....

You're trying to use a mode of description(mathematical description of motion of physical objects) designed for one purpose, and apply it to an entirely different stratum of phenomena, subjective valuation of human beings. But there is no one-size-fits-all description for different aspects of our world as we encounter them. Your mode of thinking is called objectivism.
The philosopher Francisco Varela wrote about the problem with this approach:

"To be objective, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be
designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length: If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or
a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is.
And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core."

You're operating under the assumption that the 'real', irreducible scientific truth about valuation is to be found in reducing psychological process to the behavior of physical objects, but that sort of of account wasn't designed to handle subjective phenomena. Tracking the neural activity of a human brain will tell you different things than a molecular analysis will, and a cognitive approach will reveal yet other dimensions that neither of the other accounts will. We can't simply reduce any of these to the others. We can't understand the software of a computer by reducing it to hardware or the behavior of molecules.

We can view ourselves via a Newtonian account as objects in space, and we can talk about our encounter with things of our world in the same way. But let's say we are trying to choose between two objects put in front of us. One is a robot dog with a randomizing program , so that its behavior will always be unpredictable. Next to it is a live dog. Most of us would say that the live dog is more valuable in general to us, not necessarily in monetary terms(the robot could be made of pure gold and diamonds). What makes the live dog more interesting than the robot? We could interact with the robot in a potentially infinite variety of ways given its randomness. But the dog will appear valuable to us in terms of its purposefulness and its ability to relate to us, to understand and care about us.
In other words, it doesn't seem to be sheer number of possible actions or states that corresponds to value(variety for variety's sake), but how those possible actions fit into our goals. Value is possible states organized on the basis of a purpose, USEFULNESS. Purpose UNIFIES those possible states. Without a unifying theme to make something significant to us, to make it matter to us, for us to care about it, to make it useful, sheer quantity of possible states is another word for chaos and meaninglessness. Pure freedom of change of state without something that relates each state to the prior and the next along the lines of a goal is no freedom at all.

In one sense you have stipulated a motivation. Physical objects don't have goals, the just have assigned properties. But you have assigned humans the goal of increase in possible actions.
It's a mechanical goal, though. You have half the equation right. Humans do crave differentiation, novelty , freedom, choice. But in equal measure they crave integration. Value implies the inseparability of both differentiation and integration, as generations of psychologists and psychiatrists will tell you. Hell, even stock market analysts, at least those who follow behavioral economics, will tell you that.


A psychologist by the name of George Kelly defined optimal human functioning as the capacity to embrace new elements of the world. This sound a bit like your correlating value with number of possible actions. But Kelly realized that we can only embrace new experiences if we can find a way to assimllate those experiences effectively, which means to recognize new elements not just on the basis of what makes them new but how we can relate them to what we already know. Absolute novelty cannot be assimilated.

......

Nietzsche on Will to Power:

Value is, according to Nietzsche's words, the "point-of-view
constituting the preservation-enhancement conditions with respect
to complex forms of relative duration of life within becoming."
Here and in the conceptual language of Nietzsche's
metaphysics generally, the stark and indefinite word "becoming"
does not mean some flowing together of all things or a
mere change of circumstances; nor does it mean just any development
or unspecified unfolding. "Becoming" means the passing
over from something to something, that moving and being moved which Leibniz calls in
the Monadology (chap. 11) the changements
naturels, which rule completely the ens qua ens, i.e., the
ens percipiens et appetens [perceptive and appetitive being] .
Nietzsche considers that which thus rules to be the fundamental
characteristic of everything reat i.e., of everything that is, in
the widest sense.

He conceives as the "will to power" that which
thus determines in its essentia whatever is.
When Nietzsche concludes his characterization of the essence
of value with the word "becoming," then this closing word gives
the clue to the fundamental realm within which alone values
and value-positing properly belong. "Becoming" is, for Nietzsche,
the "will to power." The "will to power" is thus the fundamental
characteristic of "life," which word Nietzsche often uses also in
the broad sense according to which, within metaphysics (cE.
Hegel), it has been equated with "becoming." "Will to power,"
"becoming," "life," and "Being" in the broadest sense-these
mean, in Nietzsche's language, the Same (Will to Power, Aph.
582, 1885-86, and Aph. 689, 1888) . Within becoming, life-L e.,
aliveness-shapes itself into centers of the will to power particularized
in time. These centers are, accordingly, ruling configurations.

Such Nietzsche understands art, the state, religion,
science, society, to be. Therefore Nietzsche can also say : "Value
is essentially the point-of-view for the increasing or decreasing
of these dominating centers" (that is, with regard to their ruling
character) (Will to Power, Aph. 715, 1887-88).
Inasmuch as Nietzsche, in the above-mentioned defining of
the essence of value, understands value as the condition-having
the character of point-of-view-of the preservation and enhancement
of life, and also sees life grounded in becoming as the will
to power, the will to power is revealed as that which posits
that point-of-view. The will to power is that which, out of its
"internal principle" (Leibniz) as the nisus esse of the ens, judges
and esteems in terms of values. The will to power is the ground
of the necessity of value-positing and of the origin of the possibility
of value judgment. Thus Nietzsche says : "Values and
their changes are related to the increase in power of that which
posits them" (Will to Power, Aph. 14, 1 887) . Here it is clear : values are the conditions
of itself posited by
the will to power.

Only where the will to power, as the fundamental
characteristic of everything real, comes to appearance,
i.e., becomes true, and accordingly is grasped as the reality of
everything real, does it become evident from whence values
originate and through what all assessing of value is supported
and directed. The principle of value-positing has now been recognized.
Henceforth value-positing becomes achievable "in principle,"
i.e., from out of Being as the ground of whatever is.
Hence the will to power is, as this recognized, i.e., willed,
principle, simultaneously the principle of a value-positing that
is new. It is new because for the first time it takes place consciously
out of the knowledge of its principle. This value-positing
is new because it itself makes secure to itself its principle and
simultaneously adheres to this securing as a value posited out
of its own principle. As the principle of the new value-positing,
however, the will to power is, in relation to previous values, at
the same time the principle of the revaluing of all such values.

Yet, because the highest values hitherto ruled over the sensory
from the height of the suprasensory, and because the structuring
of this dominance was metaphysics, with the positing of the
new principle of the revaluing of all values there takes place the
overturning of all metaphysics. Nietzsche holds this overturning
of metaphysics to be the overcoming of metaphysics. But every
overturning of this kind remains only a self-deluding entanglement
in the Same that has become unknowable.
Inasmuch as Nietzsche understands nihilism as the intrinsic
law of the history of the devaluing of the highest values hitherto,
but explains that devaluing as a revaluing of all values, nihilism
lies, according to Nietzsche's interpretation, in the dominance
and in the decay of values, and hence in the possibility of valuepositing
generally. Value-positing itself is grounded in the will
to power. Therefore Nietzsche's concept of nihilism and the
pronouncement "God is dead" can be thought adequately only
from out of the essence of the will to power. Thus we will complete
the last step in the clarifying of that pronouncement when
we explain what Nietzsche thinks in the name coined by him,
"the will to power."

