Criticality as the Ground of All Value, Not One Value Among Others

Brett Anderson and John Vervaeke develop a striking claim: self-organized criticality — the dynamic process by which systems maintain themselves at the edge of order and chaos — is not merely descriptively optimal but genuinely normative. The argument hinges on the concept of intelligibility as a meta-norm. If a cognitive system loses its capacity for Relevance realization, its ability to adaptively frame and reframe its engagement with the world, then all of its other normative commitments become inert. They cannot be evaluated, revised, or applied. Criticality is therefore not one value competing alongside others but the condition of possibility for valuing as such.

This move draws on several philosophical collapses: Putnam's dissolution of the fact-value dichotomy, Quine's undermining of the theory-data distinction, and Casebeer's naturalistic account of ethical facts. Together, these create conceptual space for treating a process description — how systems optimally self-organize — as simultaneously a normative claim about what is good. The is-ought gap doesn't need to be bridged because, at the level of intelligibility, it was never fully open.

Vervaeke explicitly identifies this meta-normative ground with Plato's Form of the Good — understood not as a specific moral content but as the structural precondition that renders all other normative discourse meaningful. The Good is what makes it possible to distinguish better from worse at all. Criticality, as the dynamic that sustains ongoing Complexification and adaptive Sense-making, occupies precisely this role: it is the process without which no norm can function as a norm.