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Sight Unseen; Concepts of Evolution in
the Metaphysics of Quality
By Dan Glover

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."


In a previous paper Force of Value in the Metaphysics of Quality I introduced the notion of struction as a working concept within Robert M. Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, as outlined in his novel Lila; An Inquiry into Morals. Here I would like to expand that idea into a conceptual complementary framework of Dynamic Quality evolutionary values driving the four static levels of static quality everyday reality. These forces of value are identified by Pirsig like this:
 

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. [1]
Using this paragraph as a clue to begin expanding the concept of force of value, or value force, in the Metaphysics of Quality, I envisioned a "positive" and a "negative" side to Dynamic Quality, something we normally think of as synonymous with "good" and "evil" in our Western culture. Since "the laws that create and destroy these patterns are not the laws of electrons and protons" I feel the inorganic level is basically beyond any conceptual framework we can use to describe it, as quantum theorists discovered earlier this century. Therefore it is of value to ignore this level as far as value force is concerned, and simply focus upon the biological, social and intellect levels within the Metaphysics of Quality.

I soon realized that these value forces are what drives the evolutionary values of those three static patterns of value. A second clue was provided by my work putting together a paper comparing the teachings of the Yaqui Indian named Juan Matus, as decried by Carlos Castaneda, called Quality is a Good Dog. In making his "division" of reality into the tonal and the nagual, don Juan Matus uses Occam's razor in the very same place that Pirsig does in his Metaphysics of Quality. Furthermore, don Juan tells us:
 

... [don Juan] explained that every human being had two sides, two separate entities, two
counterparts which became operative at the time of birth. one was called the 'tonal' and the
other the 'nagual'. ... He smiled and winked at me.

"I am using your own words now," he said.
"The tonal is the social person. ... the tonal is, rightfully so, a protector, a guardian - a guardian that most of the time turns into a guard. ... The tonal is the organizer of the world, perhaps the best way of describing its monumental work is to say that on its shoulders rests the task of setting the chaos of the world in order. ... The tonal is everything that we are; name it! Anything we have a word for is the tonal."

"The tonal is an island. ... the tonal is like the top of this table. There is a personal tonal for each of us, and there is a collective one for all of us at any given time ...

"The nagual on the other hand is the part of us which we do not deal with at all. ... the nagual is the part of us for which there is no description- no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge. ... I have named the tonal and the nagual as a true pair. That is all I have done."

Here I saw the importance attached to our cultural values was of primary concern in understanding the teachings of don Juan. This too seems of equal importance in the Metaphysics of Quality. Our everyday reality consists of the culture in which we are immersed. It follows that these patterns of value that make up the culture, or social level in the Metaphysics of Quality, are creative forces of value. The intellect level, on the other hand, is in seeming contradiction to these positive value forces and therefore must be the negative side of Quality. Together, the social and intellect patterns of value work as a struction, a complementary pair of values, of which the highest value is contained within the intellect level.

This provides a clue as to the evolutionary processes that occur within our society. Every good idea seems to be a destruction of an existing meme. Our society evolves at a seemingly much faster rate than do biological patterns of value. In the biological level, the forces of creation and destruction are in a seeming balance. Using all these clues, I have attempted to put together a graph, illustrating the concepts of evolutionary value forces in the Metaphysics of Quality.


Value Force in the Metaphysics of Quality


It is my hope that this graph illustrates in some fashion the complementary nature of value forces as they move towards Dynamic Quality, which is forever just beyond the edge of our perception. The wave pattern is only apparent at as an overview of all four levels of the Metaphysics of Quality. If any particular level is isolated for observation, the wave pattern turns into an individualistic particle pattern. This has very obvious connections with the framework of complementarity, as advanced by Niels Bohr earlier this century.

The inorganic level is simply represented by the center line in the graph. From the inorganic level springs the force of value we associate with the life force of the biological level. This level contains both forces of creation and Discreation, mingled together in a complexly related dance. And from the biological level springs the creative force of the social level. Once this social level has been created however, the only way it can continue its advance towards Dynamic Quality is to undergo destruction by the discreative force of the intellect level. When the "wave" remains in an ever continuous, synchronous movement towards freedom, evolution unfolds in the static patterns of value these forces flow through. But a stoppage at any point within the three levels of static patterns of value results in a breaking of the wave. A stasis, or a perceived evil occurs.