The name "will to power" is considered to be so obvious in meaning that
it is beyond comprehension why anyone would
be at pains specifically to comment on this combination of words.
For anyone can experience for himself at any time what "will"
means. To will is to strive after something. Everyone today
knows, from everyday experience, what power means as the
exercise of rule and authority. Will "to" power is, then, clearly
the striving to come into power.
According to this opinion the appellation "will to power" presupposes
two disparate factors and puts them together into a
subsequent relation, with "willing" on one side and "power" on
the other. If we ask, finally, concerning the ground of the will
to power, not .in order merely to express it in other words but
also simultaneously to explain it, then what we are shown is that
it obviously originates out of a feeling of lack, as a striving
after that which is not yet a possession. Striving, the exercise
of authority, feeling of lack, are ways of conceiving and are
states (psychic capacities) that we comprehend through psychological
knowledge. Therefore the elucidation of the essence of
the will to power belongs within psychology.

The view that has just been presented concerning the will
to power and its comprehensibility is indeed enlightening, but
it is a thinking that in every respect misses both what Nietzsche
thinks in the word "will to power" and the manner in which he
thinks it. The name "will to power" is a fundamental term in
the fully developed philosophy of Nietzsche. Hence this philosophy
can be called the metaphysics of the will to power. We will
never understand what "will to power" in Nietzsche's sense
means with the aid of just any popular conception regarding
willing and power; rather we will understand only on the way
that is a reflection beyond metaphysical thinking, and that means
at the same time beyond the whole of the history of Western
metaphysics.

The following elucidation of the essence of the will to power
thinks out of these contexts. But it must at the same time, even
while adhering to Nietzsche's own statements, also grasp these
more clearly than Nietzsche himself could immediately utter
them. However, it is always only what already has become more
meaningful for us that becomes clearer to us. What is meaningful
is that which draws closer to us in its essence. Everywhere here, in what has preceded and in what follows, everything is
thought from out of the essence of metaphysics and not merely
from out of one of its phases.
In the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which appeared
the year after the work The Gay Science (1883), Nietzsche for
the first time names the "will to power" in the context out of
which it must be understood : "Where I found the living, there
I found will to power; and even in the will of those who serve I
found the will to be master."

To will is to will-to-be-master. Will so understood is also even
in the will of him who serves. Not, to be sure, in the sense that
the servant could aspire to leave his role of subordinate to become
himself a master. Rather the subordinate as subordinate,
the servant as servant, always wills to have something else under
him, which he commands in the midst of his own serving and of
which he makes use. Thus is he as subordinate yet a master.
Even to be a slave is to will-to-be-master.
The will is not a desiring, and not a mere striving after something,
but rather, willing is in itself a commanding (cE. Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, parts I and II ; see also Will to Power, Aph.
668, 1 888) . Commanding has its essence in the fact that the
master who commands has conscious disposal over the possibilities
for effective action. What is commanded in the command
is the accomplishing of that disposal. In the command, the one
who commands (not only the one who executes) is obedient to
that disposing and to that being able to dispose, and in that
way obeys himself. Accordingly, the one who commands proves
superior to himself in that he ventures even his own self. Commanding,
which is to be sharply distinguished from the mere
ordering about of others, is self-conquest and is more difficult
than obeying.

Will is gathering oneself together for the given
task. Only he who cannot obey himself must still be expressly
commanded. What the will wills it does not merely strive after
as something it does not yet have. What the will wills it has
already. for the will wills its will. Its will is what it has willed.
The will wills itself. It mounts beyond itself. Accordingly, the
will as will wills out beyond itself and must at the same time
in that way bring itself behind itself and beneath itself. Therefore
Nietzsche can say : "To will at all is the same thing as to will to become stronger, to will to grow . . . " (Will to Power,
Aph. 675, 1887-88) .13 "Stronger" means here "more power,"
and that means : only power. For the essence of power lies in
being master over the level of power attained at any time. Power
is power only when and only so long as it remains power enhancement
and commands for itself "more power."

Even a
mere pause in power-enhancement, even a mere remaining at a
standstill at a level of power, is already the beginning of the
decline of power. To the essence of power belongs the overpowering
of itself. Such overpowering belongs to and springs
from power itself, in that power is command and as command
empowers itself for the overpowering of its particular level of
power at any given time. Thus power is indeed constantly on
the way to itself, but not as a will, ready at hand somewhere for
itself, which, in the sense of a striving, seeks to come to power.
Moreover; power does not merely empower itself for the overpowering
of its level of power at any given time, for the sake of
reaching the next level ; but rather it empowers itself for this
reason alone : to attain power over itself in the unconditionality
belonging to its essence. Willing is, according to this defining of
its essence, so little a striving that, rather, all striving is only
a vestigial or an embryonic form of willing.

In the name "will to power" the word "power" connotes
nothing less than the essence of the way in which the will wills
itself inasmuch as it is a commanding. As a commanding the
will unites itself to itself, i.e., it unites itself to what it wills. This
gathering itself together is itself power's assertion of power. Will
for itself does not exist any more than does power for itself.
Hence, also, will and power are, in the will to power, not merely
linked together; but rather the will, as the will to will,14 is itself
the will to power in the sense of the empowering to power. But
power has its essence in the fact that it stands to the will as the
will standing within that will. The will to power is the essence of power. It manifests the unconditional essence of the wilt
which as pure will wills itself.

Hence the will to power also cannot be cast aside in exchange
for the will to something else, e.g., for the "will to Nothing" ;
for this latter will also i s still the will t o will, s o that Nietzsche
can say, "It (the will) will rather will Nothing, than n o t will"
(Genealogy of Morals, 3, Section I, 1887}.15
"Willing Nothing" does not in the least mean willing the mere
absence of everything real; rather it means precisely willing the
real, yet willing the latter always and everywhere as a nullity
and, through this, willing only annihilation. In such willing,
power always further secures to itself the possibility of command
and the ability-to-be-master.

The essence of the will to power is, as the essence of will, the
fundamental trait of everything real. Nietzsche says : The will
to power is "the innermost essence of Being" (Will to Power,
Aph. 693, 1888) . "Being" means here, in keeping with the language
of metaphysics, that which is as a whole. The essence of
the will to power and the will to power itself, as the fundamental
character of whatever is, therefore cannot be identified through
psychological observations ; but on the contrary psychology itself
first receives its essence, i.e., the positability and know ability
of its object, through the will to power. Hence Nietzsche does
not understand the will to power psychologically, but rather,
conversely, he defines psychology anew as the "morphology and
the doctrine of the development of the will to power" (Beyond
Good and Evil, Aph. 23}.16 Morphology is the ontology of on
whose morphe, transformed through the change of eidos to
perceptio, appears, in the appetitus of perceptio, as the will to
power. The fact that metaphysics-which from ancient times
thinks that which is, in respect to its Being, as the hypokeimenon,
sub-iectum-is transformed into the psychology thus defined
only testifies, as a consequent phenomenon, to the essential event,
which consists in a change in the beingness of what is.

The
ousia (beingness) of the subiectum changes into the subjectness of
self-assertive self-consciousness, which now manifests its essence
as the will to will.17 The will is, as the will to power, the
command to more power. In order that the will in its overpowering
of itself may surpass its particular level at any given time,
that level, once reached, must be made secure and held fast.
The making secure of a particular level of power is the necessary
condition for the heightening of power. But this necessary condition
is not suHicient for the fact that the will is able to will
itself, for the fact, that is, that a willing-to-be-stronger, an enhancement
of power, is. The will must cast its gaze into a field
of vision and first open it up so that, from out of this, possibilities
may first of all become apparent that will point the way
to an enhancement of power. The will must in this way posit a
condition for a willing-out-beyond-itself. The will to power
must, above all, posit conditions for power-preservation and
power-enhancement. To the will belongs the positing of these
conditions that belong intrinsically together.

