Hugo Fjelsted Alroe (alroe@vip.cybercity.dk)
Tue, 3 Mar 1998 18:50:09 +0100
Keith and Squad
I can agree with most of what you say on the epistemic aspects of
dynamic
quality, Keith; thanks for your very valuable contributions!
As for the ontological aspects, they concern something I have been
working
with for a while. In fact, I, like many others on the squad I guess,
have
adapted this view of reality in a way, which make it difficult to
actually
argue for it in a way which would be convincing for those with another
view. I tend to think of it in terms of something like a Kuhnian
paradigmatic revolution, though I would insist that communication across
paradigms is possible.
Anyway, as for the arguments for 'quality is reality', they are to me
deeply connected with a process view or an evolutionary view. How do
things
arise, how can we understand becoming? This is the question which
started
my personal philosophical quest. There is a Dane, Simo Koeppe (da:
Køppe),
whom I may have mentioned before, who wrote a book on the levels of
reality
a few years back. There are many issues which I like in that book, and
the
levels are the well known four levels (not inspired by Pirsig, it is
after
all a quite common view), though the social and psychological level (he
is
a psychologist by education) are parallel. But he has a distinct
materialist view, and I recall an argument which went something like
this,
in terms of systems theory: Any system consists of interrelated
subsystems,
and these subsystems of further interrelated subsystems, and so on. But,
he
argued, at some level there has to be indivisible atoms (or quarks or
whatever), because if not, then everything would consist of nothing, it
would be infinitely reducible to a mere vacuum or nothingness. And,
given
these atoms, everything could in principle be explained from their
dynamics. Of course, this is only in principle, he said, in practice we
have to use the idea of systems and levels.
This struck me as immensely reductionistic, and I wondered about why he
considered the interrelations as 'not really real'. Since then I have
seen
how relations, or values, kind of disappears in the common view of
things.
The thingish worldview makes us unable to see certain aspects of the
world.
Seeing this blindness once, it is to be found everywhere. One way of
putting it, is that the thingish worldview is blind to emergence, it is
blind to the creative aspects of the world. In the thingish view,
emergence
is not really the becoming of new, it is merely the workings of lower
level
dynamics.
But, and here I am approaching the question of the nature of reality,
this
just doesn't work. (As Bo says, we cannot prove MoQ, but we can show it
works better.) If we think about the present conjecture on a scientific
worldview (meaning - a worldview open to inquiry), everything arose out
of
nothing, or at least out of something which was fairly homogeneous,
which
had very few degrees of freedom. Now we see a world with an enormous
complexity, with very many degrees of freedom. The Theory of Everything,
which the physicist are searching for, may say something appropriate on
the
beginning of the universe, and our emulations of this beginning, but
thats
it. It will have very little to say on the present world. Just as the
theory of gravity has little to say on the lives of birds.
If our ideas of explanation by reduction does not work on this grand
scale,
how can we believe they work on lesser scales? If the fundamental
physics
has very little to say on our world, why do we believe that explanation
from below captures every aspect of the nature of reality? And if we do
not
believe that, if we ask what explanations from lower levels misses out
on -
then we are back with the reality of relations, values, etc. And if
relations or values is what makes complex reality something new,
something
real, apart and above from the remains after dissection, - is this not
the
same as saying that value or realtions are the fundamental part of
(complex) reality?
If we can agree this far, then the rest of the argument will be to
follow
this down to the 'bottom', as Koeppe did, and in the end ask to the
becoming of the elementary particles. Are they special or do they too
consist of (arise out of) value, relation, quality? If we ask the
physicists, their answer will be something like energy and symmetry
breaks.
And if they are forced, they either retreat to transcendentalism and the
hand of god, or they say something which is very close to Pirsigs 'the
fundamental reality is value' (using other words, perhaps).
To the open mind, (in my particular case Pirsig was the prime eye
opener)
there really is no stance from which an entirely thingish worldview
makes
sense. And I think our best alternative is something like Pirsigs,
leaving
many open questions, of course. If we keep at it, it should take no more
than a few decades or centuries before we can make a good case for it.
I personally think we are doing ok.
Hugo
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