Leveling Up: Part IV — Introduction to The Value Pyramid & Leveling Up as a Human

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.