Once again, Walter, you rightly call out bullshit. Yet another example of how humans are rationalizing, not rational, creatures. "My personal preference must be a Universal Truth!" Or, as you rightly put it, "it’s so easy for us to just take the things we value and declare them to reflect the right kind of intrinsic values."
Suffering is the closest to an intrinsic value as one could imagine, altough I probably put it together with the experience of pleasurable states. There is certainly the option of trying to convince the public of the intrinsic value of reducing suffering for the sake of animals if this is more motivating, a version of Plato's noble lie perhaps, indeed perhaps even endorsed by utilitarianism, but I can't help it as a philosopher to try to focus on the truth. It reminds me of the very common idea, e.g. by Voltaire, that religion should be kept for its positive social impact even if it's false.
“Adaptive immunity is instructive here. It produces stochastic variation as a structural feature, not because it ‘aims’ at a pathogen in advance. The environment retrospectively selects what works. Diversity isn’t intrinsically valuable in a metaphysical sense, but in adaptive systems, it is constitutive of function. Without variation, there is no selection, and without selection, no adaptation. Perhaps the intrinsic/instrumental distinction breaks down once we look at how real biological systems actually operate.”
We may be conflating diversity as a generative mechanism with diversity as a valued outcome. In biology, variation is a structural feature of systems navigating uncertainty. Whether the resulting diversity is beneficial or harmful depends on regulatory constraints and environmental pressures. Treating ‘diversity’ as intrinsically valuable overlooks this distinction.
Bridging the is/ought, one might claim that there are specific examples where diversity is essential to thriving. For instance, under the Red Queen Hypothesis, sexual recombination promotes diverse mixing of genetics as a resilience to the threat of microorganisms. We can also see a range of examples where diversity yields robustness, from the success of stock market portfolios to the basket of inputs in prediction markets. Using a selection-style evolutionary epistemology (a la Bartley channeled through Liane Gabora's honing refinement), the motif continues. I might be able to put together an argument that optimal induction is tied to diversity using an algorithmic information theory model since only variation-selection approaches across diverse models can potentially span the state space of Turing machines in search of minimal ones.
I don't think this is enough to meet the requirement of "intrinsic," though, but it clearly is valuable at many scales and in many contexts.
Fair enough. I might invoke the faddish new "law of increasing functional information" to tie all significant structure and function in the universe to asymmetry and diversity as a last resort, putting maybe enough additional pressure on the semantics of intrinsic that we can safely abandon it along with ideas like teleological purpose.
Yes clearly this is all instrumental. If you ask the question “intrinsic to who?” it becomes obvious it’s intrinsic to life’s preference for remaining alive…which is an instrumental goal. I think that’s as basic as it gets and it’s how I ground my evolutionary ethics, but it’s Bentham’s “nonsense on stilts” to pretend otherwise.
You are right that a thought experiment revealing a shared preference does not, by itself, establish the existence of mind-independent intrinsic values. At most, it shows something about our evaluative psychology. But the deeper issue is not whether diversity is metaphysically “intrinsic,” it is how values arise at all. Human beings are biologically structured organisms with evolved motivational architectures; we reliably respond to complexity, life, and variation because such features have historically tracked resilience, adaptability, and exploratory potential. To say we “value” diversity may therefore require no appeal to spooky intrinsic properties — yet it also need not collapse into empty nihilism. Values can be real in the sense that they emerge from stable features of embodied agents operating in environments. The mistake is thinking we must choose between metaphysical intrinsic value and total projection. A naturalistic account can explain why diversity tends to matter to creatures like us without pretending that the universe itself contains moral properties independent of any form of life.
I should mention I have a long dozed years, and recently conflicted past with Eric, who choose to focus on, and then question the credibility of my argument and position, and to ignore what I actually wrote
Given my history with Eric, it makes sense that this piece by Walter Veit lands as more than an abstract methodological dispute. There’s a familiar pattern here that mirrors what I have experienced: shifting attention away from the internal logic of a framework and toward meta-level judgments about credibility, intuition, or rhetorical acceptability.
What Veit is really attacking? Veit isn’t primarily attacking “diversity is good.” He’s attacking the move from:
“I (and many others) strongly feel X is good”, to, “X is intrinsically good, full stop, independent of any valuer.”
His target is the ontological inflation of preference into property.
This aligns closely with my long-standing point, experience generates values, values do not float free as cosmic furniture. Or, in my IGT language, valuation is an emergent feature of action–identity loops, not a primitive stamped onto the universe.
Where Schwitzgebel’s move breaks (and why it bothers me)?
