Platt, Jonathan, and squad,
Very good posts Platt and Jonathan. I tend to agree with both of you for
reasons which I may or not be able to make clear.
I believe that the MoQ was the only moral compass the universe had
before life
appeared, or possibly before awareness and sentience appeared. I am now
trying to write a letter laying out my idea of the MoQ and how it affects
pre and post sentience morality.
In a nutshell I believe that Quality came into being at the birth of the
universe and is the driving force that is responsible for the evolution
that occurred as a result of all of the possibilities that existed in the
universe being realized. I do not look upon this as causation, I look upon
it as simply a process resulting from the tendency of the universe toward
randomness.
As far as whether or not it is a deterministic universe, In the sense
that the universe had to follow the chain of increasing possibilities that
occurred as the universe grew older I regard it as a deterministic
universe. However, due to the vastly increasing possibility that occurred
with the development of the universe and the resulting complexity, we have
no way of tracing the course
of this possibility.
Because of complexity the universe is now effectively non-deterministic
with regard to us. We now inhabit a universe that is free of causation and
is effectively non-deterministic.
During this pre-life episode there was no such thing as the
subject-object question because its function was simply a Quality driven
process and was producing nothing but good and value. Every result would be
good and have value because all results would have been the result of
Quality and would have been good and had value because those results were
generated by the process of Quality. The entire universe would have
consisted of nothing but value, which was good. I think this is what Pirsig
meant when he said at the end of Lila that "Good is a noun".
When we come to sentient life we can see that the basic forces operating
in the universe are still the same. We are the result of the same process
that is driven by Quality
Before aware life appeared, that is life that could recognize itself as a
separate entity, universal evolution operated unimpeded. After aware life
appeared all of the life that was aware of itself as a separate entity
operated in opposition to the process of universal evolution. That is, it
partook of the things that it needed without regard to availability. If a
squirrel needed all of the nuts that was produced it would eat them without
regard for whether sufficient nuts would be left to produce other nut
trees. This established a situation whereby evolution opeated on a
condition of oversupply and placed no demands on presentient life to assume
any responsibility for the operation of evolution.
After sentience appeared. that is, after the advent of humanity, this
situation changed. Sentient life had the ability to understand the way that
the universe, and evolution, operated, and, was saddled with the
responsibility of making sure that the biosphere, Earth, and its life forms
remained compatible with the survival of that biosphere.
Up to just lately we, humanity, have not been accepting this
responsibility. We have done this partly through lack of a full
understanding of the workings of the biosphere but mainly through failing
to realize that sentience imposed extra responsibilities on us. It may be
that we have become aware of this in time, I think that this is the case,
but it may be that it is already a little late to make a full recovery. In
any case it seems clear to me that it is time for us to focus on the
universal morality that the MoQ embodies with regard to itself and the
biosphere.
In my opinion there is no subject-object problem, no causation problem,
no free will determinism problem, or no nature-nurture problem.
Again, we are embedded in the original Quality process in which the
entire universe consists of static patterns of value continually modified
by a continual flow of dynamic quality. We are not the product of
nature/nuture. Instead we are the product of Quality generated good and
value.
To repeat myself, we are embedded in a universe that is good and has
value because it is the result of Quality operating as a process and that
process is responsible for everything that exists.
I am tired and getting befuddled. If this arouses any interest maybe I
can generate some more wisdom. Ken Clark
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