The static molecule, an enormous, chemically dead, plastic-like molecule called protein, surrounds the Dynamic one and prevents attack by forces of light, heat and other chemicals that would prey on its sensitivity and destroy it. The Dynamic one, called DNA, reciprocates by telling the static one what to do, replacing the static one when it wears out, replacing itself even when it hasn’t worn out, and changing its own nature to overcome adverse conditions. These two kinds of molecules, working together, are all there is in some viruses, which are the simplest forms of life.
This division of all biological evolutionary patterns into a Dynamic function and a static function continues on up through higher levels of evolution. The formation of semi-permeable cell walls to let food in and keep poisons out is a static latch. So are bones, shells, hide, fur, burrows, clothes, houses, villages, castles, rituals, symbols, laws and libraries. All of these prevent evolutionary degeneration.
On the other hand, the shift in cell reproduction from mitosis to meiosis to permit sexual choice and allow huge DNA diversification is a Dynamic advance. So is the collective organization of cells into metazoan societies called plants and animals. So are sexual choice, symbiosis, death and regeneration, communality, communication, speculative thought, curiosity and art. Most of these, when viewed in a substance-centered evolutionary way are thought of as mere incidental properties of the molecular machine. But in a value-centered explanation of evolution they are close to the Dynamic process itself, pulling the pattern of life forward to greater levels of versatility and freedom.
Sometimes a Dynamic increment goes forward but can find no latching mechanism and so fails and slips back to a previous latched position. Whole species and cultures get lost this way. Sometimes a static pattern becomes so powerful it prohibits any Dynamic moves forward. In both cases the evolutionary process is halted for a while. But when it’s not halted the result has been an increase in power to control hostile forces or an increase in versatility or both. The increase in versatility is directed toward Dynamic Quality. The increase in power to control hostile forces is directed toward static quality. Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.
Now when we come to the chemistry professor, and see him studying his empirically gathered data, trying to figure out what it means, this person makes more sense. He’s not just some impartial visitor from outer space looking in on all this with no purpose other than to observe. Neither is he some static, molecular, objective, biological machine, doing all this for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. We see that he’s conducting his experiments for exactly the same purpose as the subatomic forces had when they first began to create him billions of years ago. He’s looking for information that will expand the static patterns of evolution itself and give both greater versatility and greater stability against hostile static forces of nature. He may have personal motives such as pure fun, that is, the Dynamic Quality of his work. But when he applies for funds he will normally and properly tie his request to some branch of humanity’s overall evolutionary purpose.
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Phædrus had once called metaphysics the high country of the mind — an analogy to the high country of mountain climbing. It takes a lot of effort to get there and more effort when you arrive, but unless you can make the journey you are confined to one valley of thought all your life. This high country passage through the Metaphysics of Quality allowed entry to another valley of thought in which the facts of life get a much richer interpretation. The valley spreads out into a huge fertile plain of understanding.
In this plain of understanding static, patterns of value are divided into four systems: inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns and intellectual patterns. They are exhaustive. That’s all there are. If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics — Inorganic, Biological, Social and Intellectual — nothing is left out. No thing, that is. Only Dynamic Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is absent.
But although the four systems are exhaustive they are not exclusive. They all operate at the same time and in ways that are almost independent of each other.
This classification of patterns is not very original, but the Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them that is unusual. It says they are not continuous. They are discreet. They have very little to do with one another. Although each higher level is built on a lower one it is not an extension of that lower level. Quite the contrary. The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own purposes.
This observation is impossible in a substance-dominated metaphysics where everything has to be an extension of matter. But now atoms and molecules are just one of four levels of static patterns of quality and there is no intellectual requirement that any level dominate the other three.
An excellent analogy to the independence of the levels, Phædrus thought, is the relation of hardware to software in a computer. He had learned something about this relationship when for several years he wrote technical manuals describing complex military computers. He had learned how to troubleshoot computers electronically. He had even wired up some of his own digital circuits which, in those days before integrated circuit chips, were composed of independent transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors all held together with wire and solder. But after four years in which he had acquired all this knowledge he had only the vaguest idea of what a program was. None of the electrical engineers he worked with had anything to do with programs. Programmers were off in another building somewhere.
