Wim,
Wim Nusselder wrote:
"I must think more about it, but it fits my ideas about God (which I
tend to associate with DQ) as something which connects everyone and
everything and which can also guide behavior/actions."
I also had in mind Whitehead's "God works through persuasion", though I
realize my description is not quite that.
[Wim:] "I am still a bit confused about the relation between DQ and
Quality when you are writing about - 'Quality evolving' through
different stages/levels (inorganic, biological etc.), - DQ observing,
evaluating and weighing variations (from Quality patterns) AND finaly -
'evolving entities "just [being]" Quality evolving, always in the form
of the polarity DQ/sq (neither of which has any reality without the
other)'. Is DQ in your scheme still a subdivision of Quality as in the
MoQ? Is the DQ that observes/evaluates/weighs variations from static
patterns of values the same DQ that is an aspect of evolving entities
and that no reality without sq?"
In my mind, the division between DQ and sq is, like Quality itself and
like DQ itself, incomprehensible to our intellect. I believe it to be
THE case of what Coleridge called polarity, and what Nishida called a
situation that requires the "logic of contradictory identity". This was
described (by David Dilworth in his translation of Nishida's "Last
Writings") as the situation where you have an X and a Y, where X is made
possible by Y (and vice versa) but X contradicts Y (and vice versa).
Another example (not a different polarity but different words for the
same one) is to be found in our every experience of anything. All
experience requires a continuity on the part of the experiencer and the
experienced, but the experience is at the same time a change in the
experiencer and an experience of change. So continuity requires change,
change requires continuity, and they are opposites. In SOM (as Zeno
pointed out) this is a platypus. In the MOQ (as I see it) this is the
foundation.
This implies (to me) that the split of Quality into DQ and sq is not a
division, but a distinguishing. It is not an illusion, since the split
is real enough to have produced "common sense" in the form of SOM. It is
an illusion in that if the split were absolute there could be no awareness.
So I say all entities are "Quality evolving" to emphasize that the DQ/sq
split is not into two realms of existence, but one realm that can
observe and modify itself -- more than that, it IS the observation and
modification of itself.
Having said this, I realize that my characterization in my last post of
the way this polarity appears in the MOQ levels (though I left out the
social) is inadequate, but I'm not sure how to fix it. On the inorganic
level, there are relations to the wave/particle duality, but the nature
of those relations is not clear to me. On the organic level, sentience
is clearly a factor. It means we stop thinking of sentience as a means
organisms use to survive, rather they survive to be sentient. The
intellectual level is generally acknowledged to be self-observing and
self-evaluating. I'm not sure how the social fits.
- Scott
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