Sunday, January 2, 2011

Explicitly defining value equations

There has been some chatter in a comments section of one of my posts lately, so I figured I'd make an official follow-up post outlining what I use to make decisions in life. This way, I'll avoid annoying people with double and triple commenting. Here you go:

As far as values are concerned,

Object A + Valued Quality X = Object B + Valued Quality X

and

Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B + Valued (or not valued) Quality Y

and

Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B - Valued Quality X

Choosing between two foods which your taste buds perceive in ways that are virtually indistinguishable to you, the macro-scale observer, does not require a practical decision-making process, because both foods share the quality of "delicious" in almost equal amounts and configurations. However, there had to have been a preceding decision -- the decision to eat something delicious, which was made practically based on qualitative analysis of the quality of "delicious" and its competitors. Once you've chosen to eat something delicious -- instead of to eat something disgusting, for example -- so long as what you're being presented with possesses this quality, your decision-making job is done.

Forget about physical objects; they're just convenience abstractions, mental projections of the external world. What really matters are the qualities that these abstractions harbor -- and in what amounts and configurations they exist.

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