In Part I we asked two questions; what is a leveled up human and whether or not there are optimal values in order to better understand if we can even provide an answer to the first one. In Part II, we questioned the importance of meaning to better understand what motivates our behavior. In Part III, we learned about the evolution of consciousness, about qualia and how they correspond to our mental state, and about valence which is the degree to which a certain qualia is desirable or not. Humans evolved to engage in certain behaviors that were motivated by their desire to feel good, to optimize for positive valence.
Introduction to the Value Pyramid
It is the idea that there are three values that everything in our leveling up journey can be reduced to; these are valence, knowledge, and health. As stated previously, all complex organisms on earth increased the probability of passing on their genes by optimizing these values. Positive valence mental states are the carrot on a stick that motivate us to keep moving forward, to evolve. Valence is the most important value and it sits at the top of the pyramid. This is because it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable you are or how healthy you are. If you feel unhappy then it seems like it’s all for nothing. Every other value you can think of ultimately reduces down to whether or not it is correlated with positive valence. As mentioned earlier, if you value meaning it is only important as a tool to alleviate suffering and increase happiness. Same thing if you value money or family. Does your relationship dynamic with those things bring you happiness? You get the picture — it all boils down to valence.
The relationship between knowledge and health
Knowledge and health act as guide rails to ensure that the organism can increase the probability of optimizing for positive valence. Knowledge is a requirement in order to have the skills necessary to engage in behaviours that create more positive mental states. Health is directly correlated with how we feel and is required in order to maximize the amount of time, energy and concentration that we can invest into the behaviours that optimize for positive valence. We can imagine a scenario where someone is addicted to methamphetamine. They choose to repeatedly dose with the drug in order to feel high, which at the time feels extremely pleasurable. Over time if the individual neglects their health they will start to feel increasingly worse as both their highs and lows will be lower.
So while methamphetamine increases your valence, if it is at the cost of neglecting your health, over a span of time your valence will actually be lower on average than if you weren’t addicted to methamphetamine. Instead if you possess the knowledge to engage in behaviours that naturally increase your valence, it just happens to increase your health as those behaviours were selected for by evolution. These also just happen to be the behaviours that we intuitively know “in our gut” are good for us. Things like nutritious food, intimacy, leisure, community, art, understanding of the natural world etc. So it looks like we have answered the secondary question — that yes there are optimal values, and they are valence, knowledge, and health. In light of all of this, perhaps we have been guilty of thinking of what it means to be a human in some strange vacuum. Not realizing that what it means to be human is simply being an entity engaged in the process of evolution.
Leveling up
The reason we continue to live is because positive mental states make life worthwhile. No human being truly wants to feel worse, as that would be in direct contradiction to their very nature. A person does not commit suicide because they are happy. And it is not by accident that we reserve the right to a legally assisted death to only those who are greatly suffering. We can summarize this as follows, being happy and making others happy is what seems to give purpose to our lives. So if we are still playing the same game as our ancestors, why do so many people seem to be living their lives like the aliens — in states of ignorance, disease, and unhappiness? The answer is that the external environment is no longer challenging. The fact that we can satisfy our urges for sex, fatty food, and socialization at the click of a button — coupled with the reality of the modern rat race, means that we are often left feeling empty. We go on to search for meaning in our lives because without it we are lost. The meaning used to be survival, and although it was difficult, if we were doing a good job at it we generally felt good.
The brain needs a challenge. For countless millennia, we were preoccupied with meeting our basic survival needs. If the environment is no longer that challenging for a growing number of people around the world, how do we achieve a state of lasting happiness without feeling empty? Fortunately this is the perfect time to level up as a human in this game. While life may have gotten easier per se, our environment has allowed us the opportunity to shift from survival mode to overcome a new challenge, ourselves. In order to change our outer environment, we must first begin by changing our inner environment. No longer can we wait for the relatively slow process of natural selection via reproduction to save us. We are now at the crossroads in human history where we are more able to influence the direction of our individual and collective futures. Instead of satiating ourselves in the comfort zone we must seek discomfort by entering the unknown. Ironically, it is only by challenging ourselves that we can increase the values of valence, knowledge, and health, beyond what our DNA evolved for.
