Once this independent nature of the levels of static pattern of value is
understood a lot of puzzles get solved. The first one is the usual
puzzle of value itself. In SOM value has always been the most vague and
ambiguous of terms. What is it? When you say the world is composed of
nothing but value, what are you talking about? The word is too vague.
The "value" that holds a glass of water together and the value that
holds a nation together are obviously not the same thing. Therefore to
say that the world is nothing but values is just confusing, not
clarifying.
Now this vagueness is removed BY SORTING OUT VALUES ACCORDING TO LEVELS
OF EVOLUTION. (The water is inorganic and the nation is social.) They
are completely different from each other because they are at different
evolutionary levels. The patterns have nothing in common except the
evolutionary process that created all of them. But that process is a
process of value evolution. Therefore the name "static patterns of
values" applies to all.
That's one puzzle cleared up. Another one is the mind-matter puzzle.
The torment occurs not because of anything discovered in the laboratory.
Data are data. It is the INTELLECTUAL FRAMEWORK with which one deals
with the data that is at fault. The fault is within SOM itself. When SOM
regards matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it
creates a platypus bigger than the solar system.
The mind-matter paradoxes SEEM TO EXIST because the connecting links
between these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two
terms are missing: biology and society. Our intellectual description of
nature is ALWAYS culturally derived.
A third puzzle illuminated by the MOQ is the ancient "free will vs.
determinism controversy."
In the MOQ this dilemma doesn't come up. To the extent that one's
behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without
choice. But to the extent that one follows DQ, which is undefinable,
one's behavior is free.
The MOQ has much more to say about ethics...
It says that even at the most fundamental level of the universe, staic
patterns of value and moral judgements are the identical. The "Laws of
Nature" are moral laws. When inorganic patterns of reality create life
the MOQ postulates that they've done so because it's "better" and that
this definition of "betterness" -this beginning response to DQ- is an
elementary unit of ethis upon which all right and wrong can be based.
RMP
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