" T0 will at all is the same thing as to will to become stronger,
to will to grow-and, in addition, to will the m eans thereto"
(Will to Power, Aph. 675, 1887-88) .18
The essential means are the conditions of itself posited by the
will to power itself. These conditions Nietzsche calls values. He
says, "In all will there is valuing . . . " (XIII, Aph. 395, 1884) .19
To value means to constitute and establish worth. The will to
power values inasmuch as it constitutes the conditions of enhancement
and fixes the conditions of preservation. The will to power is, in its essence, the value-positing will. Values are the preservation-enhancement conditions within the Being of whatever
is. The will to power is, as soon as it comes expressly to
appearance in its pure essence, itself the foundation and the
realm of value-positing. The will to power does not have its
ground in a feeling of lack ; rather it itself is the ground of
superabundant life. Here life means the will to will.

"Living :that already means 'to ascribe worth' " (lac. cit. ) .
Inasmuch a s the will wills the overpowering o f itself, i t i s not
satisfied with any abundance of life. It asserts power in overreaching-
i.e., in the overreaching of its own will. In this way
it continually comes as the selfsame back upon itself as the
same.20 The way in which that which is, in its entirety-whose
essentia is the will to power-exists, i.e., its existentia, is "the
eternal returning of the same."21 The two fundamental terms of Nietzsche's metaphysics, "will to power" and "eternal returning
of the same," define whatever is, in its Being-ens qua ens in
the sense of essentia and existentia-in accordance with the views
that have continually guided metaphysics from ancient times.
The essential relationship that is to be thought in this way,
between the "will to power" and the "eternal returning of the
same," cannot as yet be directly presented here, because metaphysics
has neither thought upon nor even merely inquired after
the origin of the distinction between essen tia and exis tentia.
When metaphysics thinks whatever is, in its Being, as the
will to power, then it necessarily thinks it as value-positing.

It thinks everything within the sphere of values, of the authoritative
force of value, of devaluing and revaluing. The metaphysics
of the modern age begins with and has its essence in
the fact that it seeks the unconditionally indubitable, the certain
and assured [das Gewisse] , certainty.2:! It is a matter, according
to the words of Descartes, of firmum et mansurum quid s tabi/ire,
of bringing to a stand something that is firmly fixed and that
remains. This standing established as object is adequate to the essence, ruling from of old, of what is as the constantly presencing, which everywhere already lies before (hypokeimenon, subiectum)
. Descartes also asks, as does Aristotle, concerning the
hypokeimenon. Inasmuch as Descartes seeks this subiectum
along the path previously marked out by metaphysics, he, thinking
truth as certainty, finds the ego cogito to be that which presences
as fixed and constant. In this way, the ego sum is
transformed into the su biectum, i.e., the subject becomes selfconsciousness.
The subjectness of the subject is determined out
of the sureness, the certainty, of that consciousness.

The will to power, in that it posits the preservation, i.e., the
securing, of its own constancy and stability as a necessary value,
at the same time justifies the necessity of such securing in everyfhing
that is which, as something that by virtue of its very
essence represents-sets in place before-is something that
also always holds-to-be-true. The making secure that constitutes
this holding-to-be-true is called certainty. Thus, according to
Nietzsche's judgment, certainty as the principle of modern metaphysics
is grounded, as regards its truth, solely in the will to
power, provided of course that truth is a necessary value and
certainty is the modern form of truth. This makes clear in what
respect the modern metaphysics of subjectness is consummated
in Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power as the "essence" of
everything real.

Therefore Nietzsche can say : "The question of value is more
fundamental than the ques tion of certainty : the latter becomes
serious only by presupposing that the value question has already
been answered" (Will to Power, Aph. 588, 1887-88) .
However, when once the will to power is recognized as the
principle of value-positing, the inquiry into value must immediately
ponder what the highest value is that necessarily follows
from this principle and that is in conformity with it. Inasmuch
as the essence of value proves itself to be the preservationenhancement
condition posited in the will to power, the perspective
for a characterization of the normative structuring of value
has been opened up.

The preservation of the level of power belonging to the will
reached at any given time consists in the will's surrounding
itself with an encircling sphere of that which it can reliably grasp at, each time, as something behind itself, in order on the
basis of it to contend for its own security. That encircling sphere
bounds off the constant reserve of what presences (ousia, in the
everyday meaning of this term for the Greeks) that is immediately
at the disposal of the will.23 This that is steadily constant,
however, is transformed into the fixedly constant, i.e., becomes
that which stands steadily at something's disposal, only in being
brought to a stand through a setting in place. That setting in
place has the character of a producing that sets before. U That
which is steadily constant in this way is that which remains.
True to the essence of Being (Being = enduring presence) holding
sway in the history of metaphysics, Nietzsche calls this that
is steadily constant "that which is in being."

Often he calls that
which is steadily constant-again remaining true to the manner
of speaking of metaphysical thinking-"Being." Since the beginning
of Western thinking, that which is has been considered to
be the true and truth, while yet, in connection with this, the
meaning of "being" and "true" has changed in manifold ways.
Despite all his overturnings and revaluings of metaphysics,
Nietzsche remains in the unbroken line of the metaphysical tradition
when he calls that which is established and made fast in the
will to power for its own preservation purely and simply Being,
or what is in being, or truth. Accordingly, truth is a condition
posited in the essence of the will to power, namely, the condition
of the preservation of power. Truth is, as this condition, a value. But because the will can will only from out of its disposal over
something steadily constant, truth is a necessary value precisely
from out of the essence of the will to power, for that will. The
word "truth" means now neither the unconcealment of what is
in being, nor the agreement of a judgment with its object, nor
certainty as the intuitive isolating and guaranteeing of what is
represented. Truth is now, and indeed through an essentially
historical origin out of the modes of its essence just mentioned,
that which-making stably constant-makes secure the constant
reserve, belonging to the sphere from out of which the will to
power wills itself.

With respect to the making secure of the level of power that
has been reached at any given time, truth is the necessary value.
But it does not suffice for the reaching of a level of powerj for
that which is stably constant, taken alone, is never able to provide
what the will requires before everything else in order to
move out beyond itself, and that means to enter for the first
time into the possibilities of command. These possibilities are
given only through a penetrating forward look that belongs to
the essence of the will to powerj for, as the will to more power,
it is, in itself, perspectively directed toward possibilities. The
opening up and supplementing of such possibilities is that condition
for the essence of the will to power which-as that which
in the literal sense goes before-overtops and extends beyond
the condition just mentioned.

Therefore Nietzsche says : "But
truth does not count as the supreme standard of value, even less
as the supreme power" (Will to Power, Aph. 853, 1887-88).
The creating of possibilities for the will on the basis of which
the will to power first frees itself to itself is for Nietzsche the
essence of art. In keeping with this metaphysical concept,
Nietzsche does not think under the heading "art" solely or even
primarily of the aesthetic realm of the artist. Art is the essence
of all willing that opens up perspectives and takes possession of
them : "The work of art, where it appears without an artist,
e.g., as body, as organization (Prussian officer corps, Jesuit
Order) . To what extent the artist is only a preliminary stage.
The world as a work of art that gives birth to itself" (Will to
Power, Aph. 796, 1885-86) .:

"Present a case from those texts to show it was his intention."

