding my observation about the value of existing in itself. Furthermore here value is solely based upon what a given subject experiences rather than any different subject such as “the greatest number” (unless of course one happens to be referring the the value of existing as that specific subject).
Fortunately I expect that my next post will be far less difficult for me to write so I don’t expect it to also take a month. For the next one I plan to get into some of the mechanics by which value should have both emerged and evolved to create functionality. Furthermore that discussion should also help demonstrate that value ought to be more fundamental than thought.
Also I’d like to thank Tina Lee Foresee for her comments last time which suggested that the ancient Greeks may have been more aligned with me regarding the value of existing than philosophers since that time. So why might they have been more in tune with the value of existing rather than determining moral rightness versus wrongness? Perhaps in an academic sense the soon to come rise of Christianity played a substantial role creating the state of things since that time, and so even those today who call themselves both atheists and moral antirealists, often still carry the burden of Christianity? I hope to help free academia from such influences so that someday the human might not remain endlessly mysterious to the human.
(On the photo, I was trying to use facial gestures to display the difference between someone who feels very good versus someone who feels very bad. You’d think stock photos online would do a reasonable job with that, though not that I could find. So I tried some photos of myself. But I’m no actor!)
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