“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” - Ralph Waldo Emmerson
What it means to be human (or perhaps any other lifeform for that matter), is simply maximizing the desirable characteristics of qualia for that organism, as that would increase the chances of reproduction. That is, you wake up in the game as a human, as such you play the game as a human and are motivated to engage in behaviours that feel good long term such that you can fulfill your instinctual drive to procreate. What it means to be a human does not mean maximizing ignorance, disease, and unhappiness, as behaviours that led to those outcomes would not lead to successful reproduction, and therefore the extinction of humans.
To conclude, we have established our optimal values — valence, knowledge, and health as the variables to optimize. Which is in line with our intuition that being happy and making others happy is what seems to give purpose to our lives. It’s important to be happy, but if you are already happy, why not try to be happier? Why not try to be more knowledgeable? Why not try to be healthier? Now we can answer our primary question, what does it mean to level up as a human? Leveling up as a human means taking what it means to be a human to the next level, beyond reproduction of genetic code.
A leveled up human is one that values positive growth in the dimension of valence, knowledge, and health.
This blog is about taking us on this journey together. Everyday you can simply ask yourself this question — am I smarter, happier, and healthier than I was yesterday? If the answer is yes, then congratulations... you've leveled up.
In Part II, we explored the arbitrariness of meaning, and how it is only relevant to the extent that it is able to provide value to one’s life.
In a role-playing game, we level up our character in order to become better at surviving the next challenge. We can see this process at work if we look to nature. Throughout the evolution of life on planet earth, many life forms popped in and out of existence. The ones that survived did so by successfully adapting to their environment. We are the descendants of a long relay race, with each of our ancestors having passed on the genetic baton to the next. As more complex multicellular life began to emerge around the globe such as animals, the development of a central nervous system became a significant advantage to their reproductive fitness. Starting with locomotion with the cerebellum, to emotions with the limbic system, all the way to the formation of complex notions with the frontal lobe. Along with this came an emergence of higher consciousness in which the richness of sensory experience expanded into a nearly infinite field of possibility. In the human animal, and likely many other animals, perhaps all things including electrons, this is known as the capacity to feel “what it is like”. A bat knows what it is like to be a bat — a dolphin, a dolphin — a cow, a cow — and you, yourself. In philosophy and psychology, the “what it is like” of subjective experience is referred to as qualia.
Qualia can be divided into varying degrees of “this mental state feels good” or “this mental state feels bad”. Positive mental states played key roles in motivating humans towards behavior that allowed them to successfully reproduce, that is, “nutritious food tastes good”, “social cooperation feels good”, and “sex feels good”. If we didn’t desire calorie dense foods like fatty meats and starches we would be too weak to perform the tasks necessary for daily survival. Without motivation to cooperate with one another, we wouldn’t be able to form larger cohesive social units. And if we weren’t motivated to have sex, you and I simply would not exist. Negative mental states played key roles in motivating humans to avoid things that were detrimental to reproduction, “this plant is bitter and smells bad, maybe it’s poison”, or “that person is ugly, maybe they are unhealthy”. Without the ability to detect off putting flavours and smells, there would be a lot of unnecessary deaths due to consumption of poisonous plants and fungi. A person’s attractiveness is a byproduct of healthy genes and access to adequate resources, and our desire to reproduce with the most attractive potential mate ensured that the highest quality genes were passed on successfully to the next generation. The evolving brain selected for states and behaviors that were beneficial for long term survival to feel good, and selected against states and behaviors that were detrimental for long term survival to feel bad.
Whether or not consciousness pervades all things, somewhere along the line, as evidenced above, evolution evolved in brains a sense of feeling in the dimension of what in psychology is called valence. Valence, otherwise known as hedonic tone, refers to the intrinsic attractiveness (positive valence) or aversiveness (negative valence) of a mental state — pleasure vs. pain respectively. Whether you are being chased by a lion, are having a migraine, or have been poisoned; these examples would generally refer to negative valence experiences in various degrees. And whether you are having an orgasm, have just eaten a good meal, or are experiencing a mystical state of ecstasy; these examples would generally refer to positive valence experiences in various degrees. In the past, before the internet, our desire to pursue pleasure would have been beneficial for survival. This is because our brains evolved valence to motivate us to either engage in behaviours that were conducive to reproduction or avoid behaviours that were not. It is this biological machinery that motivates us to continue playing the human game.