I'll start with Heidegger.
1)The Word of Nietzsche:" God Is Dead" in The Question Concerning Technology.
2)Heidegger:Nietzsche Vol 1 and 2,
3)Heidegger-Nietzsche vol 3 and 4

4)Deleuze:Desert Islands and Other Texts p.117 Conclusions on the Will to Power and the Eternal Return, p.135 On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought
5)Deleuze:Nietzsche and Philosophy 1962

My summary was from Heidegger's "The Word of Nietzsche:" God Is Dead", Deleuze's is similar. If you want it fleshed out I'd recommend the above reading.

Oh Hell :here's an exerpt from the piece:

The Word of Nietzsche:
" God Is Dead"

Therefore, let us now ask Nietzsche himself what he understands
by nihilism, and let us leave it open at first whether with this
understanding Nietzsche after all touches on or can touch nihilism's
essence.
In a note from the year 1887 Nietzsche poses the question,
"What does nihilism mean?" (Will to Power, Aph. 2). He answers
: "That the highest values are devaluing themselves."
This answer is underlined and is furnished with the explanatory
amplification : "The aim is lacking; 'Why?' finds no answer."
According to this note Nietzsche understands nihilism as an
ongoing historical event. He interprets that event as the devaluing
of the highest values up to now. God, the supra sensory world
as the world that truly is and determines all, ideals and Ideas,
the purposes and grounds that determine and support everything
that is and human life in particular-all this is here represented
as meaning the highest values. In conformity with the opinion
that is even now still current, we understand by this the true,
the good, and the beautiful; the true, i.e., that which really is ;
the good, i.e., that upon which everything everywhere depends ;
the beautiful, i.e., the order and unity of that which is in its
entirety. And yet the highest values are already devaluing themselves
through the emerging of the insight that the ideal world
is not and is never to be realized within the real world. The
obligatory character of the highest values begins to totter. The
question arises : Of what avail are these highest values if they
do not simultaneously render secure the warrant and the ways
and means for a realization of the goals posited in them?

If, however, we were to insist on understanding Nietzsche's
definition of the essence of nihilism in so many words as the becoming valueless o f the highest values, then we would have
that conception of the essence of nihilism that has meanwhile become
current and whose currency is undoubtedly strengthened
through its being labeled "nihilism" : to wit, that the devaluing
of the highest values obviously means decay and ruin. Yet for
Nietzsche nihilism is not in any way simply a phenomenon of
decay ; rather nihilism is, as the fundamental event of Western
history, simultaneously and above all the intrinsic law of that
history. For that reason, in his observations about nihilism
Nietzsche gives scant attention to depicting historiographically
the ongoing movement of the event of the devaluing of the highest
values and to discovering definitively from this, through
calculation, the downfall of the West; rather Nietzsche thinks
nihilism as the "inner logic" of Western history.

With this, Nietzsche recognizes that despite the devaluing for
the world of the highest values hitherto, the world itself remains ;
and he recognizes that, above all, the world, become value-less,
presses inevitably on toward a new positing of values. After the
former values have become untenable, the new positing of values
changes, in respect to those former values, into a "revaluing of
all values." The no to the values hitherto comes out of a yes to
the new positing of values. Because in this yes, according to
Nietzsche's view, there is no accommodation to or compromise
with the former values, the absolute no belongs within this yes
to the new value-positing. In order to secure the unconditionality
of the new yes against falling back toward the previous values,
i.e., in order to provide a foundation for the new positing of
values as a countermovement, Nietzsche even designates the
new positing of values as "nihilism," namely, as that nihilism
through which the devaluing to a new positing of values that is
alone definitive completes and consummates itself. This definitive
phase of nihilism Nietzsche calls " completed," i.e., classical,
nihilism. Nietzsche understands by nihilism the devaluing of
the highest values up to now. But at the same time he takes an
affirmative stand toward nihilism in the sense of a "revaluing
of all previous values."

Hence the name "nihilism" remains
ambiguous, and seen in terms of its two extremes, always has
first of all a double meaning, inasmuch as, on the one hand, it
designates the mere devaluing of the highest values up to now, but on the other hand it also means at the same time the unconditional
countermovement to devaluing. Pessimism, which
Nietzsche sees as the prefiguration of nihilism, is already twofold
also, in the same sense. According to Schopenhauer, pessimism
is the belief that in this worst of worlds life is not worth
being lived and affirmed. According to this doctrine, life, and
that means at the same time all existence as such, is to be denied.
This pessimism is, according to Nietzsche, the "pessimism of
weakness." It sees everywhere only gloom, finds in everything
a ground for failure, and claims to know how everything will
turn out, in the sense of a thoroughgoing disaster. Over against
this, the pessimism of strength as strength is under no illusion,
perceives what is dangerous, wants no covering up and glossing
over. It sees to the heart of the ominousness of mere impatient
waiting for the return of what has been heretofore. It penetrates
analytically into phenomena and demands consciousness of the
conditions and forces that, despite everything, guarantee mastery
over the historical situation.

A more essential reflection could show how in what Nietzsche
calls the pessimism of strength there is accomplished the rising
up of modern humanity into the unconditional dominion of subjectivity
within the subjectness of what is.9 Through pessimism in its twofold form, extremes become manifest. Those extremes
as such maintain the ascendancy. There thus arises a situation
in which everything is brought to a head in the absoluteness of
an "either-or." An "in-between situation" comes to prevail in
which it becomes evident that, on the one hand, the realization
of the highest values hitherto is not being accomplished. The
world appears value-less. On the other hand, through this making
conscious, the inquiring gaze is directed toward the source
of the new positing of values, but without the world's regaining
its value at all in the process.

To be sure, something else can still be attempted in face of
the tottering of the dominion of prior values. That is, if God in
the sense of the Christian god has disappeared from his authoritative
position in the suprasensory world, then this authoritative
place itself is still always preserved, even though as that
which has become empty. The now-empty authoritative realm
of the suprasensory and the ideal world can still be adhered to.
What is more, the empty place demands to be occupied anew
and to have the god now vanished from it replaced by something
else. New ideals are set up. That happens, according to
Nietzsche's conception (Will to Power, Aph. 1021, 1887), through
doctrines regarding world happiness, through socialism, and
equally through Wagnerian music, i.e., everywhere where "dogmatic
Christendom" has "become bankrupt." Thus does "incomplete
nihilism" come to prevail. Nietzsche says about the latter :
"Incomplete nihilism : its forms : we live in the midst of it.
Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluing our values so far :
they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute" (Will
to Power, Aph. 28, 1 887) .

