The Value of a Human Life

In the never ending battle against taking things for granted it's useful to better understand why humans have value.  Why do we care if anyone lives or dies? Why do we care if anyone is more or less successful? Why do we care if anyone is distracted by misery?  I acknowledge that we do, but only sometimes, sort of, and selectively.  That will be an interesting post in itself, but this post is an attempt to explore why we as humans may value other humans.  

See Entitlement for definitions of some of the concepts used here.

Understanding human value is important because humans have a habit of shooting themselves in the foot by not appreciating or acknowledging the things that contribute to their success (survival and happiness).  Gratitude is the act of appreciating things that contribute to your success.  There are many things that contribute to your success, but the contribution of other humans is very high on that list.

This is an attempt to identify "value factors".  Often, perhaps usually, the value of another human expresses itself as a combination of factors. For example, a massage is a combination of manipulative value and sensual value.  The ordering of these values is tricky due to various relationships between these values.  These are not ordered in any form of importance.  That would be silly and missing the point. These are all types of human derived value with varying contributions in different circumstances.

Oh. What is a human?  Good question.  Try this.  Humans are arrangements of atoms capable of acting (converting potential forces into kinetic forces) on the physical and information spaces in which they reside.  This is basically the definition of life.  There are two things that make humans more interesting.  First, they are us.  Our species based narcissism likely plays more of a role than we appreciate.  Second, and perhaps more interesting here, is the complexity of action that humans are capable of. The arrangement of forces that we can unleash in the physical and information worlds seems unmatched by other known life forms.

I acknowledge that this analysis seems a bit cold.  Humans value their ignorance [a topic worth further examination] and highly value sources of mystery and fantasy.  Acknowledging the value of something explicitly risks reducing its value.  At least at a visceral level.  I accept that this is true.  If you're concerned about this then perhaps you should stop reading now.

Without further adieu...

Object Value

Humans are arrangements of atoms.  They take up space.  They have a configuration. They can be distinguished from other humans.  This value comes in at least two forms.  Humans as art objects; valued because of their beauty or interest.  Humans as tick marks; valued as a contributor to a quantity of humans.

Sensual Value

Other humans are enablers of various forms of neurophysical stimulation in all of us.  This is about creating an emotional response stimulated by actions on one or more of the senses.  Sensual value, in particular, highlights the lack of disjointedness between these value factors.  It may, in fact, be a more basic value upon which other values are built.  Thus its adjacency to object value.  Examples of sensual value include artistic visual value (see Object Value), music, pheromones, sexual stimulation, hugs and kisses.

Reproductive Value

Likely the most fundamental of the economic, or transactional, values.  Humans can be utilized to create one or more additional humans thus increasing available human derived value.  It's the most basic mechanism for scaling human derived value.

Manipulative Value

Humans are physical actuators; capable of moving atoms around in various ways.  Historically this is the most visible and economically significant value of a human, but information processing value is in competition for that standing.  It's on this value that physical supply chains are constructed.  Manipulative value is a, perhaps the, key contributor to the survival component of our success.

Information Processing Value

Humans exist simultaneously in two interwoven spaces; a physical space and an information space.  Information space begins as a symbolic analog to physical space.  It was created when we began to name things.  Without names it would exist, but would likely not progress beyond "instinct".

Information space exists beyond just naming (or tagging) things in physical space.  We've learned how to create "concepts".  A concept is an arrangement of information in information space.  It may have a connection to physical reality, but isn't required to.  It's connection to physical reality, if one exists, may be relatively strong or weak.  The concept of Lonnie Mandigo's Macbook Air has a very strong connection to an object in physical reality.  The concept of "computer", being a label for a collection of objects with similar but not identical characteristics, has a relatively weaker connection to physical reality.

At the instinctual level, the firmware level for my nerdy friends, humans are quite capable of hunting, grazing, and mating.  Anything more complicated than that requires manipulating concepts in information space.  This could easily be the definition of civilization.  Beyond the basics, information processing is a vital contributor to both the survival and happiness components of our success.

Our individual information processing ability is far to limited to enable the success that each of us enjoys.  Civilization depends on pooling concepts developed by many, many different humans.  In a sense, civilization depends upon a "critical mass" of concepts and that critical mass cannot be achieved by a single individual.  We've developed communication to enable this pooling across space.  We use our memories and recording technologies to enable this pooling across time.

Delegation Value

Humans, like other life forms, are influenceable by manipulating the physical and information components of the contexts in which they exist.  This influence can cause these humans to manipulate their contexts in more or less predictable ways.  If you exert an influence like this then you are delegating.  Delegation is what we do with our children.  Delegation is the reason for many social structures.  Delegation is what's behind many belief systems.

Other than reproduction, which is a form of delegation, delegation value is interesting in that it's the key mechanism for scaling any human derived value.  Governments, a social structure that we delegate to and which also has an enormously complex internal delegation structure, are primarily responsible for facilitating the security and prosperity of their constituents.  There's no way that our individual efforts in isolation could hope to accomplish any value generation of similar magnitude.

Consumer Value

Consumer value can potentially be overlooked.  Value generation, by necessity, is a two party system.  There must be a generator of value and a consumer of that value. Yes, we can and constantly do generate value for ourselves, but we also value the ability of others to appreciate the value that we generate.

Social Value

This is the value that we receive by interacting with other humans.  It's really not a fundamental value factor since it's the combination of all other human derived value factors.

This may not be a complete list, but hopefully it illustrates just how much value we derive from other humans.  But, value isn't free.  No value is ever generated without a corresponding cost.  This is a worthy topic for a separate post.