Our modern environment is radically different from the one we experienced as hunter gatherers hundreds of thousands of years ago. But we are more or less physically identical and thus the game itself has not changed, as we are still motivated by our desire to feel good. If there are optimal values, they are neatly situated within this context. Purely as a thought experiment, we can imagine that there are aliens out there in the universe with their own set of values. Perhaps these beings value ignorance, disease, and unhappiness. You may have experienced a gut feeling that these do not align with your values, and you are right. We have evolved to value their opposites — namely knowledge, health, and happiness. Our capacity for knowledge allowed us to survive and adapt to the often harsh and changing environments of the past. Being in good health was important in order for us to reach sexual maturity and pass on our knowledge to our children. And our desire to be in a positive mental state created the motivations to engage in the behaviours conducive to our survival. All complex organisms on earth increased the probability of passing on their genes by optimizing these values.
We can call this the value pyramid.
In Part I, I asked you to write down on a piece of paper what you value.
What did you come up with? It is common to have included things like money and human relationships in your list. However, if someone has a bank account balance of $0, are they less developed than a millionaire? What about someone who lacks social capital, like a hermit? The problem with things like money and human relationships is that they are measures of the external environment. You could have been born into wealth, or be a celebrated individual, but at the same time be deeply dissatisfied. If leveling up implies a sort of progress, each of us are unique, and our set of values may be too idiosyncratic to generalize across all humans. After all, we are trying to define what it means to level up as a human, not as Jamie in Western culture middle-class suburbia. Perhaps you included more values as well — things like meaning and purpose. But can we reduce what we value to be general enough so that it can apply to all areas of life? Did your list include knowledge, health, or happiness? If so you are on the right track. What if I told you that the basis of our self-development can be reduced to the pursuit of knowledge, health, happiness without including meaning or purpose.
What about meaning though? What is life’s relevance, significance, and value? In the grand scheme of things, it does not appear to have any meaning other than what is attributed to it by the individual. It is up to us to fill the void. However, as a reflection of our changing attitudes and circumstances, the meaning or purpose we apply to our lives does not always seem to stay consistent. If we find a new purpose, it appears arbitrary and subjective whether it is better or worse than the one we had before insofar as it is contingent on the overall satisfaction it can provide us. So while it can still be argued that the search for meaning is important, whatever we find is deeply personal and only relevant as a tool to alleviate suffering and increase happiness. For example, fostering family relationships can bring meaning to one’s life insofar as it brings joy. But if it brings misery, then we often feel trapped and have wishes that those relationships would end. My goal here is to provide an alternative to this dilemma, a meta-meaning. Namely, if there was a meaning to life, what would it look like? We can start by looking towards someone accomplished to see if we can gather some information about what this meta-meaning looks like.
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said “The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer”. To paraphrase, the whole point of life is to level up.
We can look to evolution as an example.
All humans to varying degrees must bear the weight of their circumstances. While most people would love to have the ability to snap their fingers and magically improve them, life isn’t exactly fair and unfortunately no such magic exists. These circumstances may work to benefit some while proving truly burdensome to others. Although they may have been determined by some combination of good and bad luck, we must not fall victim to them. For example, if you are reading this, you are one of the lucky ones, as your circumstances have allowed you enough freedom to end up on this blog. It is with this “free will” that you have the choice to rise above the perceived limitations they present. We must choose to focus on the things in life we can control, because focusing on the things we can’t is a waste of our energy. So while there are times most of us may not be able to control our circumstances (outer environment), we may be surprised to learn how much control we have over how we perceive and react to them (inner environment). With practice, we can construct our inner environment like an athlete training to build strength, or a musician learning and mastering an instrument. Over time as we develop our inner environment, our outer environment naturally will follow suit. Classically, the development of our inner environment is called self-development. This is the environment we must learn to master in order to take our first steps towards leveling up.
Before we embark on our journey of self-development we must ask the question — what does it mean to level up as a human? Development means progress, as such there has to be some sort of measure by which we can gauge our development by. The athlete may measure their progress by gauging the amount of weight they can lift compared to the last workout. The musician may measure their progress by seeing how efficiently they can play common chord progressions in different keys. In both these examples it is imperative to keep some sort of practice log or diary if one wants to measure and thus maximize their progress. So before we can even begin to answer the initial question, we have to go deeper down the rabbit hole. We need to come up with the variables we are to measure in order to track our self-development. One question leads to another and we are left asking — are there optimal values? We don’t know where we are going until we determine what set of values are important to us, which will in turn determine our trajectory and thus help us answer the initial question.
Before reading further, write down on a piece of paper what you value.
