Introduction

My goal is to articulate a value system durable enough to serve humanity for thousands of years; one grounded in what we actually are rather than what we wish we were.

Science has given us much. We know we are matter and energy, subject to physical law. We know we evolved, that our minds are embodied, that we exist in a universe vastly larger and older than our intuitions can grasp. But we have not yet reconciled this knowledge with how we live. Our inherited value systems—political, religious, philosophical—were built on foundations that predate this understanding. They served us, but they are showing strain.

What follows is an attempt to derive meaning, purpose, and value from first principles consistent with contemporary and future physics. I am not here to dispute claims about transcendence, afterlives, or realms beyond observation. I am here to offer a foundation for the world we can measure, test, and survive in. Within that scope, I believe this gives us our best chance.

It is incomplete. It may be wrong in places. But it is offered as a starting point for those who believe we need a new foundation; one that can hold the weight of the next millennium.

Axioms of Dissipative Purpose

I. Structure

Axiom: Dissipative structures are the means by which systems access otherwise inaccessible regions of state space.

Corollary: A structure persists to the extent that the state space it unlocks offers better dissipation than alternatives. When it stops opening new territory, or a competing structure opens more, it gets replaced.

II. Consciousness

Axiom: Consciousness is the means by which a dissipative structure models state space, including its own position within it, enabling simulated exploration prior to physical commitment.

Corollary: A conscious structure persists to the extent that simulated exploration reduces the cost of accessing high-dissipation regions compared to blind physical search.

III. Purpose & Meaning

Axiom: Purpose is the means by which a conscious system explicitly represents its own dissipation objective. Meaning is the felt experience of pursuing purpose through state space.

Hypothesis

Alignment between a system's explicit purpose and its dissipative reality should produce both optimal performance and maximal meaning.

Invitation

If this framework holds, then the path forward is clear: understand what we are, align our purposes with that reality, and create or modify systems—personal, social, economic, political—that do the same.

At the individual level, this means abandoning self-deception about our nature and pursuing goals consistent with our role as dissipative structures. It means recognizing that meaning is, or was, not found or invented but emerges from accurate alignment with the flow we are part of.

At the collective level, this means redesigning institutions to facilitate genuine exploration rather than stagnation, to reward structures that open new territory rather than those that merely extract from existing pathways.

This is not a finished philosophy. The axioms may need revision. The hypothesis requires testing across disciplines, across cultures, across time. But I believe the direction is right: toward a value system grounded in physics, validated by experience, and capable of coordinating human effort across generations.

The journey will be difficult. Not because the ideas are obscure, but because they are not. You do not need a guru; the foundation is observation, not revelation. This makes Gradientism harder to spread. There is no mystique, no hidden teaching, nothing to sell at a weekend retreat. Only alignment with what is already visible.

If you want to pursue this further, or push back, leave your thoughts below.

References

Axiom I: Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. — Foundational work on dissipative structures and self-organization in far-from-equilibrium systems.

Axiom II: Landauer, R. (1961). "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process." IBM Journal of Research and Development. — Establishes that information processing has irreducible thermodynamic cost, grounding mental simulation in physics.

Jaynes, E.T. (2003). Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. — Frames Bayesian inference as the extension of logic under uncertainty, grounding optimal belief-updating in mathematics.

Friston, K. (2010). "The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience. — Frames cognition as minimizing surprise through predictive modeling, linking consciousness to thermodynamic efficiency.

Axiom III: Schaul, T. et al. (2015). "Universal Value Function Approximators." ICML. — Agents with explicit goal representation outperform those with implicit objectives, demonstrating the performance advantage of represented purpose.

Schmidhuber, J. (2010). "Formal Theory of Creativity, Fun, and Intrinsic Motivation." IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development. — Formalizes "interestingness" as compression progress—a computational analog of meaning as the felt experience of learning.

Pathak, D. et al. (2017). "Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-Supervised Prediction." ICML. — Intrinsic motivation signals sustain exploration and improve performance, linking felt reward to state space access.

Hypothesis: England, J. (2013). "Statistical physics of self-replication." Journal of Chemical Physics. — Derives bias toward dissipation-efficient structures in driven systems, grounding the link between thermodynamic alignment and performance.