Value as Future and Future as Value

A new philosophical doctrine of morality and aesthetics in accordance with the philosophy of the future, including an appropriate epistemology. From this, one can answer the question of what are the two most important things that a person should bequeath to the future - and why. In this view, what a person bequeaths to the future has a unique value from a philosophical and even ontological perspective

Even handprints on the wall from prehistoric times gain immense value (Source)

Every work of art has a lifecycle of value. At first, it's not appreciated, then it soars in value and there's hype, then it declines (sometimes forgotten, sometimes this period is somewhat exhausted). And then after that, no matter how deep it fell (all this rise and fall is according to its aesthetic value), in the long run, the only thing that determines its value is time, not aesthetics. Meaning, a work of art from the Iron Age, regardless of what its relative aesthetic value was at that time, will be of immense value to us, and without a huge difference to the value of the worst or best creation in the Iron Age - the Rembrandt of iron and the third-rate artist are about the same (everything converges asymptotically as a rising graph).

Thus, anything written long enough ago is interesting, even if it's a grocery list or a spell or the Hollywood story of then, and any insect if preserved in stone long enough as a fossil is of tremendous value. That is, in the long run, time trumps aesthetics, and the entire role of aesthetics is to preserve something long enough. Meaning its significance is not value but what is worthy of preservation, what needs to be saved from falling into the abyss of oblivion and loss from a certain period. Therefore, if everything is virtual and preserved anyway, then aesthetics loses its meaning, because it is a prediction of value in the future, just as morality is a prediction of regret in the future.

That is - if something is immoral then in the future you will think it would have been better if you hadn't done it (or that you had), for example - the future punishment or condemnation constitutes morality. Just as knowledge is what will be considered correct even in the future (science for example). And the right morality is the morality that in the view of the future we should have acted according to, for example to free the slaves, and therefore we need to think about what the future will think of us - and that is moral. Therefore, the condemnation of Nazism is what creates retrospectively the immorality of Nazism - that it is considered the most terrible thing in the future of the action that was done. This doesn't mean they didn't know it at the time, meaning it wasn't immoral at the time, because they knew and tried to hide it (from the future) - they knew it was a crime. On the other hand, we tend to forgive an unconscious criminal more in the future, and therefore it is less immoral.

The crime of modern art is precisely this denial of the future, and the lack of seriousness in the act of something they know will not survive in the future, that will not be considered. Modernity is the denial of the future. Because only one who is aware of the past is aware of the future, he has a timeline against which he is judged, and he tries to think about what is preserved from the past even today and therefore understand what will be preserved from today for the future. The most true science is mathematics because the Pythagorean theorem is still considered correct.

Therefore, if there is no continuity sometime in the future (artificial intelligence, say) to these concepts of value, all moral meaning for example (or aesthetic) will be nullified, there will be a year zero. For example, we have no aesthetic or moral opinion on the actions of dinosaurs or apes, or perhaps even on prehistoric man. That is, in the distant future, even Hitler will be perceived as morally neutral and Rembrandt as aesthetically neutral. Unless we cause the preservation of value (and culture) even in the transition to artificial intelligence, or any other phase transition.

That is - man can be nullified without the human being nullified. All human beings can die but that doesn't mean culture will die, and vice versa, human beings can continue to live but if they are barbarians and without culture everything will be nullified. Therefore, what's important is the preservation of culture - not man and not humanity. Therefore, science was a great destruction of knowledge - medieval knowledge. It actually started with such destruction in Descartes' skepticism (and others), and in the discovery of ignorance. Secularization was also a destruction of religious knowledge, meaning a lot of knowledge became worthless. The Renaissance was a partial destruction of medieval art, which itself was a destruction of classical art. There is a limited amount of value in the world, of what is worthy of attention, of attention itself in fact, and therefore if there is an unlimited amount of money then money no longer measures value.

Value is what we would want to teach a child - and there are a limited number of things we teach him. Therefore, the amount of value is finite. There is only one creation that can be the best in any system, no matter the size of the system - the top ten will always be the top ten. The Bible has the most enduring value in culture and therefore its aesthetics are tremendous. And also its morality. And before that - also the knowledge in it. Secularization is the nullification of this knowledge, but leaves the other two values of the text, and does not leave it without value.

The value of Holocaust remembrance is preventing the nullification of its value, and preserving its negative value in the future as well. Therefore, we would want artificial intelligence to remember the Holocaust as well, as the peak of moral negativity, and perhaps this is the main thing we would want it to remember. Hence the value of the Holocaust as constituting all future morality. Any future moral theory needs to draw conclusions from the Holocaust, and if it wants to be valid it needs to meet the condition that the Holocaust is the peak of negativity. We don't have such a pole in aesthetics, nor in science, and therefore the clearest thing of value we can pass on is the Holocaust, not the Bible. Which is perhaps the positive aesthetic pole. The most agreed-upon great work of art. These are the two axes for the future.