Not someone, everybody. Not X, goodness. And not me—I've already done my tests—you.

You are testing for a transcendental quality of being. It applies equally to everybody, just like gravity or thermal radiation.

So, alright, I'll design the first test for you. I won't full out define goodness, but the test itself will sort of reveal that.

You need to give up something valuable to you to someone who needs it.

An underlying idea here is that goodness requires sacrifice. Simply giving up something you don't value won't work. Another underlying idea is that need takes precedence over want. Giving someone else something that they want is nice, but not necessarily good.

What do people need? They need food, water, clothes and shelter. That's the bare minimum, so your best bet will be one of those things.

You have to do this because you recognize the value of the person you help.

An underlying idea here is goodness requires appreciation for otherness.

In the course of one full day (sure, I will risk putting a time limit on it, even if that's not the best policy, I can't imagine you doing the experiment otherwise), if you don't receive something of greater or equal value to what you sacrificed, it's a failed experiment.

An underlying idea here is that goodness isn't a one way street. It doesn't mean martyrdom. Reciprocity is also a quality of goodness.

However, the reward shouldn't come from the act itself (feeling good) or the person whom you help. The reward should come from something seemingly unrelated.

It needs to come from something seemingly unrelated because you are not looking for emergent local phenomena. You're looking for laws of nature.

Now, correlation doesn't prove causation, right, so you need to not only be able to repeat this test, but you also need to try to disprove other possible causes of the reward.

That means that, if the first test is a success, try doing the good deed and then isolating yourself. If the reward comes anyway, you might want to start looking deeper into what it means to be human and perhaps designing even more tests. If it doesn't work, at least you will have tested for the existence of a transcendental reciprocal goodness with a one day time limit.

> Someone has a meaning X for their lives. How do you test it? What do you test it against?

People who work in Facebook, Google, Twitter, {CorporationX} in the AI / user profiling department may know a thing or two about that topic.