We can grasp Nietzsche's thoughts on incomplete nihilism
more explicitly and exactly by saying : Incomplete nihilism does
indeed replace the former values with others, but it still posits
the latter always in the old position of authority that is, as it
were, gratuitously maintained as the ideal realm of the suprasensory.
Completed nihilism, however, must in addition do away
even with the place of value itself, with the suprasensory as a
realm, and accordingly must posit and revalue values differently.
From this it becomes clear that the "revaluing of all previous
values" does indeed belong to complete, consummated, and therefore classical nihilism, but the revaluing does not merely
replace the old values with new. Revaluing becomes the overturning
of the nature and manner of valuing. The positing of
values requires a new principle, i.e., a new principle from which
it may proceed and within which it may maintain itself. The
positing of values requires another realm. The principle can no
longer be the world of the suprasensory become lifeless. Therefore
nihilism, aiming at a revaluing understood in this way, will
seek out what is most alive. Nihilism itself is thus transformed
into "the ideal of superabundant life" (Will to Power, Aph. 14,
1887) . In this new highest value there is concealed another appraisal
of life, i.e., of that wherein lies the determining essence
of everything living. Therefore it remains to ask what Nietzsche
understands by life.

The allusion to the various levels and forms of nihilism shows
that nihilism according to Nietzsche's interpretation is, throughout,
a history in which it is a question of values-the establishing
of values, the devaluing of values, the revaluing of values ; it is a
question of the positing of values anew and, ultimately and
intrinsically, a question of the positing of the principle of all
value-positing-a positing that values differently. The highest
purposes, the grounds and principles of whatever is, ideals and
the suprasensory, God and the gods-all this is conceived in
advance as value. Hence we grasp Nietzsche's concept of nihilism
adequately only when we know what Nietzsche understands by
value. It is from here that we understand the pronouncement
"God is dead" for the first time in the way in which it is thought.
A sufficiently clear exposition of what Nietzsche thinks in the
word "value" is the key to an understanding of his metaphysics.
It was in the nineteenth century that talk of values became
current and thinking in terms of values became customary.

But only after the dissemination of the writings of Nietzsche did
talk of values become popular. We speak of the values of life,
of cultural values, of eternal values, of the hierarchy of values,
of spiritual values, which we believe we find in the ancients,
for example. Through scholarly preoccupation with philosophy
and through the reconstructions of Neo-Kantianism, we arrive
at value-philosophy. We build systems of values and pursue in
ethics classifications of values.

" But he was pretty clear that "perspectivism" was not a thesis as such."

Heidegger argues that "The will to power is the ground of the necessity of
value-positing and of the origin of the possibility of value judgment.. Moving out beyond itself,
the opening up and supplementing of possibilities belongs to the essence of the Will to Power."
"The revaluation of values via the thinking of Will to Power "does not merely
replace the old values with new. Revaluing becomes the overturning of the nature and manner of valuing."

In other words, for Heidegger (and Derrida, Deleuze and a host of other interpreters),
the Will to Power is a principle that determines that particular valuations(theories, schemes, perspectives) are always contingent and temporary, and eventually lead to their own overcoming and transformation into different valuative perspectives ad infinitum. There is never an overarching scheme that can enclose them, other than the Will to Power itself as the principle of self-overcoming. (This doesn't affect the legitimacy of the logic contained within any particular perspective).

"I'm generally familiar with most of the historically prevailing qualitative and quantitative interpretations of value; which one do you think is being ignored?"

My background is in cognitive science, continental philosophy and I have a modest understanding of analytic philosophy. I havent come across your formulation of value before, but maybe that's because it comes out of economics or finance.

You have defined measurement of value in terms of "number of possible actions" or "futures". I'm trying to figure out in a basic sense what one is counting in finding a work of art or piece of music or dinner or potential friend to be valuable, or more valuable than another. What for example, could be the difference in 'possible futures' between the value to me of a Rembrandt painting vs a Picasso?
What do we make of the person who chooses to write a book rather than purchase a book? How do we measure the value to them of the book they're writing vs the monetary value of the book they would have purchased?
It seems to me that that value, as meaningfulness, is less about number of possible futures than about the meaningfulness of those futures. The thing about value as meaningfulness is that what provides meaningful satisfaction tends not to be something that we can increase in a calculative, linear way by just repeating what we were doing but doing more and more of it.
Qualitative meaningfulness as value becomes bored and satiated with repetition of the same theme.
We can continue to use money but will find that what we spend it on will change with our changing tastes. We may even become bored with money and decide to give it away.
It is in the nature of what we find valuable that in order to continue to find value, we have to qualitatively change our relationship to what we find meaningful. This cannot be subsumed under a quantitative measurement scale because the scale will always be stuck in a prior definition.

NIetzsche's perpsectivalism is related to American pragmatism in its recognizing value as more important than truth. It is not that we cannot choose between valuative paths, but that the basis of our choice is pragmatic usefulness, and the criterion of usefulness is subject to change along with the changes in perspective. So we can form stable societies and stable moral systems and a stable basis for science, which is precisely what we do. Its just that we have to throw out the 'view from nowhere' , the God's truth', the idea of linear progress, and replace these notions with a more mobile idea of consensus.

Your attempt to assess value via a calculative procedure reduces the 'value' of value so severely as to make it useless except in extremely narrowly defined contexts. It does little more than what is achieved by defining the value of money as the quantity of money.
If you are running a business, this can be a useful way of understanding your product's appeal , but only within very narrow parameters. It will not help to explain why people lose interest in your product when trends change, because it ignores the real basis of value in qualitative interpretation.

being true’ with regard to knowing is being in accord. Beiing ‘ true’ to the facts as being in accord or correctness is a matching between an actual state of affairs and one’s claim or opinion about that state of affairs.
Proof or validation is a successful corresponding between opnion amd the situation.
But situations are never simply facts in themselves but are interpreted. So knowledge attempts to match opinion with a situation that is already interpreted by the opinion. Thus knowledge and opinion are entangled from the start.

Heidegger did not say that beingness only becomes a reality when it is affirmed by another being. On the contrary, he argued that being always already implies being-with. Being is already outside itself, ahead of itself as being-with, even when we are alone.
Nancy, in “the Inoperative Community, moves from Heidegger’s notion of being-with. Nothing exists except as singular-plural, in a relation-differential tension of same-different. Thus a community can never be an ideal unity. It exists as relations-tensions between and within individuals comprising it. That is why it is ‘inoperative’, which doesn’t mean dysfunctinal, it means there can be no operational, ideal, normative definition of community

what’s the difference between psychologism and cognitive science?

Let me try to deconstruct your account of Deleuze-Guattari. In doing so i'm going beyond Merleau-Ponty and instead channeling the thinking of Heidegger and Derrida.

"Another dimension is paradigmatic, referred to the meaning of the unfolding linear linguistic sequence. Both have composed signifying strata, upholding the subject of enunciation, framing one in the totality of the current socio-linguistic field. Power operates through grammar."

Both Heidegger and Derrida trace grammar back to logic, and logic back to the metaphysical presuppositions underlying modern objective thought
Thus they deconstruct 'grammar'', the propositional schematic description of a meaning. Power implies self-constitution , but in constituting itself , power must transcend itself and thus power-grammar is split within itself before it can simply constitute itself as force, concept, scheme.

"There is a split, a doubling of a speaker onto two subjects:
a subject of a statement, and a subject of enunciation.
When somebody (a child, a student, or you and I) starts speaking, this one unavoidably uses sentences with meaning, pre-given by the dominating social reality."

"Pre-given "implies co-opted,conditioned by. Does "Dominating social reality" dominate from outside, as a schematic outside, already composed as a conditioning grammar-power that is incorporated into a subject?

" Its dominant reality is given by the range of statements which are possible for it. One learns the variety of possible options that one is allowed to think, believe, want, or love from those given within society: a subject of enunciation forms its consciousness of itself out of the statements which it is able to make as a subject of a statement."

