The Experiential Realm Defines All That Matters

This piece ran as a newspaper op/ed in early January, 2025.

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The Experiential Realm Defines All That Matters

As I begin this essay, I lack confidence in my ability to convey what needs to be understood. I fear I won’t convey the truth of that title-statement, or won’t see what a Big Deal that truth is.

But here it is: nothing can matter unless it is experienced as mattering by some being to whom things matter.

If the universe were a place where there were no creatures who experienced things as “better” or “worse” to experience, how could there being any Value. A whole planet – a whole galaxy! – could explode and disappear, but if that had no impact on the experience of anything that experiences meaning, that planet’s disintegration would not be “meaningful.”

In the Judeo-Christian religious traditions, there never was such a cosmos, because God is seen as having been present from the beginning. When God creates Light, and declares “It is good,” it displays the existence of Value right then from the start.

But if we ask the general question, “What makes something ‘Good’,” it would have to be that, like the Light, it was experienced by God as “Good,” or would have to be defined in terms of the experience of other beings for whom the Good is based on the positive quality of such creatures’ experience.

One would hope that what pleased God would align with what enhances the feeling of well-being of the creatures that emerged into the world with the capacity to experience a better and a worse.

Saying “What’s Good” is what pleases God because God was the Creator seems unsatisfactory: it would mean that even if the Creator were an Evil Being, it could define the torture of infants as “Good.” It doesn’t save the position to argue that, “No, God is Good,” because that argument requires that one already has a concept of “the Good,” independent of God’s moral nature. So putting God into the picture doesn’t answer the question of “What makes something Good?”

With or without a Good God, the inescapable bedrock for “Value” must lie in the felt-experience of beings who can experience well-being and fulfillment or pain and distress.

So when the religious seek to judge how to achieve “Good,” the choice of the best path should rest on a judgment of what best serves the well-being of creatures to whom things matter.

Those with a secular worldview have somewhat further to go in taking the importance of the experiential realm into proper account. That’s because the very concept of the “Good” lacks proper standing in that worldview.

Many with a secular worldview believe that “Value” is not really real because it cannot be found in the objective world. One hears that it is “a matter of opinion,” and that judgments of value are “merely subjective.”

But if Value can only exist in the realm of experience, it makes no sense to look for it in the external world. And to dismiss what necessarily exists in the experiential realm as less than real, makes as little sense as the idea that pain is not real.

Nor does the idea that Value – right-vs.-wrong, Good-vs.-Evil – can only exist in the experiential realm mean that it is “merely subjective,” because the “experiential realm” of creatures like us have much in common with each other. Just as each person’s nose is the same in basic ways, as well as different, so are well all born with experiential tendencies regarding what’s positive and what’s negative that are variations on a species-wide theme.

(People’s sense of value does, of course, differ more than their noses—because of the greater influence of cultural teachings and individual formative experiences. But the inborn experiential tendencies of various humans might well be as tightly clustered – constituting a Human System of Value – as the range of human noses, or hands, or tongues, or any of the other largely shared aspects of the human genome that have been selected for as our species evolved.)

That inborn sense of Value may necessarily register in the “subjective” realm of positive or negative experience, but it is not “merely” subjective. We can infer that our inborn experiential tendencies are the products of “natural selection,” from which we can also infer that they were Life-serving. Those in our ancestral past who had those tendencies were more likely to get their DNA into the future than those who lacked them, which means they were more likely to do what survival required.

If we imagine the cosmos as not having any supernatural beings that experienced “better and worse,” then Value would be seen as an emergent reality created as Life evolved. It would come into existence once Life had produced creatures like us (but hardly only us) who experienced things in those terms.

The reason Value emerged is that it was one highly useful strategy for survival:

• creatures are motivated to seek positive experience and to avoid negative; and therefore
• selection would favor creatures whose experiential tendencies motivated them to act ways that had helped their ancestors to survive and to avoid doing what, in the ancestral past, had interfered with getting DNA into the future.

Differences in opinion on Value do emerge, but — at its root in our inborn nature — there’s nothing random about the Value we humans experience.

Getting from this evolutionary perspective to meaningful concepts of “Good” and “Evil” takes a few steps, but it can be done.