Deep section · V — Value

Value (V): better and worse for a system

Once a system is aware of differences that matter for its own continuation, those differences do not remain neutral. Some states support its integrity; others undermine it. Value, in IO, is the name for this structural tilt: the “better/worse” gradient written into how a system interacts with its own possibilities.

IO treats value as neither a purely subjective feeling nor a mysterious external property. Instead, value is what you get when you combine:

• an informationally structured state space (I),
• a system that is aware of its own and its environment's states (A),
• and the simple fact that some states allow that system to persist, learn, and act, while others do not.

From this perspective, value is not added “on top” of the world. Rather, it is the way an informationally self-maintaining system sorts and ranks the differences it is already aware of. The system does not treat all Δ-equivalent possibilities the same; it develops a preference structure over them.

In simple organisms, this may look like moving toward nutrient-rich regions and away from damaging conditions. In more complex systems, it becomes richer: preferences about long-term stability, learning, social bonds, aesthetic experience, and so on. IO's claim is that all of these are variations on the same underlying pattern: a gradient over informational states that encodes "more or less compatible with continued, coherent existence of this system (or system-of-systems)."

From preferences to gradients

In everyday language, we talk about "liking" or "wanting" some outcomes more than others. In IO, this gets reframed as a structure over the state space: a way of assigning higher or lower "goodness" to different configurations of the system and its environment.

Once you have that structure, many ideas from control theory and decision theory become applicable: value landscapes, attractors, gradients, and policies that tend to move the system uphill in that landscape. But IO keeps the focus on what grounds these numbers: the informational architecture of a self-maintaining system, not a free-floating "utility" imposed from outside.