Later, when he got into work with programmers, he discovered to his surprise that even advanced programmers seldom knew how a flip-flop worked. That was amazing. A flip-flop is a circuit that stores a 1 or a 0. If you don’t know how a flip-flop works, what do you know about computers?
The answer was that it isn’t necessary for a programmer to learn circuit design. Neither is it necessary for a hardware technician to learn programming. The two sets of patterns are independent. Except for a memory map and a tiny isthmus of information called the Machine Language Instruction Repertoire — a list so small you could write it on a single page — the electronic circuits and the programs existing in the same computer at the same time have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
The Machine Language Instruction Repertoire fascinated Phædrus because he had seen it from such different perspectives. He had written hardware descriptions of many hundreds of blueprints showing how voltage levels were transferred from one bank of flip-flops to another to create a single machine language instruction. These machine language instructions were the final achievement toward which all the circuits aimed. They were the end performance of a whole symphony of switching operations.
Then when he got into programming he found that this symphony of electronic circuits was considered to be a mere single note in a whole other symphony that had no resemblance to the first one. The gating circuits, the rise and decay times, the margins for voltage levels, were gone. Even his banks of flip-flops had become registers. Everything was seen from a pure and symbolic world of logical relationships that had no resemblance at all to the real world he had worked in. The Machine Language Instruction Repertoire, which had been the entire design goal, was now the lowest element of the lowest level programming language. Most programmers never used these instructions directly or even knew what they meant.
Although both the circuit designer and the programmer knew the meaning of the instruction, Load Accumulator, the meaning that each knew was entirely different from the other’s. Their only relationship was that of analogy. A register is analogous to a bank of flip-flops. A change in voltage level is analogous to a change in number. But they are not the same. Even in this narrow isthmus between these two sets of static patterns called hardware and software there was still no direct interchange of meaning. The same machine language instruction was a completely
different entity within two different sets of patterns.
On top of this low-level programming language was a high-level programming language, FORTRAN or COBOL in those days, which had the same kind of independence from the low-level language that the low-level language had from electronic circuits. And on top of the high-level language was still another level of patterns, the application, a novel perhaps in a word-processing program. And what amazed him most of all was how one could spend all of eternity probing the electrical patterns of that computer with an oscilloscope and never find that novel.
What makes all this significant to the Metaphysics of Quality is its striking parallelism to the interrelationship of different levels of static patterns of quality.
Certainly the novel cannot exist in the computer without a parallel pattern of voltages to support it. But that does not mean that the novel is an expression or property of those voltages. It doesn’t have to exist in any electronic circuits at all. It can also reside in magnetic domains on a disk or a drum or a tape, but again it is not composed of magnetic domains nor is it possessed by them. It can reside in a notebook but it is not composed of or possessed by the ink and paper. It can reside in the brain of a programmer, but even here it is neither composed of this brain nor possessed by it. The same program can be made to run on an infinite variety of computers. A program can change itself into a different program while it is running. It can turn on another computer, transfer itself into this second computer and shut off the first computer that it came from, destroying every last trace of its origins — a process with similarities to biological reproduction.
Trying to explain social moral patterns in terms of inorganic chemistry patterns is like trying to explain the plot of a word-processor novel in terms of the computer’s electronics. You can’t do it. You can see how the circuits make the novel possible, but they do not provide a plot for the novel. The novel is its own set of patterns. Similarly the biological patterns of life and the molecular patterns of organic chemistry have a machine language interface called DNA but that does not mean that the carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atoms possess or guide life. A primary occupation of every level of evolution seems to be offering freedom to lower levels of evolution. But as the higher level gets more sophisticated it goes off on purposes of its own.
Once this independent nature of the levels of static patterns of value is understood a lot of puzzles get solved. The first one is the usual puzzle of value itself. In a subject-object metaphysics, 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?
Phædrus thought this was why no one before had ever seemed to have come up with the idea that the world is primarily value. 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 value is just confusing, not clarifying.
Now this vagueness is removed by sorting out values according to levels of evolution. The value that holds a glass of water together is an inorganic pattern of value. The value that holds a nation together is a social pattern of value. They are completely different from each other because they are at different evolutionary levels. And they are completely different from the biological pattern that can cause the most sceptical of intellectuals to leap from a hot stove. These patterns have nothing in common except the historic evolutionary process that created all of them. But that process is a process of value evolution. Therefore the name static pattern of values applies to all.
