Your Deepest Value is Adaption
You like some people, food, and TV shows more than you do others. When those likes change over time, you can often notice changes in context, i.e., in the details of those things and your interactions with them. Allowing you to attribute your choice changes to such context. You might see that you tend to like people who are friendly, food that is spicy, or TV shows that are sexy. You conclude that you don’t just directly like particular people, food, or shows, but instead your preferences are about more deeper features, and you make particular choices to better obtain those fundamentals.
However, for other things that you choose, you made your first related choice early in life, and haven’t changed your choices much in a long time. Like being really into music. For example, you may have forgotten that you initially weren’t so into music, but then got into music more soon after associates praised and noticed you more when you were musical. Yes, today you get a lot of respect and attention for your music, but you tell yourself that those are incidental; music is now one of your fundamental values.
If all that attention were to go away, your interest would plausibly eventually decline greatly. But as the chance of that is low, you can easily deny or ignore such undermining counterfactuals. And maybe you have worked to “commit” to this choice, by making it harder to imagine ever liking music any less than you now do. Which would in fact slow such a decline, if it were to come.
The habits that you acquired early in life were also influenced by the community in which you were embedded. Had that community been different, those habits would also have been different. But you won’t notice that context dependence much unless you study how different communities vary in their habits.
Other than re timescale and visibility, I don’t see a fundamental difference here. Between the processes by which you make the kinds of choices where you can see yourself changing often, and so can attribute them to deeper values, and the choices you made long ago, and see as intrinsic to “who you are”, where you don’t notice that you would have made different choices had contexts been different. Yes, at each level we can distinguish influences that come from info at that level, and deeper influences. But all the levels make that distinction.
Yes, people like this idea that they have a “core value identity” which lets them see themselves as moral and connected to particular communities. But this makes them neglect and deny their actual past and potential future context-dependencies.
If we look as deeply as we can at the slowest and largest scale processes by which we change our choices, what we will find is evolution, both of DNA and of culture. Maladaptive choices are suppressed, while adaptive choices are enhanced. And so if there if anything that deserves the name of “your deepest value”, it is adaption. Whether you like the self-image of that statement or not, adaption is in fact what most deeply shapes your deepest personal choice processes, which shape your more shallow mental structures that you notice as the “values” that guide your most frequently changing particular choices.
This is missing something. Adaptation *to what*? Adaptation is always in service of something - some goal. It's like saying "my core value is optimization." Optimization *of what*? There has to be an objective to start with, before you can adapt or optimize that objective.
You described a person adapting their superficial preferences to gain greater social status. In that case, their "core value" would be greater social status, not "adaptation."
Anyway, the notion of having "core values" is not well defined and not well grounded. If a core value is an unchangeable preference from which all our other preferences follow, we probably don't have those. More meaningful than a core preferences would be a preference that we would *settle on*, in the limit, as we gather data and experience, and consider many different alternatives. A preference of reflective equilibrium.
Adaptation is a mechanism by which an entity selects, ranks, and propagates its values. Without it, new ideas or values would not spread or persist.
Adaptation itself is not a value; it is a sorting mechanism. What we actually value is the emergence of new ideas or values that are worth adapting to.