From a natural phillosophy POV, I would say rather than distancing us from psychological value, we need to see money and power (the ability to expend energy) as a semiotic relation within which modern society inserts itself.

So the modern economic mode of life involves these two complementary kinds of abstraction. On the one hand, we have worked towards universalised flows of energy - principally the electricity networks and petrol stations that any kind of human productive activity can hook into. And then money acts as the abstract sign of the cost of a unit of material action, as in the price of a barrel of oil.

Obviously the world is more complex than that. Status matters, and so people pay a lot for paintings and other tokens of cultural value. Although conspicuous consumption is also just showing you can afford to waste energy.

But the point is that in creating these universalised energy sources and universalised energy tokens, we maximise our human freedoms then to do "anything we want to imagine" within the limits we have thus socially constructed

So rather than dollars distancing us from the true value of nature, they are our way to abstract the essence of nature itself - put a single market price on it's raw energy value - and thus give ourselves the most possible freedom to mobilise nature in ways that seem to meet our desires.

What do you think of this excerpt from the philosopher George Simmel's book?

“Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point”

Capital is the way we measure valuation, how we commodify labor in the real world. Psychological valuation is how we idealize what we desire.

“Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point” — River

It seems to be the dubious assertion that what we mean by 'valuation' would not be set by us, nor its real occurrences in the natural world, but some otherworldly "conceptual meaning" that suddenly arises by viewing the whole world from a particular view point.

What do you think of this excerpt from the philosopher George Simmel's book?

“Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point”

I'd appreciate your thoughts... — River

It seems like a badly written sentence. "Conceptual meaning" sounds redundant. Valuation is presented as a part of the natural world and yet independent of the world, a contradiction.

That being said, I can image viewing the world through one pair of desirous eyes. Then we can image everything important to the individual owning the eyes to be inflated and everything unimportant to be deflated. Or we can think of consciousness focused on ways to convert X into Y or get to Z. So the world is conceptually "scaffolded " in terms of these desires. A junkie, for instance, might think of the world in terms of dealers, cash-flow, and different highs. An investor sees the movement of money, etc.

If only we valued food and clothing and health as much as money, then things might be a lot better for many and not a few.

It seems contradictory in that it says "Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world", but then goes on to say that it's not part of the world. Which world is it not part of - the natural one? What other world is there?

Where is this vantage point relative to the world that it is independent of?

Humans aren't the only ones that make value judgements. Making value judgements is an evolved psychological trait that we acquired from older life forms. The health, resources and the amount of time and energy one devotes to mating rituals will influence the decision of a member of the opposite sex and determine whether or not the other is chosen to pass on their genes. Natural selection "selected" such psychological traits because it promotes fitter offspring that have a greater chance at survival.

I can't comment on the Simmel quote, since I don't know its larger context. He doesn't seem to be talking about money so much as about value. There are lots of non-monetary values, such as aesthetic and moral values, truth value and so on.

Regarding money, I'm inclined to perceive dollars (or any unit of currency) as votes on the distribution of labor and resources. The more subjectively valuable a good or service is to us, the more dollars we are willing to spend to acquire it. When we spend money we are voting on the value of whatever it is that other people are doing.

The thing is, few of us are able to meet all of our needs and desires by our own efforts. We inevitably require the assistance of others. So why should other people help us when they have unmet needs and desires of their own?

Money solves that problem. If something somebody does is of value to me, then my paying them for doing it provides that person with the means to elicit the aid of others in meeting their needs.

In other words, money serves as a kind of social glue in large-scale societies where people don't all know each other and aren't all connected by blood ties and family loyalties.

Spending money is like a continuous real-time poll on what those around us should be doing with their time, where the number of votes we have to cast is a function of how valuable other people think our own activities are.

What do you think of this excerpt from the philosopher George Simmel's book?

“Valuation as a real psychological occurrence is part of the natural world; but what we mean by valuation, its conceptual meaning, is something independent of this world; is not part of it, but is rather the whole world viewed from a particular vantage point”

I'd appreciate your thoughts... — River

Spending itself can be a desirable act as opposed to the goods/services it buys. Spending provides the illusion that what one is buying is their preference. Something free may not seem as desirable as something bought, because the act of buying itself is imbued with some sort of ritual of identity. My money buys this product and identifies my preferences in a way that getting something free may not. Consumption through spending becomes the desirable ritual along with the actual consumption of the good and service. It's all part of the package it seems.

Where is this vantage point relative to the world that it is independent of?

Humans aren't the only ones that make value judgements. Making value judgements is an evolved psychological trait that we acquired from older life forms. The health, resources and the amount of time and energy one devotes to mating rituals will influence the decision of a member of the opposite sex and determine whether or not the other is chosen to pass on their genes. Natural selection "selected" such psychological traits because it promotes fitter offspring that have a greater chance at survival. — Harry Hindu

This summarises what seems to be Simmel's argument well: valuation is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. And yet our talk about it seems transcendent.

The (to Simmel, transcendent) vantage point is the human one: we reflect on value. Crows are bright creatures, for instance, but their conversation, as far as we know so far, does not rise to a caw about the value of one's latest stash or cache. Once we are capable of reflecting on value, how does that change our valuations?

And, the crunch: what happens when the valuations we articulate to ourselves clash? Enter 'value theory' of one kind or another. Simmel thinks money is both wonderful and terrible, for it enables us to compare the value of any single object (including the abstract) with any other via the intrinsically valueless intermediary of money, and this is its glory and its horror: it makes universal valuation seem easy, and it demeans the value of everything by turning our finest achievements into monetary value.

Well that's how I read it.

This summarises what seems to be Simmel's argument well: valuation is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. And yet our talk about it seems transcendent. — mcdoodle

I don't see how talk is transcendent. Talk, or text in our case, are simply sounds, or scribbles, that we have attached meaning and value to. How and why we attach meaning and value has to do with our goals as individuals and as members of the same highly social group.

The (to Simmel, transcendent) vantage point is the human one: we reflect on value. Crows are bright creatures, for instance, but their conversation, as far as we know so far, does not rise to a caw about the value of one's latest stash or cache. Once we are capable of reflecting on value, how does that change our valuations? — mcdoodle

I didn't ask WHAT the vantage point was, I asked WHERE it was. My point was that this vantage point is within the same world (and therefore part of it) that money as just pieces of metal and paper are.

And, the crunch: what happens when the valuations we articulate to ourselves clash? Enter 'value theory' of one kind or another. Simmel thinks money is both wonderful and terrible, for it enables us to compare the value of any single object (including the abstract) with any other via the intrinsically valueless intermediary of money, and this is its glory and its horror: it makes universal valuation seem easy, and it demeans the value of everything by turning our finest achievements into monetary value.

Well that's how I read it. — mcdoodle

They clash when our goals clash. Our immediate and long-term goals go hand in hand with the values we assign to things. The more something helps us achieve some goal, the more valuable it is.

Well, I was trying to understand what Simmel meant. I thought you were trying to contradict him without greatly caring what he meant. After all, he wrote a whole book, not just that little quote. And the notion of a 'vantage point' that is somehow independent of an individual or even of a space-time location is not earth-shattering.

Actually, people having wild notions is not earth-shattering. It would be earth-shattering if their wild notions, like the notion of a vantage point being independent of a sensory system or independent of space-time (vantage points change and are part of the causal chain that make up reality and are therefore part of "time", or else how can you explain how it is that the vantage point is actually observing anything?) were actually true, because it's logically impossible.