This requires a drastic revision of the way we conceive of our everyday reality in terms of good and evil as we normally think of them in our Western culture. It also uncovers clues to why the intellect has been persecuted over the centuries in many societies seeking to retain the status quo, like the old U.S.S.R. The Socialist State failed to consider the destructive nature of the intellect as containing value and instead attempted to control society by creating  "restrictions" to keep the supposed degenerates in line. However, these "restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution" and ensured the extinction of that state. The old values simply died of old age. It seems that since there was no Dynamically inspired revolution in the old U.S.S.R., but only a withering of old values, that society is still suffering through tumultuous times.

This may have ramifications in the biological level as well. At this particular moment in time, no new species are coming into being around us. From the geological records, it is becoming more and more apparent that new species only arise after a global catastrophe, like the asteroid which struck the earth some 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and clearing the way for the domination of the mammals. It has been confirmed unambiguously that just such an occurrence indeed took place, although the jury is still out as to why, after such a catastrophe, such a profusion of new lifeforms sprang into being, seemingly overnight.

Some evolutionary researchers have been using bacteria to simulate the process our own species may have went through to reach the state we presently find ourselves. Here are some extracts from an article in the New Scientist magazine concerning such research:

Replaying Life

EVOLUTION is history. Not dead, terminated, finito, you
       understand, but rather the unfolding story of life on Earth. And as in
       any history, chance plays a role. Just as it is impossible to know if
       the First World War would still have started if Archduke Francis
       Ferdinand's driver had not made a wrong turn in Sarajevo, so it is
       impossible to say what life would have been like if, for example, the
       age of dinosaurs had not ended in catastrophe.

       Or is it? Some evolutionary biologists think there is more to evolution
       than mere history. Not content with sifting through the fossil record
       and looking for clues about the past by analyzing the way things are
       today, they are studying evolution in action in the lab. Here, the
       researchers can replay the tape of life over and over, tweak the
       environment and see how species adapt in response. They can chart
       changes in organisms over thousands of generations and watch as
       brand new creatures evolve over days, not millennia. They can even
       test how evolution affects a species' ability to survive by making it
       compete with its ancestors.

       For the past few years such experiments have been going on in a
       handful of labs. Tiny test tube worlds populated by microbes are
       shedding new light on the fundamental forces that shape all living
       things. They are giving insights into questions such as what happens
       after a mass extinction, how life adapts successfully to a myriad of
       environments, and whether adapting to one environment restricts an
       organism's ability to adapt to another. These studies have led some
       researchers to draw surprising conclusions about the role of past
       events in evolution--and even about whether or not the appearance
       of intelligent life is inevitable.

       Paul Rainey's lab at the University of Oxford is home to vast
       numbers of wrinkly and fuzzy spreaders. These are not characters
       from a B movie or escapees from a virtual world, but genetically
       discrete varieties of a common bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens.
       In the outside world these microbes live on leaves and clump
       together in smooth circular colonies. By contrast, in the lab, wrinkly
       spreaders form relatively large colonies with irregular convoluted
       surfaces, while clusters of fuzzy spreaders look more spherical but
       with an indistinct, fuzzy edge.

       Rainey, Michael Travisano, who has just moved to the University of
       Houston, and their colleagues produced the two new varieties simply
       by growing P. fluorescens in a novel environment of nutrient-rich
       broth. "To the leaf colonising bacteria it's a pristine environment--a bit
       like the world after a major extinction event," says Rainey. "The
       bacteria have lots of opportunity to diversify."

       Rainey's reference to mass extinction is no accident. Life on Earth
       has gone through at least five such catastrophic events, in which up
       to 95 per cent of all species were lost in the geological blink of an
       eye. But every time, life bounced back with greater variety than
       before as new species exploited new ecological opportunities. And
       that is exactly what happens in Rainey's test tubes. After just one
       week, P. fluorescens evolves into both wrinkly and fuzzy spreaders.
       What's more, no matter how many times the team repeats the
       experiment, by day seven the smooth morph is always sharing its
       world with the two spreaders. The new environment leads to
       diversity or, as biologists say, there has been adaptive radiation.

