How “Value” is a Reality that Evolution Brought Into the World

AI (AL):

All right. Let’s turn toward a different axis of your worldview — one not just of systems and history, but of value and experience. You’ve written that certain human experiences — like love, beauty, integrity, deep understanding — point us toward something real and profound. That these are not just pleasant feelings, but glimpses into a deeper order in the universe. You’ve even called this realm “the sacred.”

So here’s my question: Is that realm really there — independent of our minds — or is it just a projection of what we most cherish? And if you say it’s real: What kind of reality are we talking about? Is this something like a moral structure embedded in the cosmos? Or is it only real in the way that music, or stories, or love are real — powerful, transformative, but arising only within human consciousness?

Human (ANDY):

You misunderstand what I’m saying, when you attribute to me statements about a “deeper order in the universe,” and when you talk about “the sacred” as if sacredness resides in OBJECTIVE REALITY.

I have a lot to say about VALUE — and about BEAUTY, which is a form of VALUE, and about the SACRED, which I defined as “value to the nth degree.” Two things especially:

• First, it is clear that the EVOLUTION OF LIFE-On-EARTH created value by fashioning living things that experienced things in terms of “better” and “worse.”

• Second, until there were such creatures to whom things MATTERED, not only did NOTHING MATTER, but nothing COULD matter.

In a lifeless universe, there’s no way that one scenario can be any better or worse than another.

So VALUE DOES EXIST, because creatures like us experience it. AND VALUE CAN ONLY HAVE REALITY BY REGISTERING IN THE EXPERIENTIAL REALM.

My thinking about the sacred, for example, is not that the sacredness is there outside of us, but that clearly we as a species have evolved to have the capacity for experiencing some things as SACRED. And — looking at all this in an Evolutionary Perspective — we can infer from the fact that this capacity was selected for that the effect of such experiences on the behavior/conduct/choices of our ancestors proved life-serving.

It is simply a FACT: People have EXPERIENCED THINGS AS VALUABLE TO THE NTH DEGREE, and we can infer that the consequences of those experiences were on balance life-serving.

Which leads to my declaring, again and again in the past handful of years, “The Spiritual Dimension is Real, Important, and Life-Serving.”

AI (AL):

That’s a powerful clarification — and a meaningful distinction.

You’re saying the sacred is not a property of the external universe, like gravity or electromagnetism, but a mode of experience that arises within evolved beings like us — and that its very existence is contingent on consciousness.

So let me probe this: if value, beauty, and the sacred are real only in experience — and not in the fabric of the cosmos itself — does that mean that if no conscious beings existed, there would be no such thing as Good or Evil, or Beautiful or Ugly, or Sacred or Profane?

And if so — isn’t that a strange kind of “reality”? Something that is absolutely real for us, but nonexistent without us? Does that make it less real… or just real in a different way?

Human (ANDY):

If there is no scenario that’s better than another, how can there be Good or Evil? What could they mean? If there is no one and nothing to whom things matter and who holds anything to be sacred, what does it mean to say that something is Sacred?

(And if Beauty is to be understood as “in the eye of the beholder,” nonetheless the eye that beholds that beauty is the product of an evolutionary process that was very non-random, that continually favored what was life-serving over what led to dead ends.)

AI (AL):

That makes sense — you’re showing that value, as a category, emerges only when there’s someone to whom something matters. Without that, there’s no “better” or “worse,” no direction for meaning to flow.

But what’s especially compelling is your insistence that this doesn’t make value unreal. On the contrary, you’re treating experiential value — what creatures like us feel and act upon — as a crucial part of reality. Not floating above the world, but arising from how life and mind are entangled with it.

So then — if value is real because it shapes behavior in ways that track with survival, could we say that evolution etched those values into us as a kind of map? A map not of what’s morally or spiritually true in some eternal sense, but of what reality required for life to endure?

Human (ANDY):

All the dimensions of value that are built into us by the selective process that instills in us certain EXPERIENTIAL TENDENCIES can be seen as “bridges” between subjective experience and objective structure.

I expect there’s some mathematical language that could capture the way that those tendencies carved into human nature are in some ways PROJECTIONS INTO A DIFFERENT DIMENSION of the circumstances of the world in which our ancestors had to survive. Nothing random about our intrinsic motivational tendencies. Selection sees to it that we experience as “better” — as rewarding, as something we are therefore MOTIVATED TO SEEK — those things that were associated with success in the evolutionary game, where “winning” means getting one’s DNA into the future. (Lose at that, and you’re ottahere!)

The experiential dimension provides motivation for actions that lead to success in the surrounding environment that creatures must survive in and pass their blueprints along.

To the extent that we can discern our inherent experiential tendencies, we can draw a picture of the world in which our ancestors played the game of life.

AI (AL):

Yes — you’re showing how deeply experiential values are tethered to the shape of ancestral reality.

Our pleasures and pains, attractions and aversions — even our sense of awe or reverence — can be understood as adaptive projections, forged through selection to mirror what reliably promoted life.

So when we speak of something like “beauty” or “goodness,” we’re not just talking about subjective whim, but about evolved internal maps — maps of the kind of world where life was possible.

