[MD] EvO~lution and a VaLue centered metaphysics

[X Acto]

"Nothing dominates Quality. If there's domination and possession involved, 
it's Quality that dominates and possesses Lila. She's created by it. She's 
a cohesion of changing static patterns of this Quality. There isn't any 
more to her than that. The words Lila uses, the thoughts she thinks, the 
values she holds, are the end product of three and a half billion years 
of the history of the entire world. She's a kind of jungle of evolutionary 
patterns of value. She doesn't know how they all got there any more than 
any jungle knows how it came to be.
And yet there in the middle of this 'Lila Jungle' are ancient prehistoric 
ruins of past civilizations. You could dig into those ruins like an 
archaeologist layer by layer, through regressive centuries of civilization, 
measuring by the distance down in the soil, the distance back in time.
That was an intriguing idea. You could structure a whole analysis around 
this one person, interview her, find out what her values were and then 
show the entire metaphysics in terms of one specific case . . . This 
whole metaphysics was crying for something to bring it down to earth. 
He could ask her questions all the way to Florida."
-Lila chptr 11

Ron:
That is what his value centered metaphysics needed something to
relate it to an SOM understanding, something to "bring it down
to earth"  He goes to explain:

"But the theory was OK. Lila is composed of static patterns of value 
and these patterns are evolving toward a Dynamic Quality. That's 
the theory, anyway. She's on her way somewhere, just like everybody 
else. And you can't say where that somewhere is.
The theory had arrived in his mind several months ago with the 
statement, 'All life is a migration of static patterns of quality 
toward Dynamic Quality.' It had been boiling around in his mind 
ever since.
In traditional, substance-centered metaphysics, life isn't evolving 
toward anything. Life's just an extension of the properties of atoms, 
nothing more. It has to be that because atoms and varying forms of 
energy are all there is. But in the Metaphysics of Quality, what is 
evolving isn't patterns of atoms. What's evolving is static patterns 
of value, and while that doesn't change the data of evolution it 
completely up-ends the interpretation that can be given to evolution."

Ron:
"It completely upends the interpretation that can be given to evolution"
This marks where Pirsig begins to use evolutionary theory as an
example to expand his value centered metaphysics. The very example
he needed to link MoQ with SOM.

"Historically this assumption by a subject-object metaphysics that 
all the world is composed of substance put a strain on the Theory 
of Evolution right from its beginning. At the time of its origin 
it wasn't yet understood that at the level of photons and electrons 
and other small particles the laws of cause and effect no longer 
apply; that electrons and photons simply appear and disappear 
without individual predictability and without individual cause. 
So today we have as a result a theory of evolution in which 'man'
 is ruthlessly controlled by the cause-and-effect laws of the 
universe while the particles of his body are not. The absurdity 
of this seems to be neglected. The problem doesn't lie in 
anyone's department. Physicists can ignore it because they are 
not concerned with man. Social scientists can ignore it because 
they are not concerned with subatomic particles.
So although modern physics pulled the rug out from under the 
deterministic explanation of evolution many decades ago, it has 
survived by default because no other more plausible explanation 
has been available. But right from the beginning, substance-caused 
evolution has always had a puzzling aspect that it has never been 
able to eliminate. It goes into many volumes about how the fittest 
survive but never once answers the question of why."

Ron:
And there it was, an important theory about existence that was 
undercut by scientific objectivism, the perfect example to expand
apon his value centered metaphysics.
He begins with:

"'Survival of the fittest' is meaningful only when 'fittest' is equated with 
'best,' which is to say, 'Quality.' And the Darwinians don't mean just any 
old quality, they mean undefined Quality! As Mayr's article makes clear, 
they are absolutely certain there is no way to define what that 'fittest' is.
Good! The 'undefined fittest" they are defending is identical to Dynamic 
Quality. Natural selection is Dynamic Quality at work. There is no quarrel 
whatsoever between the Metaphysics of Quality and the Darwinian Theory of 
Evolution. Neither is there a quarrel between the Metaphysics of Quality 
and the 'teleological' theories which insist that life has some purpose. 
What the Metaphysics of Quality has done is unite these opposed doctrines 
within a larger metaphysical structure that accommodates both of them 
without contradiction."

Ron:
It was the example that worked perfectly for his purposes
He writes:

"The explanation of life as a 'migration of static patterns toward 
Dynamic Quality' not only fitted the known facts of evolution, 
it allowed new ways of interpreting them."
 
My arguement is that this example, this bridge between a metaphysics
of substance with a metaphysics of value, is what Bo takes to be the
MoQ itself. So much so, that he invents interpretations, levels and whatnot
in an effort to incorporate the larger idea of a metaphysics of value within
a smaller idea of a metaphysics of substance.Which is why the MoQ seems
like it wants to burst from the confines of the "intellectual level". A level that
he insists and has convinced others, that s/o is THE way, thinking beings
view experience at any place at any time regardless of culture.
Pirsig had this to say about the subject:
 
"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 
inorganic 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."
 
The intellectual level notion of s/o reality is a socially dominated idea.
A myth created by science for survival purposes.