This article is a follow up to the Objects of mind mental representation, where I have discussed some of the characteristics of mental objects. Here I will try to understand how our values are generated.
Following is a poem about our values.
Happiness Quantifiers - from the book what is time.
We are in the land of Quantifiers they shouted,
We measure our distances, we measure our weights,
We measure our time, and we measure our speeds,
We measure our heat, and we measure our energies.
And when we get together, we talk about our measurements.
We talk about the speeds of our cars.
We chat about the calories we consume.
We argue about the wages we are paid.
We fight about the boundaries and land.
We laugh about pink and white dresses.
And we teach our children to measure on their own.
That's all what we do.
If you have followed the thought process of mental objects, previously I have discussed everything which comes to our consciousness is represented by our mind by mental objects. Same physical object is represented by different mental imaginary by different people in deferent ways. More importantly our values are attached to the mental objects. You would say, no, our values are in the physical object itself. Let's understand this.
Example
Imagine you are trying to sell your car. You are the first owner of the car. You try to sell it for good money; however, nobody wants to buy it. After few months of trying, you give up. You give up to a salesperson to some relatively low price than you have initially imagined. You think it is worth more than that and it is surely.
Few months later you see your car outside a shopping complex, and you meet the new owner. With a casual talk without telling anything, you ask how much he pay for the car. And he gives a value which rolls your eyes. Shamefully you go away thinking you missed the opportunity to earn some more cash. What happened?
It happened as the price was not in the car, the price was attached to the mental object of the car. Really speaking there is a branch of finance which is called behavioral finance as the real-world decisions we make are inherently attached to the values of our mental objects. Not only in finance, but we can also generalize this idea to any other value given to mental objects, if you closely think about it, whenever we create a mental object, we give a price tag to it. It may be a religion, mathematic equation, a goal for next year, a relationship or friendship.
The following characteristics of mental objects are also applicable to these price tags naming,
values are unique to each individual.
values change over time.
What is the Advantage of knowing this?
I would say it is essential to understand where our values come from as each and every action and decision making, every and gain and loss in our lives come from values we assign. Hence the happiness as well as sadness, pain and pleasure inherently bound to the values. Anyone who wish to live a mindful life, this information may help to overcome some of the problems if not all.
Thank you for reading Where do our values come from? - mental representation.
You may also like to read A talking tree thought experiment.
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