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ANNOTATION:
The value underlying survival, fitness, and process
The analysis provided here is on the right track, but it doesn't dig quite deeply enough. _Survival_ is a concept derived from _life_ (individual life, contrasted with Life in the larger, evolutionary, process sense). _Fitness_ is a concept derived from _Life_ -- and the _process_ of evolution simply IS _Life_. Of these candidates, _process_ comes closest to being an adequate foundational value -- but only because it comes closest to the ACTUAL foundational value, which I call "reflexive functionality."
Both individual lives and the larger evolutionary process of Life have an objective, physical property that I contend should be acknowledged as the only identified (so far) intrinsic value in our universe. Colloquially speaking, that is property of working to be the kind of thing that works to be ... (etc.).
Absent any way to observe value as a physical property in the world, and being unable justifiably to treat subjective evaluation as a flawless indicator of actual value, we can at least apply the method of behaviorism to this problem: see if we can identify something that appears to be the object of value-seeking or value-preserving behavior -- something more fundamental than the individual lives and the inclusive fitness corresponding to particular organisms and lineages, something that applies universally.
That something is _reflexive functionality_. It is a physical property, and it is intrinsic to the nature of a self-maintaining system (that is, no self-maintaining system can fail to maintain itself and still remain in that class). As Life continually begets begetters, we see actual work that maintains that very process. As individual organisms seek in many ways to survive, we see the same kind of work being done to maintain the integrity of a process of self-maintenance.
As best I can tell, everything else that we might call "value" is only instrumental -- only supportive of reflexively functional systems. We have compelling evolutionary stories that account for the development of valuing mechanisms in organisms -- all directed to seeking and maintaining _instrumental_ values in support of self-maintenance (for individuals) and inclusive fitness (for lineages, and ultimately, for Life).
These ideas are explained in more detail at my Evolution and Philosophy website: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/KVC/.
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