Maggie and Squad,
The evil that you point to in your message was not evil until after the
social and intellectual levels came into being. The inorganic and
biological levels, until after sentience developed, did not contain the
possibility of evil. For instance, one can use a rock to bash out the
brains of an unwanted baby but that does not make the rock evil. The evil
lies in the social or intellectual level impulse that caused the rock to
become a weapon. Again, until sentience was injected into the universe, the
universe was evolving under the guidance of Dynamic Quality and the range
of possibility was continually expanding. We could even say that the "Many
Truths" idea that was later applied to sentience was also operating during
the physical and biological phases of the evolution of the universe.
Complexity and possibility was continually expanding and a great range of
possibility was no doubt being explored. Those "Truths" which did not
contribute materially to the line of physical evolution were discarded and
the "Truths" which offered the line of least evolutionary resistance were
pursued. The result was the universe as we understand it now. This is the
same idea that Pirsig later applied to sentience and human consciousness
under the "Many Truths" concept. If nothing intervenes, this idea, carried
to its ultimate conclusion, in both physical and human evolution, will
ultimately result in a physical universe containing sentience which is
harmonius throughout and which will contain no evil. If we take a long
enough view we can see that both physical and ethical evolution are
operating in the universe and this should eventually result in an ethically
correct universe.
The problelm that I have with the current situation is that "ethics", as
applied to humanity, is not always ethical when considered from the
viewpoint of the physical universe. For instance, we now have some seven
billion people on the earth now. By some estimates it is approaching
overload. Was Pol Pot being ethical when he killed off a couple of million
people, thus reducing the biomass load on the biosphere? How are we going
to solve this type of problem a little further down the line. We demand
unlimited water, and electricity, and food and transportation, and such.
Somewhere in the not too distant future we will arrive at a critical phase
in our demands on the biosphere. What will ethics be then? I shudder to
think what kind of wild eyed schemes will pop up when we have to put severe
restrictions on our activities. Now it is just religion and similar ideas
that cause the problem. What will happen when we have a real problem? Will
something like Cosmotheism become the dominate religion? Lets hope that
"Many Truths" will function to curb our baser instincts by that time.
Somebody give me some answers. Ken
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