It seems obvious that your change in relationship with suffering constitutes a kind of value shift, doesn’t it?
This is not obvious to me. In the first place, I never had the value “avoid suffering” even before I started my practices. Since before I even knew the concept of suffering, I have always had the compulsion of avoiding suffering, but the value to transcend it.
What’s your relationship with value drift? Are you unafraid of it? That gradual death by mutation? The infidelity of your future self?
I am afraid of value drift, but I am even more afraid that the values that I already have are based on incoherent thinking and false assumptions, which, once exposed, would lead me to realize that I have been spending my life in pursuing the wrong things entirely.
Because I am afraid of both value drift and value incoherence, I place a high priority in learning how I can upgrade my understanding of my own values, while at the same time being very cautious about which sources I trust and learn from. I cannot seek to improve value coherence without making myself vulnerable to value drift. Therefore, I only invest in learning from sources authored by people who appear to be aligned with my values.
Do you see it as a kind of natural erosion, a more vital aspect of the human telos than the motive aspects it erodes?
No, I do not think that value drift is inevitable, nor do I think the “higher purpose”, if such a thing exists, involves constantly drifting. My goal is to achieve a state of value constancy.
This is not obvious to me. In the first place, I never had the value “avoid suffering” even before I started my practices. Since before I even knew the concept of suffering, I have always had the compulsion of avoiding suffering, but the value to transcend it.
I am afraid of value drift, but I am even more afraid that the values that I already have are based on incoherent thinking and false assumptions, which, once exposed, would lead me to realize that I have been spending my life in pursuing the wrong things entirely.
Because I am afraid of both value drift and value incoherence, I place a high priority in learning how I can upgrade my understanding of my own values, while at the same time being very cautious about which sources I trust and learn from. I cannot seek to improve value coherence without making myself vulnerable to value drift. Therefore, I only invest in learning from sources authored by people who appear to be aligned with my values.
No, I do not think that value drift is inevitable, nor do I think the “higher purpose”, if such a thing exists, involves constantly drifting. My goal is to achieve a state of value constancy.