Hullo Scott, Wim, and Patrick, Roger and Maggie (in the "Is Evolution to
Complexity Equal to Progress" thread)
Scott, your comments on the "Machine in the Ghost theory: that Quality
evolves, first (from our point of view) as inorganic, then biologically,
etc." raised my interest earlier, but all too often the vocal overwhelms the
important. It seems to me that the "Machine in the Ghost theory" fits
comfortably with Pirsig, at least at first reading.
SCOTT: "The question is how do new patterns evolve, and for that we need the
concept of DQ. However, it might be better to think of DQ operating not as
the creator of patterns but as the Pure Observer and Evaluator, which gives
weight to certain variations, making them more likely."
I like the question. I also like the subtle shift from creator to observer
and evaluator. This seems to me to be moving in a helpful direction.
SCOTT: "The pattern is: in any situation, certain possibilities exist, and
as they are observed and evaluated, some gain higher probability, and hence
become more likely to happen (become static patterns)."
Perhaps I fail to understand, or am reading your 'observing and evaluating'
too literally, but this seems another form of God, a 'deus ex machina'. I am
also acutely aware that we are approaching the limits of language here. I
note you go on to say "It doesn't assume an entity outside of the evolving
entities, since the evolving entities "just are" Quality evolving", but I
can't reconcile the two statements.
SCOTT: "I also had in mind Whitehead's "God works through persuasion",
though I
realize my description is not quite that."
I note that in this post of the 17th you mention Whitehead. I have raised
Whitehead's views (as interpreted by Wilber) three times in this forum,
seemingly without interest, most recently in the 'Personal Spirituality'
thread on 1st August. (I'll add the major quote again at the end of this
post, in case you missed it before). I feel that Whitehead is critical to
this discussion, though I would suggest he started the ball rolling in a
certain direction and probably did not have the ability to carry it to the
limits suggested by Wilber.
WIM: "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 understand where you are coming from. We need to include how we are
'guided towards' what is of more value.
SCOTT: "In my mind, the division between DQ and sq is, like Quality itself
and
like DQ itself, incomprehensible to our intellect."
Hmmm. In this case why bother with it? Surely Pirsig argues that while
quality must remain undefined, all further cuts of the knife are a form of
definition, (ie a metaphysics). However, I do concede some real problems
with the DQ/sq cut, and have argued this many times previously.
SCOTT: "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."
Yes. This is where I agree that logic and rationality, that must operate in
terms of dualities, run into the realm of paradox, since reality at some
fundamental level is not about duality.
SCOTT: "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."
This seems to follow from the above. 'Division' is similar to my 'duality'.
I'll have to think about the adequacy of 'distinguishing'. Perhaps. The
reality of 'common sense' is something I think about a lot at present,
though I have developed nothing helpful yet. It arises powerfully in the
consideration of mysticism.
SCOTT: "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."
I don't quite grasp this. What is the "it" that is "the observation and
modification of itself."?
SCOTT: "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."
This is the core of the teleology debate. This is what Whitehead seems to be
saying, or at least that in understanding what 'survival' means (at the
biological level) it does not help to use the language of the 'lower'
inorganic realm, but rather we must use the values implicit in the higher
levels to understand the lower levels.
WIM: "The next type of evolution might imply the discovery of stratagems
employing
the "logic of contradictory identity" and "metaphors, paradoxes and
experience that isn't immediately translated into an opinion"
I like your comments in this post Wim, and it seems to me that this
statement points to a way forward, a praxis. This seems to me what the
mystics are researching. Scott seems to point to this also in the section
where he elaborates on the "logic of contradictory identity", which, he
concludes, permeates every experience.
[SCOTT: "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."]
JOHN B: Having responded to your debate thus far, I would like to throw in a
few suggestions to help draw out the 'logic' of the direction we seem to be
exploring.
1 One of the most helpful comments ever made in information theory is
that by Gregory Bateson in his "Last Lecture", that "information is
difference that makes a difference". He elaborates that of the infinite
number of differences immanent in any situation, very few become
information. To do that, they have to "enter into an information processing
system. This is basic to our notion of what is life, our notion of what is
death. It is basic for religion."
I would want to stress that the first "difference" in his statement is
'different' to the second. The first is a matter of analysis, the second of
value. In this context, it makes sense to move to 'life' and 'religion'. In
effect he is pointing to Whitehead's view, as I interpret it, that value
works in the opposite direction to evolution. That is, from the scientific
perspective, value emerges in some way from the evolutionary algorithm,
whereas for Whitehead, we can only understand evolution by starting with the
highest values accessible to us, and seeing how far down the levels they
extend. 'Analytic' difference only becomes significant in the presence of
'value' difference, and the value realm is primary. [This seems to fit well
with Pirsig's general argument.]
