Valueception

Description

Daniel Thorson:

"Iain McGilchrist's extensive research on the divided brain offers compelling insights into this question. In his groundbreaking works "The Master and His Emissary" and "The Matter With Things," McGilchrist introduces the concept of "valueception" – our capacity to directly perceive values as realities that exist independently of our preferences or judgments.

This perceptual capacity, McGilchrist argues, is primarily mediated by the right hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in direct, embodied engagement with reality in its wholeness. Unlike the left hemisphere, which excels at abstraction, categorization, and manipulation, the right hemisphere maintains an open, receptive relationship with what is. It perceives reality not as a collection of objects to be utilized but as a living presence imbued with inherent meaning and value.

The cultural dominance of left-hemisphere modes of attention has led to what McGilchrist describes as a "hall of mirrors" – a world where we increasingly engage not with reality itself but with our representations and models of it. In this abstracted space, values become mere preferences or subjective projections rather than qualities we can directly perceive in the world.

Crucially, McGilchrist argues that how we attend to reality shapes what we're able to perceive. The narrow, utilitarian focus characteristic of left-hemisphere attention systematically blinds us to the presence of intrinsic value. Like looking through a pinhole, we see only what our mode of attention allows. A world approached primarily as resource, as means to our ends, gradually loses its inherent value and meaning, not because these qualities disappear from reality, but because our way of attending makes them imperceptible to us."

(https://intimatemirror.substack.com/p/valueception?)

Discussion

The Eye of Value in CosmoErotic Humanism

Daniel Thorson:

"The philosophers Zachary Stein and Marc Gafni have developed this insight further through their framework of CosmoErotic Humanism. They speak of "the eye of value" – a perceptual capacity that allows us to directly apprehend the intrinsic worth of reality.

This eye of value, when open and clarified, enables us to perceive not just that things have value but how value flows and manifests in the living world. It reveals a universe that is not value-neutral but value-saturated, where goodness, truth, and beauty are not subjective projections but real dimensions of existence that call us to right relationship.

Stein and Gafni understand our current meta-crisis – the interconnected ecological, social, and meaning crises we face – as fundamentally a crisis of intimacy and perception. When the eye of value is clouded or closed, we become functionally blind to the intrinsic worth of the natural world, of other beings, and ultimately of ourselves. This blindness doesn't just impoverish our experience; it enables destruction that would be unthinkable if we could directly perceive the value of what we're destroying.

The eye of value isn't just a passive receiver; it's an active capacity that shapes how we exist in the world. When this perceptual organ is functioning well, we naturally align our actions with the flow of value we perceive. We don't need complex ethical calculations to know that clear-cutting an ancient forest is wrong – we can feel the wrongness directly, just as we can sense the dissonance in a jarring chord."

(https://intimatemirror.substack.com/p/valueception?)