Does one 'learn' what is possible to think from out of this supposed schematic outside power-grammar?
Or is there a more intimate and immediate play, as temporality, between one's history as the 'having been' and the future-directed presenting of the present? This play would project its own possibilities out of one's own 'having been', in an endless repetition . This would not be the subjectivity of a subject. there is no constituted subject here. There is only temporality as this intimate play of a projecting , fore-structuring 'having been' that is always already ahead of itself in being itself. The 'being of this temporality, its ''is'-ness IS this internal articulation. Never simply present to itself or capable of auto-affection. it 'IS' by being other. It is being as already other, already being-with. Power , the social, grammar are all derived modifications of this primary 'already other' that is not yet subject or object.

." The verb 'to be' always functions as a shifter that moves from an expressed statement to give a 'reality';
" this movement is mediated in modern thought by the process of subjectification through which the speaker identifies a given reality with the statement. In this way, reality comes to be constituted by subjects acting as though their statements were true."

This is similar to Nietzsche. "Truth" equals the stabilizing of a particular value-structure that presents itself to the subject. The subject itself is only Will to Power, the endless positing of values that then define the subjectivity of the subject.
Heidegger argues ,though, that the verb 'to be' is not a shfiter that indicated posited values. 'To be'
splits the notion of statement, value, subjectification. To make a statement is to posit subject-predicate scheme. But the making of a statement, the posting of a 'fact' is a derived modification of a more primordial gesture splitting up a statement before it is simply constituted as an 'it' and the subject as a 'subjectivity'.

"The subject may think of himself/herself as an independent, free-minded individual while "obeying a variety of dominating norms"

And while thinking of himself as 'obeying a variety of dominating norms', the notion of 'obeying norms' can be deconstructed via Heideggerian temporality and Derridean differance, The act of obeying transforms that which it obeys in the very act of obeying, Norms subvert themselves in the very act of constituting themselves. There is never a simple norm or unitary notion of obedience.

:” Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me, but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us,” I think that the notion of “a unique interpretation” carries a high risk of being caught in a kind of the faciality machine."

The facially machine, un-noticed to itself, undermines the univocal implication of of domination'(the dominating is at the same time the dominated), 'norms'(the normal is always an exceptional exemplar of itself), 'enslavement'.
Interpretation is always at the same time unique and conventional. It is 'dominated, historical, normative, at the same time that it is 'dominanting', productive, subversive, exceptional but all this takes place before the simple apparatus of a dominating social norm can ever form itself.

Terrapin wrote:
"Transcendent" as it's used to make excuses for the idea of a god, for example, is just nonsensical."

It is the opposite of nonsensical. It makes complete sense within the contours of the way consciousness is being understood within those traditions A divine 'nothingness"? That would be a shallow and self-serving reading. Besides , it misses all those traditions for whom consciousness does not just mean 'access to a material world'.

Wiki says "In religious experience transcendence is a state of being that has overcome the limitations of physical existence and by some definitions has also become independent of it. This is typically manifested in prayer, séance, meditation, psychedelics and paranormal "visions".

So the difference between the "Transcendent" and the transcendental for the seer of visions may be in terms of what KIND of consciousness is involved. Both are subjective experiences of an outer reality, but of two wholly different kinds.
There has been a renewal of interest among philosophers of mind in panpsychism. In some versions of it, the material world harbors within itself a non-material aspect or element, and that perhaps a special faculty of consciousness might be able to access that element. So you see here, while the experience is WITHIN consciousness, it is not transcendental in that it is not a condition of possibility for experiencing objective material reality. But it is transcendent in two ways. First, it transcends 'normal consciousness'. Second, it pertains to an aspect of the world that transcends the material dimension. In the case of the religious mystic , it transcends the geographic realm of the material world.

You could argue that mysticism is a less useful paradigm of describing experience than your preferred account, but it is neither meaningless nor nonsensical, any more than Aristotelian physics or Lamarckian biology. Science doesn't evolve by turning older notions into nonsense, it just changes its frame of interpretation.

I argued a similar point above, that one has to understand the pre-suppositions involved in the use of 'transcendent'.

He probably wants to argue that a 'worldly referent' is not what adherents have in mind, so your interpretation is sort of cheating, a diversion.

You have defined transcendent in a particular way, as "that which does not pertain to or does not occur in human consciousness and is inherently outside of human consciousness", and thus "cannot be described by human consciousness." Your conclusion is pre-supposed by your premise. I assume you aim to use your definition as a critique of positions which supposedly claim otherwise. You want to argue based on your tautology( consciousness=all possible experienced reality, therefore the transcendent is outside all possible experienced reality)
that what they identity as meaningful is actually meaningless and indescribable. But in order for their understanding of the transcendent to be falsified, you would have to demonstrate that their way of understanding the term begins from the same pre-supposition as yours(consciousness=all possible experienced reality). But transcendent is defined differently in different historical periods and within different philosophical and religious traditions. No one disagrees with a tautology, what they disagree about is a pre-supposition.

Your larger premise is that science attempts to match its theories to an independent objective reality. In this regard, science validates truth by falsifying. If a certain empirical theory of consciousness falsifies a previous, this means it is a better match for objectively observed phenomena than that older one. But a different pre-supposition, for instance one that thinks beyond a correspondence theory of scientific objectivity, would argue that attempting to falsify the claims of alternate accounts of the transcendent will miss the essence of their viewpoint.

All value is already sentiment. Valuation is the way we are affected by something or someone. The value does not originate in the thing nor in ourselves but in the particular way we relate to the thing, the way we interpret, evaluate it. That is its meaning for us, and it is a function of the way our own unique history intersects with the thing.

"why this idyllic scene does take place in faraway Ecuador?"
I don't know Maybe because it's 5 degrees and snowing here in Chicago.

"Most of the machinic subjectivities are entirely relevant from the point of an adjustment of a subject to the social, cultural, and working environment." "When you engage with your friend, both of you adjust to mutually shared socio-cultural established norms of communication,"

But you know, each of us interprets the meaning of those so-called cultural norms differently. This is why today there are violent disagreements in the U.S. concerning social and ethical and political norms.The understanding of the norms themselves differ from person to person, but normally so subtly that it appears as though those of us within a particular community(urban vs rural) united by those norms believes that we just assimilate them automatically. But even within a community of supposedly shared norms, even within a single family, there can be violent disagreements over the meaning of those 'norms'.

"If the harmony prevails, there is no place for questioning and problematization."
An ideal harmony generally does not prevail in social situations, in direct proportion to the failure of the participants to slip into the perspective of the other. This is especially true in today's political climate.

Identity politics, the #metoo movement, #blacklivesmatter, are just some examples of the way we on the one hand recognize each others' differences more effectively over time, and yet fail to understand why those who we blame fail to live up to our standards.
Most of the philosophical underpinnings of these movements, particularly marxist ones, contain an underlying moralism that drives the blamefulness of their rhetoric. A Foucaultian-Deleuzian account
avoids the moralistic-blame of emancipatory positions because it doesnt try to organize thought around a developmental telos. And yet, it still blames in the sense of pointing a finger at arbitrary sources of conditioning. We are 'shaped by', 'adjust to', 'conditioned by' the affect, social, physical worlds.
Relevance, significance is not what conditions you and me , but what you and I interpret uniquely within what would supposedly 'condition' us.

