Endogenous means something that exists within some system. If the ‘something’ is quantifiable, such as a variable in an economic model, points scored in a game, etc that specific thing being considered has endogenous value within that model or game.

I recently came across Descartes’ First Meditation in a philosophy book. Here, the author considers the question of whether it is possible to know if one is in a state of dreaming or wakefulness. He tries to answer himself by using some analogies and ideas, some of which are described below

1. As he is lying on his bed and moving his hands and can touch and sense things, he must be awake, but then he recalls exactly such memories from some dreams that he has had in the past.

2. He proceeds with questioning his own senses and says that one is regularly deceived by them. He then asks, is the sensation of being in a body, whose movements are controllable by his thought, enough to prove that his body is real? He answers this by comparing the things perceived through the senses as not unlike a painting, where the painter must have used some ‘real’ thing as a thing to draw inspiration from in order to create the painting. Even if the painter had created the painting from his own fictional imagination, the existence of the painting implies the existence of other real things such as color and paint.

3. He tries to classify the certain things from uncertain things, saying that most of the knowledge in fields such as astronomy, physics, medicine etc are uncertain, but the objective truth of adding two numbers such as 2 and 3 to make 5 cannot be denied.

While going through this argument, it occurred to me that dream or no dream, a consciousness that does sense awareness of it’s surroundings can and will have to infer some value from the information it perceives, whether deceptive or not. If the consciousness is dreaming, then there isn’t any way for the consciousness to know that it is so. Therefore, any knowledge that it can get about it’s surroundings would be useful to it for survival within that dream state.

This is akin to the endogenous value mentioned above in various games, even today’s virtual reality video games, where the value of any collectible item or points earned or other such sort of thing such as exploratory cues, do have value within the ecosystem of the video game (including the community around it and leaderboards etc). Thus, virtual reality, now made possible in our times, might likely have fascinated the likes of Descartes, who might have glossed over the sports games being played in his own times. Or perhaps, it just did not occur to him at the time of writing.

Another thought that occurred to me is how do we define value in the world? The value of time, money, energy, people, groups etc have different definitions and interpretations based on context. At the end of the day, however, the common aspect seems to be that ‘value’ is something that either you yourself give to another entity or it is something that is given to an entity (even an individual) by other members of some society. If an individual’s worth is to be constantly diminished, then it is sufficient to not give value in any sense to any action taken by the individual. This also seems to be the operational scheme of gangstalkers who continue to deny me value and manage to get everyone else to do the same.