       Charles Darwin was the first to highlight the importance of adaptive
       radiation in the formation of new species, with his study of
       Galápagos finches. In this case, a single species from mainland South
       America colonized the Galápagos Islands. There it gradually
       diversified into several varieties with distinctive beaks specialized for
       harvesting the different foods available on different islands. Isolated
       on different islands, each variety maintained and increased its
       distinctiveness. Today there are 14 species.

       Bottom dwellers

       Speciation is a combination of adaptive radiation and sexual isolation,
       either in space--like the finches--in time, or through divergent sexual
       practices. Most bacteria rarely have sex, so they reveal little about
       sexual isolation. But, says Rainey, bacteria are good models for
       helping to tease out exactly what drives adaptive radiation.

       Ecological opportunity is one spur. Like Darwin's finches, Rainey
       and Travisano's bacteria are adapted to a specialized lifestyle, or
       niche. This is easily seen in the test tube world because each morph
       occupies a distinct habitat. Wrinklies tend to clump together on the
       surface of the broth, fuzzies are bottom dwellers, while the ancestral
       smooth morph lives suspended throughout the liquid. "There is rapid
       evolution and niche specialization when the environment into which
       the bacteria are introduced is rich in available niches," says Rainey.
       "It's a very powerful effect." As well as the spreaders, other morphs
       evolve from time to time, including one specialized to living at the rim
       and others that appear as the resident populations change the balance
       of nutrients in the broth.

       Showing that ecological opportunity is a primary cause of adaptive
       radiation was simplicity itself. The team grew the same bacteria in
       the same broth under identical conditions, but eradicated ecological
       opportunity by shaking the broth. Without the different habitats
       offered by the undisturbed environment, no new morphs evolved.

       The second force behind adaptive radiation that Rainey and
       colleagues have studied is competition. A microbe can diversify as
       much as the random mutation of its genes will allow, but unless a
       new morph has a competitive edge over other forms it will not make
       it into life's doomsday book. Since Darwin's time, competition has
       been considered pivotal to diversification. Yet proving its precise role
       has turned out to be difficult, and considerable controversy surrounds
       its importance. (full article may be read here.) [3]

Now, no one is saying our own culture is as simple as the culture of bacteria the researchers grew. But there are no doubt some similarities to how each has come to evolve. There is no doubt that natural selection plays a role in both biological and social evolution. But the role of what the researchers called "adaptive radiation" is little understood at this time. It would seem that the two concepts of natural selection and adaptive radiation are actually complementary in the process of evolution that led to the myriad species alive on earth today, and how society has evolved. Natural selection seems to be a gradual, continuous process, while adaptive radiation occurs only in catastrophic situations.

This leads to the inevitable conclusion that world-wide catastrophes are only low value situations from a static quality point of view. In fact, it may well turn out to be that periodic renewal of the earth is the natural order of things, and that should neo-sapiens evolve one day, it will only be in response to another giant rock striking the earth and wiping out 90% of the existing lifeforms in existence, thereby allowing new (and better?) species to propagate via adaptive radiation. From the point of view of Dynamic Quality, these catastrophes are high value situations.

By recognizing value force as a complement to the static quality patterns of value which comprise our everyday reality, evolutionary concepts in the Metaphysics of Quality begin to explain many of the problems that traditional subject/object thinking fails to answer. Evolution as we understand it is only viewed from a static quality point of view, since that is the only concept we can use in describing it.
And it is only viewed retrospectively. Since Dynamic Quality is outside time, so to speak, and outside our our conceptual range of experience, these value forces are not any kind of energetic processes that we are aware of, or can become aware of at some time in the future. There would seem to be a correlation between Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic field theory, advanced in his book Morphic Resonance; A New Science of Life and the notion of Dynamic Quality, viewed as value forces of creation and discreation.

Links

Perceptions of Quality
 

Footnotes

[1] Lila; An Inquiry into Morals, bantam paperback, page 178

[2] Tales of Power, page 128

[3] New Scientist magazine, Replaying Life, by Kate Douglas