2 "Process theology" is the name given to a theology that grew directly
from the thought of Whitehead, and which stressed the centrality of
processes over things. Value meant that the ultimate aim of all occasions
(to Whitehead, all reality is composed of 'actual occasions' having a mental
and a physical pole) is 'beauty', a certain harmony of proportions and
relations, while evil is the thwarting of this aim - the mutually
obstructive character of things. "Salvation means a progressive response to
the lure of God toward the realization of beauty, and the peace which is the
preservation of beauty." (James M Lapsley, Salvation and Health, p57)
The use of the word 'lure' implies an attractor, and while I have problems
with traditional God talk, this is the next step in fleshing out a way of
understanding in which value has priority. Pirsig mentions a 'level of art',
and more or less abandons it, but Whitehead and the process theologians had
already developed a way of talking (albeit theological) which develops this
further. 'Beauty' is an attractor, which establishes a pull in a certain
direction. (I do not have sufficient mathematical expertise to know whether
there is any fit between this and the idea of 'attractors' in chaos theory -
are there any advanced mathematicians amongst us?)
ROGER: "Nature does seem to have the capacity to increase in complexity and
to
progress toward new qualities. Evolution may not tend to lead to complexity
or progress, but it certainly has found them just the same."
>From this reasonable statement of Roger's, I would like to move to a third
point.
3 I would like to examine the term 'potential'. (To paraphrase Roger,
evolution offers the potential for complexity or progress.) Potential is a
strange word, for it implies that beyond the description that I can offer of
something or someone, are capacities for being or becoming not yet in
existence. Like evolution, it demands a process in time. But 'potential'
also implies a possible direction. When I say that you have the potential to
be or become something, I bring into the description of you 'as you are' the
possibilities of a particular unfolding, and again this always involves a
value, be it positive or negative. This value is located in the person who
senses or supposes the potential, not necessarily in the recipient. So I can
suggest that an infant has the potential to {whatever} without that infant
having any cognisance of what I am suggesting. But I do. I draw on values of
which I am aware to ascribe potential to another.
How to use this I am not yet sure.
4 Bateson, in developing what he called a 'biological epistemology', used
the understanding of Fechner and Weber that mental life is dependant upon
the ability to receive news from the outside (this is very SOM jargon, but
bear with me) and this supposes that we can discriminate differences that
are in fact ratios. "This means that our entire mental life is one degree
more abstract than the physical world around us", says Bateson; "we deal in
... derivatives, and not in quantities - in ratios between quantities but
not in quantities. This, you see, is a bridge between mind and body, or
between mind and matter, but, at the same time, it differentiates mind from
matter." He goes on to show how everyday language is not very helpful in
establishing relationships, and more importantly, if you were to begin
looking at the world "with a biological epistemology, you will come into
contact with concepts which the biologists don't look at at all. You will
meet with beauty and ugliness. These may be real components in the world
that you as a living creature live in. It's not a new idea that living
things have imminent beauty, but it is revolutionary to assert, as a
scientist, that matters of beauty are really highly formal, very real, and
crucial to the entire political and ethical system in which we live." (A
Sacred Unity, p311)
There seems to me to be a fertile intersection of ideas in "the difference
that makes a difference", the "lure of God" in process theology, the concept
of "potential", and the perception of "imminent beauty" and "ugliness" in
living things. All these in some sense point beyond the immediate, and draw
value from a larger context. And of course, this is what we all experience
in our own development as persons. It makes sense to us to speak of
developing (or not developing) our potential, yet it is so easy to avoid the
implications of this. I begin to sense that value is fundamental in ways
that Pirsig only partly explored, and that the question of teleology is
probably only a way of mis-phrasing the questions we should be asking.
Bateson's last words in his "Last Lecture" are "that perhaps the monstrous
atomistic pathology ... of wrong thinking in which we all live - can only in
the end be corrected by an enormous discovery of those relations in nature
which make up the beauty of nature."
John B
[My previous posting on Whitehead, as interpreted by Wilber, follows.]
Whitehead "said that if you want to know the general principles of
existence, you must start at the top and use the highest occasions to
illumine the lowest, not the other way around, which of course is the common
reductionist reflex. So he said you could learn more about the world from
biology than you could from physics; and so he introduced the organismic
viewpoint which has revolutionized philosophy. And he said you could learn
more from social psychology than from biology, and then introduced the
notion of things being a society of occasions - the notion of compound
individuality. Naturally, he held that the apex of exemplary pattern was
God, and it was in God, the ultimate compound individual, that you would
ground any laws or patterns found reflected in reduced versions in the lower
dimensions of psychology, then biology, then physics. The idea, which was
brilliant in its statement, was that you first look to the higher levels for
the general principles of existence, and then, by subtraction, you see how
far down the hierarchy they extend. You don't start at the bottom and try to
move up by addition of the lower parts, because some of the higher parts
simply don't show up very well, or at all, on the lower rungs. Perhaps his
favourite examples were creativity and love - God, for Whitehead, was
especially love and creativity. But in the lower dimensions, the creativity
gets reduced, appearing in humans as a modicum of free will but being almost
entirely lost by the time you get to atomic particles... So Whitehead, by
looking to illuminate the lower by the higher, and not vice versa, could
make creativity the general principle, and then understand determinism as a
partial restriction or reduction of primary creativity. If, on the other
hand, you start at the bottom, then you have to figure out a way to get free
will and creativity out of rocks, and it just won't work."
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 25 2002 - 16:06:21 BST