"Where can one demarcate the difference between psychologist accounts and antipsychologist accounts?" Psychologism is a perjorative term, like scientism or historicism, referring to models purporting to describe primordial conditions of possiblity for empirical, contingent phenomena like brain or mental processes. Attaching an '-ism' to someone else's model is accusing them of unknowingly confusing normative principles or grounds trasnscendent to changeable empirical reality with empiricism.For instance, when we talk about THE scientific method, we are treating science scientistically by assuming that method is outside of the empirical contingent historical development of science rather than something that evolves along with it. So one person's epistemological ontological grounding of language or meaning may be another's psychologism(If youre Rorty all epistemology is psychologism).

Kant's position was that the empirical by itself(pure content) is blind and the transcendental(pure form) alone is empty. Thus both by themselves are inadequate and only together does consciousness attain meaning.

If you and i are in a room with a dog, a child and an old woman from an Indian village in Equador, how does the flow of interaction proceed? There are many considerations, of course. Do the humans all speak the same language? Lets say yes. But lets say the goal for you and me is to interaction with each individual in the room and attempt to gain as effective a sense as possible of their ongoing experiencing , including being able to anticipate as well as possible how to engage with them and how they will react to us, how to make them react as positively as possible, how to avoid conflict. What strategy do we use? Lets start with the dog. You and I will likely be aware of our body language and the dog's body language. Does it appear threatened or frightened? What does fear mean? Do we impute to the dog intentions and interpretations, such as this 'oerson may harm me'? DOn't we , through our interaction with thte dog, in the tone and pitch and rhythm of speech that we chose, attempt to establish a particular 'dance' with the dog? We know some do this better than others. TO succeed, and not just for a few minutes, but to succeed in knowing how to slip into a dance in varying conditions and circumstances with the dog(maybe it is better tho describe this dancing over time as engaging in a multitude of different types of dances conveying different moods and attitudes) is to recognize the dog as having a certain consistent 'style' of dance, regardless of the particular circumstances.

Isnt this how we interact with every individual in the room, finding what each peron's style of dance is, regardless of changing circumstance? If subjectivity is machinic activity and machinic activity always mutates and changes, where how does ongoing style emerge?
How is ongoing worldview, gender to be understood? IF I engage with my friend according to my understanding that there is an ongoing worldview(a worldview that is alwasy changing but maintains an overall thread of internal consistency) including political, religious and ethical outlook that guides their thinking , then I may slip intricately into his outlook , merging my dance with his, in such a way as to anticipate his joys and suffering, what causes him guilt , anger , anxiety.
My prediction is if one attempts to engage with him such the interaction itself is thought as a mobile environment of shifting machinic processes with no thread of consistency, I will have no way to be with him intimately in his affective-intelellectual modulaltions. His behavior will appear somewhat arbitrary to me rather than flowing out of itself.

Do the ongoing concerns of the person driving a car not interaffect the supposed purely 'automatic' act of driving? Do the pieces not interaffect each such as to form a relational totality unified according to what matters to the person? Is each subjectivty merely a blind vector of irrelevance? Are words like significance, relevance, being-for-the-sake -of, involvement, interest , mattering, are these notions derived from the arbitrary chaos of dfference, or is difference itself to be understood as always RELEVANT difference?

One could point out the way that over time, of the old woman, the dog, you and I and the child all become friends, we all interaffect each other as one larger subjectivity. But the dog will still maintain its own affective rhythms and attitudes , and all the humans in the room, regardless of how many years they spend together, will maintain separate ongoing threads in style.

Notice that Guattari is relying on mechanistic, machinic metaphors in attempting to unseat the Cartesian self. Of course, the causal logic of machination is itself a product of Gallilean-Cartesian thought. One could argue that Guattari is using this language against itself , but there are certain risk here.
I dont see Deleuze and Guattari as wanting to maintain a causal logic of objects in interaction, but they do rely on a kind of behaviorist conditioning vocabulary to describe the way that world impinges on and shapes and transforms 'us'( itself). THis is where I find the chiasmatic intertwining descriptions of Merleau-Ponty to more effectively escape the implication of classic causality.

Deleuze likes to cite dynamical systems models to convey the reflexive self-transformative quality of experience. But dynamical systems is a deterministic description
in its original uses and so must also be understood metaphorically if one want sot avoid sliding back into determinism.

Derrida has been known for deconstructing discourses that assume self-identical structures, forms, objects, meanings, the presence-to itself of intention.The metaphysics of presence, as he calls it, is auto-affection itself . It would seem that Derrida is attempting to see sense and symbol as Deleuze does, as always multiple, differentiated. But htere's an important difference between them. Deleuze begins from objects, paired down and relational, as polarities, as fundamentally arbitrary. I am alienated from myself every moment because the 'I' is nothing but arbitrary, polarized and polarizing vectors, gestures, signs. Derrida beings with signs also, but digs beneath signs to show that a sing sign is already divided with itself as other than itself. So there is no simple sign, but an already hinged or bifurcated presencing -absencing gesture. Heidegger's notion of temporalty does something similar. IT splits up a sign before it can simply be itself as sign. The effect of where Heidegger and Derrida situate the site of difference(unlike Deleuze they split difference before it can simply be itself as a difference) si that signs, objects, forms no longer have the power of polarization and arbitrariness that they do for Deleuze. Not because the are assimilated to a subject, but the opposite. It is only when you give too much power to the elements of the world(whether you dub them affective, material, political, linguistic, that you are assigning them presence, not breaking away fully enough from Cartesianism. Derrida's notion of the trace begins before language as human speech, before any notion of consciousness or humanity or animality or the biological.
BUt notice that the effect of deconstruction is that any text shows itself to already be dissimulating itself at every moment, not gathering together as a unitary structure. But the same radical otherness within itself as repetition of the sign prevents one from simply saying that it's unfolding is arbitrary in the way that it appears for Deleuze. Rather, as Derrida says, there is a way of being the same differently.
This allows him to see certain threads of continuity through difference in a text. Not to recognize this in being with others prevents one from really seeing them. In all the varied activities you mentioned earlier that we can involve ourselves with, we move through all those activities in a way that is the same time differing with respect to itself every moment, and maintaining a thread of continuity. To say otherwise is to uphold a claim of difference that needs to be deconstructed. What gives something the power to differ purely? So neither the Cartesian unity nor the Deleuzian difference, but a gesture more primordial, already divided within itself before it can simply be the same or different,

I would give anything to hear an academic philosopher say that just once.

This sounds like Kant, but not very much like current thinking in psychology(or philosophy)

You're trying to understand self-consistency via a conception of time imported from the natural sciences,i.e. self as an object in motion.
But organisms are self-organizing. Their way of changing themselves is non-linear, self-reflexive, they feedback into themselves as their way of being themselves, The same is true of consciousness.
To be a meaning (an "i" this instant) is to borrow from and transform a previous meaning. So the present meaning is framed by the immediately previous one. The past is changed and defined by the present. Consciousness is also anticipative. In experiencing the 'now' of the present it is meaning ahead of itself. So past , present and future belng simultaneously to the now . The now is multiple.

Yes, but if the meaning of what is experienced in conscious is always different. then what exactly is continuous? Or does continuous here just mean self-similar?