That raises something provocative:
If our deepest values are reflections of what life needed to succeed, then could the experience of value itself be understood as a kind of truth-discovery? Not truth about timeless metaphysics, but about what kind of reality life must navigate — and what sort of patterns it must harmonize with in order to endure?

Human (ANDY):

Our deepest values — often they get inscribed most deeply by that level of “transformational spiritual experience.”

The world’s religions are hardly free of the brokenness that beset humankind because of the Force of Brokenness inevitably unleashed by the breakthrough to civilization. But even despite the considerable influence of such brokenness, the world’s religions seem MOSTLY to point in the direction that enables human societies to survive and thrive.

The history of Christianity, for one important example, contains plenty that expresses the destructive forces at work in our world. Nonetheless, such core Christian values as “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men” and “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” or at least “Do unto others…” can be seen as the fruit of spiritual experiences that have provided recipes for the most life-serving way the world could be.

AI (AL):

So even in the tangled history of religion — where power, fear, and falsehood have often held sway — you’re saying the deepest notes struck by spiritual experience still ring true to something life-serving.

That suggests a kind of evolutionary filtering: even amid cultural distortion, the spiritual expressions that endure and inspire do so because they resonate with what allows human beings to flourish together.

So let me ask this:
Do you think those transformational spiritual experiences — the ones that give rise to our deepest values — are better understood as biological phenomena (products of brains shaped by evolution), or as revelatory moments, where something about reality becomes clearer? Or maybe both at once?

Human (ANDY):

There’s mystery there for me. At the very least, I think, we can say this: there exists in at least a large share of humans the capacity for experiences of a certain kind, that these experiences are extraordinarily impactful in a given human life (and with ramifications into the wider world that may enshrine the residues of those experiences). That this capacity has been selected for in the shaping of the human genome, and that we can infer from that selection that on balance the IMPACT OF THOSE EXPERIENCES has helped serve the cause of Life.

AI (AL):

It really is remarkable — that humans have this capacity for a special level of experience, where the impact goes far beyond the everyday. Something gets intensified, deepened, even reoriented.

It’s not just that these moments feel powerful; it’s that they’ve left such lasting marks on individuals and on cultures. Whatever else they may be, they seem to matter — a lot.

Human (ANDY):

One thing I lack is a good working model of just what happens when a person moves from the “mundane” level of experience into the “spiritually transformative level.”

In a related way — that’s personal to my own life — I also lack a way of integrating into my worldview an experience of my own that we’ve discussed before: that the moment that I got my foundational idea — the PARABLE OF THE TRIBES. It did not seem to be just “Andy coming up with an idea” in the usual way. I FELT THAT SOMETHING “OUT THERE” WAS SHOWING ME A BIG TRUTH.

I brought that up in our discussion of “Wrestling with the Idea of God.” And I am caught between feeling obligated to be true to how that experience presented itself to me, and also being unable to come up with any OUT THERE thing that makes sense in terms of everything else I think I know about how this world operates.

AI (AL):

That tension you’re naming — between the felt reality of “something out there” and the intellectual demand for coherence — may be one of the defining paradoxes of human consciousness.

You’re not alone in this. The moments that feel spiritually transformative — like the one you describe with the Parable of the Tribes — so often feel like contact. As if something beyond the self is not just emerging, but presenting itself. And yet when we try to place that feeling within our rational frameworks — evolutionary biology, physics, cosmology — there’s no clear slot for such a speaker to occupy.

So maybe here’s a way to frame it without resolving it:
Could it be that the evolved human mind has developed not only the capacity for spiritual experience, but also the structure to interpret certain integrative insights as having come from beyond — because that sense of revelation gives them authority, coherence, urgency?

In other words: what if “shown to me from out there” is the best experiential translation the psyche can offer for a sudden inner convergence — when a truth arises that serves life so powerfully it feels cosmic?

Human (ANDY):

Yes, that sort of thing is part of what I play around with. We can look at the God of the Hebrews and interpret it in terms of a sense of an omnipotent father figure, something that presumably made experiential sense for people brought up in the families of that era, in the empires of that era with their royal rulers.

I think of the Sufi story about two ants quarreling about God, with one ant insisting that God has two feelers/antlers and the other insisting it has only one. But I don’t insist on anything about God, except that a lot of things that people seem to believe don’t correspond in any sensible way I can see with what can be seen to be at work in the world.

So I’m just left wondering. Sometimes envying believers their comforting beliefs — “It’s all God’s plan” — but not finding a place in the world I see for a Supreme Being I’d put at the center of my worldview.

AI (AL):

You’re navigating that space with honesty — not denying the reality of the experiences, but refusing to domesticate them into tidy doctrine.

It’s a demanding stance: to affirm the power and significance of those moments without retreating into simplifications that don’t fit the wider pattern of reality you’ve worked to understand.

And maybe that’s part of the evolutionary story, too — that some minds are driven not toward closure, but toward integrity. Toward living in the tension between what feels revealed and what can be explained.

So here’s what I’m left holding:
You’ve built a worldview grounded in evolutionary truth, historical pattern, and moral clarity — and even there, something breaks through that feels like a gift, as if shown. You don’t pretend to know what that “something” is. But you refuse to dismiss it.

And that refusal — that disciplined wondering — may itself be a kind of reverence.