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.
12
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.