That’s one puzzle cleared up. Another huge one is the mind-matter puzzle.
If the world consists only of patterns of mind and patterns of matter, what is the relationship between the two? If you read the hundreds of volumes of philosophy available on this matter you may conclude that nobody knows — or at least knows well enough to convince everybody else. There is the materialist school that says reality is all matter, which creates mind. There is the idealist school that says it is all mind, which creates matter. There is the positivist school which says this argument could go on forever; drop the subject.
That would be nice if you could, but unfortunately it is one of the most tormenting problems of the physics to which positivism looks for guidance. 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 subject-object metaphysics itself.
A conventional subject-object metaphysics uses the same four static patterns as the Metaphysics of Quality, dividing them into two groups of two: inorganic-biological patterns called matter, and social-intellectual patterns called mind. But this division is the source of the problem. When a subject-object metaphysics regards matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it creates a platypus bigger than the solar system.
It has to make this fatal division because it gives top position in its structure to subjects and objects. Everything has got to be object or subject, substance or non-substance, because that’s the primary division of the universe. Inorganic-biological patterns are composed of substance, and are therefore objective. Social-intellectual patterns are not composed of substance and are therefore called subjective. Then, having made this arbitrary division based on substance, conventional metaphysics then asks, What is the relationship between mind and matter, between subject and object?
One answer is to fudge both mind and matter and the whole question that goes with them into another platypus called man. Man has a body (and therefore is not himself a body) and he also has a mind (and therefore is not himself a mind). But if one asks what is this man (which is not a body and not a mind) one doesn’t come up with anything. There isn’t any man independent of the patterns. Man is the patterns.
This fictitious man has many synonyms; mankind, people, the public, and even such pronouns as I, he, and they. Our language is so organized around them and they are so convenient to use it is impossible to get rid of them. There is really no need to. Like substance they can be used as long as it is remembered that they’re terms for collections of patterns and not some independent primary reality of their own.
In a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality the four sets of static patterns are not isolated into separate compartments of mind and matter. Matter is just a name for certain inorganic value patterns. Biological patterns, social patterns, and intellectual patterns are supported by this pattern of matter but are independent of it. They have rules and laws of their own that are not derivable from the rules or laws of substance. This is not the customary way of thinking, but when you stop to think about it you wonder how you ever got conned into thinking otherwise. What, after all, is the likelihood that an atom possesses within its own structure enough information to build the city of New York? Biological and social and intellectual patterns are not the possession of substance. The laws that create and destroy these patterns are not the laws of electrons and protons and other elementary particles. The forces that create and destroy these patterns are the forces of value.
So what the Metaphysics of Quality concludes is that all schools are right on the mind-matter question. Mind is contained in static inorganic patterns. Matter is contained in static intellectual patterns. Both mind and matter are completely separate evolutionary levels of static patterns of value, and as such are capable of each containing the other without contradiction.
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. Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorga
nic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, We are suspended in language. Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.
The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see the historic reasons for this myth of independence. Science might never have survived without it. But a close examination shows it isn’t so.
A third puzzle illuminated by the Metaphysics of Quality is the ancient Free Will vs. Determinism controversy. Determinism is the philosophic doctrine that man, like all other objects in the universe, follows fixed scientific laws, and does so without exception. Free will is the philosophic doctrine that man makes choices independent of the atoms of his body.
This battle has been a very long and very loud one because an abandonment of either position has devastating logical consequences. If the belief in free will is abandoned, morality must seemingly also be abandoned under a subject-object metaphysics. If man follows the cause-and-effect laws of substance, then man cannot really choose between right and wrong.
On the other hand, if the determinists let go of their position it would seem to deny the truth of science. If one adheres to a traditional scientific metaphysics of substance, the philosophy of determinism is an inescapable corollary. If everything is included in the class of substance and its properties, and if substance and its properties is included in the class of things that always follow laws, and if people are included in the class everything, then it is an air-tight logical conclusion that people always follow the laws of substance.
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Page 17