Gordon Seidoh Worley comments on What’s up with self-esteem?

[Gordon Seidoh Worley]

Oh, to your other question, I have no special resources to recommend. I mostly arrived at a version of this theory on my own, then found out about Friston and perceptual control theory and was like “ah, great, someone already worked this out, one less thing for me to worry about!”.

In my recent post on value drift I had a paragraph with a bunch of links, though I think they are the things you may have already seen. For completeness and in case you missed any of the ones I liked, here it is copied into this comment:

If we tear away the idea that we might possess values, we are left with the act of valuing, and to value something is ultimately to judge it or assess its worth. While I can’t hope to fit all my philosophy into this paragraph, I consider valuing, judging, or assessing to be one of the fundamental operations of “conscious” things, it being the key input that powers the feedback loops that differentiate the “living” from the “dead”. For historical reasons we might call this feeling or sensation, and if you like control theory “sensing” seems appropriate since in a control system it is the sensor that determines and sends the signal to the controller after it senses the system. Promising modern theories suggest control theory is useful for modeling the human mind as a hierarchy of control systems that minimize prediction error while also maintaining homeostasis, and this matches with one of the most detailed and longest used theories of human psychology, so I feel justified in saying that the key, primitive action happening when we value something is that we sense or judge it to be good, neutral, or bad (or, if you prefer, more, same, or less).