Schwitzgebel’s thought experiment quietly relies on a slide. Psychological inclination → metaphysical status.
Veit correctly calls this out as question-begging. From my side, the deeper irritation is this,
Schwitzgebel frames disagreement as a kind of defect (“If you don’t share this intuition, I have no argument against you”) while still treating his intuition as philosophically probative.
That’s a soft form of epistemic gatekeeping. Not aggressive, not explicit, but structurally exclusionary.
Which mirrors my past experience with him. The form of my work is treated as suspect before its content is metabolized.
Hume sits quietly in the background. Veit’s invocation of David Hume is doing heavy lifting. The mind spreads itself on external objects. Meaning, we confuse projection with perception.
From a Polycene lens, values are not discovered like rocks.They are enacted like gestures.
They arise within relational fields. This does not make them trivial. It makes them local, contextual, historically shaped, and revisable.
Which is far more compatible with my emphasis on dynamism, creativity, and non-stagnation.
Where Veit and I quietly converge? Veit lands in moral nihilism. I don’t.
But Veit and I share a crucial middle. No mind-independent intrinsic values.
Yes to lived, enacted, negotiated, evolving value-fields, IGT would phrase this as value is a property of experiential recursion, not of inert being.
In other words, reality doesn’t contain values. Reality values.
That’s a subtle but decisive shift.
Schwitzgebel wants diversity to be intrinsically valuable. Veit points out, if you really care about diversity, you should avoid metaphysical doctrines that try to legislate a single true value-structure.
I have been making a parallel point for years, attempts to universalize one metaphysical picture of consciousness often function as covert constraint systems. Pluralism dies first, even when pluralism is being preached.
I reject intrinsic value as a metaphysical property, while affirming value as an emergent, creative, relational process intrinsic to experience itself.
Values do not preexist experiencers. Experiencers generate values. And because experiencers are plural, values must be plural too.
That keeps me out of both moral realism, flat nihilism, and squarely inside an evolutionary, generative axiology.
My conflict with Eric has never really been about tone. It’s about ontological starting points.
He begins from intuitions and asks what must be true about reality to honor them.
I begin from generativity and ask what kinds of realities make intuition possible at all.
Once again, Walter, you rightly call out bullshit. Yet another example of how humans are rationalizing, not rational, creatures. "My personal preference must be a Universal Truth!" Or, as you rightly put it, "it’s so easy for us to just take the things we value and declare them to reflect the right kind of intrinsic values."
(The closest I come to believing in "intrinsic value" is reducing unnecessary, unwanted intense suffering.)
Suffering is the closest to an intrinsic value as one could imagine, altough I probably put it together with the experience of pleasurable states. There is certainly the option of trying to convince the public of the intrinsic value of reducing suffering for the sake of animals if this is more motivating, a version of Plato's noble lie perhaps, indeed perhaps even endorsed by utilitarianism, but I can't help it as a philosopher to try to focus on the truth. It reminds me of the very common idea, e.g. by Voltaire, that religion should be kept for its positive social impact even if it's false.
“Adaptive immunity is instructive here. It produces stochastic variation as a structural feature, not because it ‘aims’ at a pathogen in advance. The environment retrospectively selects what works. Diversity isn’t intrinsically valuable in a metaphysical sense, but in adaptive systems, it is constitutive of function. Without variation, there is no selection, and without selection, no adaptation. Perhaps the intrinsic/instrumental distinction breaks down once we look at how real biological systems actually operate.”
We may be conflating diversity as a generative mechanism with diversity as a valued outcome. In biology, variation is a structural feature of systems navigating uncertainty. Whether the resulting diversity is beneficial or harmful depends on regulatory constraints and environmental pressures. Treating ‘diversity’ as intrinsically valuable overlooks this distinction.
Bridging the is/ought, one might claim that there are specific examples where diversity is essential to thriving. For instance, under the Red Queen Hypothesis, sexual recombination promotes diverse mixing of genetics as a resilience to the threat of microorganisms. We can also see a range of examples where diversity yields robustness, from the success of stock market portfolios to the basket of inputs in prediction markets. Using a selection-style evolutionary epistemology (a la Bartley channeled through Liane Gabora's honing refinement), the motif continues. I might be able to put together an argument that optimal induction is tied to diversity using an algorithmic information theory model since only variation-selection approaches across diverse models can potentially span the state space of Turing machines in search of minimal ones.
I don't think this is enough to meet the requirement of "intrinsic," though, but it clearly is valuable at many scales and in many contexts.
Agreed, we can identify many purposes for which diversity is required, but that's an instrumental justification not an intrinsic one.
