Thanks for the response.

One of the most interesting and powerful claims that you make in the OP is that this framework is a descriptive account of value:

This framework reduces all philosophical, religious, and ethical inquiry to a single question: Does it enhance life’s drive to perpetuate and thrive? If the answer is yes, it will continue. If no, it will fade. This is not merely a statement of preference; it is a descriptive reality. — James Dean Conroy

Clarifying ethical inquiry in this way sounds amazing, but I think this argument loses a lot of it's power when we realize that both 'good' and 'bad' things come from life.

Because life doesn’t just produce harmony, it produces contradiction, resistance, and adaptation — James Dean Conroy

So yes, life births its own contradictions. But the ones that endure are those that re-align with life. It's part of the dialectic it utilises - both winners and losers - it hedges its bets - always (think grasshoppers turning into locusts and eating each other - or parasitism) - everything is explored. — James Dean Conroy

Even if the 'bad' things self-destruct over time, it is unclear to me whether any specific idea is a winner or a loser. I just have to wait to see which ideas win out. This might work in the long-run, but I can't always afford to wait, and it seems like I would have to resort to a different framework in order to solve more immediate problems.

For example, the world's major religions clearly have not died out, and so this framework doesn't seem to offer any solid grounds for resolving any sort of religious dispute, or any moral dispute grounded in religion.

I think the framework is logically consistent (and I largely agree with it), but I don't think it's as powerful a tool for answering difficult questions as it sounds like you hope it could be.

This might just be me quibbling about the application of your framework.
I have one more thought I need to digest some more before I post again.

Hey great post.
I appreciate your patience and attention to the argument here.
I mostly agree with the OP, but I have a few thoughts.

Life is the only frame from which value can be assessed. It is the necessary condition for all experience, meaning, and judgment. Without life, there is no perception, no action, and no evaluation. — James Dean Conroy

If life is the source of all value, it's also presumably the source of everything else.

Life must see itself as good. Any system that undermines its own existence is naturally selected against. Therefore, within the frame of life, the assertion "Life = Good" is a tautological truth. It is not a moral statement; it is an ontological necessity. — James Dean Conroy

If life is necessarily the only source of value, it's also necessarily the only source of nihilism, antinatalism, and any other "system that undermines its own existence." You say that these systems will self-terminate, but their mere existence seems to pose a contradiction. If it's descriptively true that all life supports itslef, how can we explain the emergence (or existence) of antinatalism at all?

"Life must see itself as good," but sometimes produces suicide and terrorism and depression and nihilism.

Again, I appreciate the post and would love to share some other thoughts if you respond.

@Bret Bernhoft

I'm sure there are bad ideas out there about how technology is bad, but there are also legitimate concerns about how technology can hurt us. Social media and global trade are great things, but there are downsides. There's good reason to think social media can cause or exacerbate mental health problems, and there are plenty of unhappy workers caught on the short-side of the global market.

This probably isn't exactly what you are referring to but I think there are lots of good reasons to hesitate before we embrace something new.

I would like to have a polite and interesting discussion about why you feel the way you do. — SackofPotatoeJam

Polite interesting discussions with people I disagree with is exactly why I joined the forum. I love how you've tried to create a space for productive conversations.

I don't think that global warming/climate change is the greatest threat to mankind. In my opinion, even if I assumed that the most dire scientific projections about the future were true, there are still more serious crises that are hurting and killing more people than climate change. Millions of people die from very preventable causes every year, and hundreds of millions suffer from poverty and malnutrition etc. We should spend our energy and money efficiently, saving as many people and doing as much good as possible.

I am hopeful that innovation will give us more power over the environment, and allow us to get the things we want (like energy) safely and efficiently. Innovation will happen even faster if some of the millions of children we can save grow up to become engineers and scientists.

I quite like the ideas in Bjorn Lomborg's book False Alarm

Thank you for the original post and for responding to my comment.

either we can know things, or we cannot know anything. If we can’t know anything, then we can’t know whether we can know anything. — Hello Human

I think this gets things backwards. There are things I know (my name, how to eat, what a cat is), I don't need a theory to tell me whether I know these things. I need a theory that can help me understand what it means that I know these things, but I take the fact that I know them for granted. If you don't, then that's probably where our disagreement/confusion comes from and we should talk about it.

And what are those things? — Hello Human

The only things I am certain about are my experiences. Whether they accurately represent the world (whether there even is a world) is not a question I can be certain about. All I have is consciousness, and a theory of knowledge that investigates questions outside of consciousness forces us to ask and answer impossible questions (what is existence? what is the nature of reality? is there anything other than reality?).

P is true is just fancy talk for P — Pie

I also like this theory of truth quite a lot. I think that it accurately describes how we use the word "true", and avoids distinguishing between "What I think is true" and "What IS true". I don't see how we can know objectively what IS true, and I'm not even convinced that we even want to know what IS true. I also think that mindfulness and meditation can contribute to our understanding of truth. I think that meditation offers me a chance to experience the fundamental building blocks that everything else derives from, and any theory of truth must start from the meditative state of mind.

But, if we don’t know the foundation for knowledge, how can we know whether the proposed standard must be accepted? We could only support a standard either with knowledge derived from the foundation, or with the foundation itself, but in either case, you already assume something as a foundation. — Hello Human

I think that the project of creating a philosophical foundation for knowledge gets things backwards. I have knowledge already, there are things I know. Whether I have a philosophical foundation for this knowledge is irrelevant. I don't need a theory of knowledge to explain how I know things, instead I need to understand the phenomenon of "knowing".

A universal theory of knowledge requires certainty about things I don't think we can be certain about. Describing our experience requires certainty about our experience, which I think is the only certainty we really have.