James argued that, Hume couldnt find any unity in consciousness so he cheated by imposing a metaphysical unifying factor externally.
There are different ways of understanding the notion of unity in relation to consciousness. The metaphysical option that prevailed in different ways from Descartes to Sartre to Husserl made some aspect of the 'I' able to return to itself and reflect on itself as itself identically. Hume,as I mentioned, accomplished this through a metaphysical unifier. Husserl said that although the contents of consciousness, the objects that I intend, are always different, there is an 'empty' 'I' that is mere sense of self as that which always accompanies my intending acts. This 'empty I' is self-identical over time.
It is what gives all our actions a sense of 'mineness' even though its is always something different that I am involved with.
For James the 'I' is not self-identical but self-consistent in time, due to the fact that intended meanings refer back to previous intentions as part of their own sense.

Some sense of meaning that can return to itself identically in relfection.

The unity of the 'i' that Number2018 is talking about was a common presupposition in philosophy and psychology from Descartes and Kant to Sartre. It was assumed in cognitive science research and is implied in any notion of consciousness in which memory is assumed to be accessible as stored traces.

on the other hand, Shaun Gallagher talks about socially distributed cognition:

“Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive
processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies,
environments, institutional structures, etc.”
Such processes don’t originate in individual minds but are shared among a community of participants in an activity.

William James put it thusly:

"Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. But now there appears, even
within the limits of the same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of
belonging together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which this
statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are produced by sudden contrasts in the
chain, making often explosive appearances and rending each other in twain. But their comings and
goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the time
and the space in which they lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we may be so
stunned and confused for a moment by the shock as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has happened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the
consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted
with each other most violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still remain between the
thoughts by whose means they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of
the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder
pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.[12] Our feeling of the same
objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder
a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence;
but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find
in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an
inkling of anything that went before. Here, again, language works against our perception of the truth.
We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else."

There is an alternative way to think about the social than the via the violently arbitrary immanence of Deleuze. There is a more radical way to think about the site of sociality. My paper critiquing social constructionism also can apply tp Deleuze,
Embodied Perception. Redefining the social

You seem to have a good understanding of Deleuziam thinking. I’m wondering what other philosophers and approaches you find particularly relevant to you. What’s your attitude toward paychoanalytically influenced positikns(Lacan, Zizek)?
What about use of theological tropes by writers like Zizek, Vattimo, Jean-Luc Marion, Caputo?
Or Marxist influenced approaches(Habermas, Adorno)?
Some would argue that Deleuziam thinkiking deconstructs theological , psychoanalytic and Marxist critical theory.

as long as Mazarotto doesn’t end up letting a form of behaviorism back in (which I doubt very much unless he wants to protect the sources of this enslavement from the effects or machinations of the enalavemwnt itself),
I can see his approach as Nietzschean in spirit. There is a critique of Deleuziam thought on affect and body that I agree with. Ruth Leys argues “Deleuzian affect theorists tend to put everything that is not a question of “meaning,” defined in some highly limited sense, over against the body or affect. What seems wrong or confused about this is the sharpness of the dichotomy, which operates at once with a highly intellectualist or rationalist concept of meaning and an unexamined assumption that everything that is not “meaning” in this limited sense belongs to the body. This too is a false dichotomy, one that—in spite of a professed hostility to dualism—threads its way throughout much of the new literature on affect.”
Ruth Leys says Massumi argues the affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology—that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs—because they are non-signifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning. Affects are “inhuman,” “pre-subjective,” “visceral” forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these. Whatever else may be meant by the terms affect and emotion, the affects must be noncognitive, corporeal processes or states. Affect is, as Massumi asserts, “irreducibly bodilyand autonomic”(PV,).

Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic intertwining approach to affect is a corrective to this dualism.
He and the enactivists recognize a certain self-consistency to the organism in its interaction with environment that is missing from Deleuze. How does Deleuze explain stable personality features?

Deleuze’s translator Brian Massimi gives the following account of the relation between affect and perception-language:

"Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage, are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the intensest (most contracted) expression of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside of oneself, at the very point at which one is in most intimately and unshareably in contact with oneself and one's vitality. If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through
that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect.”

"The escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that are its capture. This side-perception may be punctual, localized in an event (such as the sudden realization that happiness and sadness are something besides what they are). When it is punctual, it is usually described in negative terms, typically as a form of shock (the sudden interruption of functions of actual connection). But it is also continuous, like a background perception that
accompanies every event, however quotidian. When the continuity of affective escape is put into words, it tends to take on positive connotations. For it is nothing less than the perception of one's own vitality, one's sense of aliveness, of changeability (often signified as “freedom”).

One's
“sense of aliveness” is a continuous, nonconscious self-perception (unconscious self-reflection or lived self-referentiality). It is the perception of this self-perception, its naming and making conscious, that allows affect to be effectively analyzed – as long as a vocabulary can be found for that which is imperceptible but whose escape from perception cannot but be perceived, as
long as one is alive."

"Simondon notes the connection between self-reflection and affect. He even extends the capacity for self-reflection to all living things– although it is hard to see why his own analysis does not constrain him to extend it to all things (is not resonation a kind of self-reflection?). "At this point, the impression may have grown that affect is being touted here as if the whole world could be packed into it. In a way, it can, and is."

Notice that the “inside” here is the self-consistent pattern of perceptual perspective that is disrupted from without. You could say that the ‘without’ as affect is already alongside as background, keeping perception from being purely self-enclosed, and therefore the inside is already outside itself.

Question: when Deleuze talks about the effect of cinema on our understanding of time, does he mean that it makes us realize what was always already true about time that we just never realized before, or does he mean that technologies like cinema create an absolutely new experience of time?
I think he means the former.

i like Deleuze. He understands the idea of radical temporality, the way that time as difference inserts itself into every stability of meaningful being and transforms it into becoming. He understands it in a different way than Merleau-Ponty does. If youve never read him, he was bot5h a philosopher and psychologist. His Phenomeology of Perception offers a detailed account of memory, language , consciousness, perception and affect. There are currently a host of psychological writers who are using his ideas in their embodied, enactive approaches to cognitive phenomena. Its a burgeoning field. Check out the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
As to the question of the role of the new in the structure of time, the new is the place where an inside is exposed to an outside to challenge, destabilise and transform that inside. Bodliy affect serves that role for Deleuze in relation to linguistic consciousness. It exposes a self-enclosed schematism to a radical otherness. Merleau-Ponty's position isn't that different, except that for him inside and outside are not so easlliy determined, because each inflitrates the other(when my left hand touches the right, which is the perceiving and which is the perceived? Future present and past interprenetrate in the same way.
The past is repeatedly recast by a future that can never be anticipated in a
present that cannot be fixed. Anticipation re-figures recollection as much
as recollection shapes expectation.

Of course we're not reading the same book. Thats the point. Every word of Nietzsche's you're interpreting according to certain presuppositions and I'm reading him according to an entirely different set of presuppositions. I have an inkling of your presuppositions, but the only way for me to figure out how to translate my terms into yours is by finding out more about your larger presupposotions concerning what science does, what causation means, what objectivity is, etc. I get the sense you think these are obvious and straighforward things, but they are all open to very different interpretations within philosophy of science.

Maybe it’s time to abandon epistemology and follow Rorty. Could be the confusion originates in the metaphysics grounding epistemology.