Fair enough. I might invoke the faddish new "law of increasing functional information" to tie all significant structure and function in the universe to asymmetry and diversity as a last resort, putting maybe enough additional pressure on the semantics of intrinsic that we can safely abandon it along with ideas like teleological purpose.
It won't hurt.
Yes clearly this is all instrumental. If you ask the question “intrinsic to who?” it becomes obvious it’s intrinsic to life’s preference for remaining alive…which is an instrumental goal. I think that’s as basic as it gets and it’s how I ground my evolutionary ethics, but it’s Bentham’s “nonsense on stilts” to pretend otherwise.
You are right that a thought experiment revealing a shared preference does not, by itself, establish the existence of mind-independent intrinsic values. At most, it shows something about our evaluative psychology. But the deeper issue is not whether diversity is metaphysically “intrinsic,” it is how values arise at all. Human beings are biologically structured organisms with evolved motivational architectures; we reliably respond to complexity, life, and variation because such features have historically tracked resilience, adaptability, and exploratory potential. To say we “value” diversity may therefore require no appeal to spooky intrinsic properties — yet it also need not collapse into empty nihilism. Values can be real in the sense that they emerge from stable features of embodied agents operating in environments. The mistake is thinking we must choose between metaphysical intrinsic value and total projection. A naturalistic account can explain why diversity tends to matter to creatures like us without pretending that the universe itself contains moral properties independent of any form of life.
I should mention I have a long dozed years, and recently conflicted past with Eric, who choose to focus on, and then question the credibility of my argument and position, and to ignore what I actually wrote
Given my history with Eric, it makes sense that this piece by Walter Veit lands as more than an abstract methodological dispute. There’s a familiar pattern here that mirrors what I have experienced: shifting attention away from the internal logic of a framework and toward meta-level judgments about credibility, intuition, or rhetorical acceptability.
What Veit is really attacking? Veit isn’t primarily attacking “diversity is good.” He’s attacking the move from:
“I (and many others) strongly feel X is good”, to, “X is intrinsically good, full stop, independent of any valuer.”
His target is the ontological inflation of preference into property.
This aligns closely with my long-standing point, experience generates values, values do not float free as cosmic furniture. Or, in my IGT language, valuation is an emergent feature of action–identity loops, not a primitive stamped onto the universe.
Where Schwitzgebel’s move breaks (and why it bothers me)?
Schwitzgebel’s thought experiment quietly relies on a slide. Psychological inclination → metaphysical status.
Veit correctly calls this out as question-begging. From my side, the deeper irritation is this,
Schwitzgebel frames disagreement as a kind of defect (“If you don’t share this intuition, I have no argument against you”) while still treating his intuition as philosophically probative.
That’s a soft form of epistemic gatekeeping. Not aggressive, not explicit, but structurally exclusionary.
Which mirrors my past experience with him. The form of my work is treated as suspect before its content is metabolized.
Hume sits quietly in the background. Veit’s invocation of David Hume is doing heavy lifting. The mind spreads itself on external objects. Meaning, we confuse projection with perception.
From a Polycene lens, values are not discovered like rocks.They are enacted like gestures.
They arise within relational fields. This does not make them trivial. It makes them local, contextual, historically shaped, and revisable.
Which is far more compatible with my emphasis on dynamism, creativity, and non-stagnation.
Where Veit and I quietly converge? Veit lands in moral nihilism. I don’t.
But Veit and I share a crucial middle. No mind-independent intrinsic values.
Yes to lived, enacted, negotiated, evolving value-fields, IGT would phrase this as value is a property of experiential recursion, not of inert being.
In other words, reality doesn’t contain values. Reality values.
That’s a subtle but decisive shift.
Schwitzgebel wants diversity to be intrinsically valuable. Veit points out, if you really care about diversity, you should avoid metaphysical doctrines that try to legislate a single true value-structure.
I have been making a parallel point for years, attempts to universalize one metaphysical picture of consciousness often function as covert constraint systems. Pluralism dies first, even when pluralism is being preached.
I reject intrinsic value as a metaphysical property, while affirming value as an emergent, creative, relational process intrinsic to experience itself.
Values do not preexist experiencers. Experiencers generate values. And because experiencers are plural, values must be plural too.
That keeps me out of both moral realism, flat nihilism, and squarely inside an evolutionary, generative axiology.
My conflict with Eric has never really been about tone. It’s about ontological starting points.
He begins from intuitions and asks what must be true about reality to honor them.
I begin from generativity and ask what kinds of realities make intuition possible at all.
Those are different rivers.
They only look adjacent from the shore.