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.
A third puzzle illuminated by the Metaphysics of Quality is the ancient Free Will vs. Determinism controversy. Determinism is the philosophic doctrine that man, like all other objects in the universe, follows fixed scientific laws, and does so without exception. Free will is the philosophic doctrine that man makes choices independent of the atoms of his body.
This battle has been a very long and very loud one because an abandonment of either position has devastating logical consequences. If the belief in free will is abandoned, morality must seemingly also be abandoned under a subject-object metaphysics. If man follows the cause-and-effect laws of substance, then man cannot really choose between right and wrong.
On the other hand, if the determinists let go of their position it would seem to deny the truth of science. If one adheres to a traditional scientific metaphysics of substance, the philosophy of determinism is an inescapable corollary. If everything is included in the class of substance and its properties, and if substance and its properties is included in the class of things that always follow laws, and if people are included in the class everything, then it is an air-tight logical conclusion that people always follow the laws of substance.
To be sure, it doesn’t seem as though people blindly follow the laws of substance in everything they do, but within a Deterministic explanation that is just another one of those illusions that science is forever exposing. All the social sciences, including anthropology, were founded on the bed-rock metaphysical belief that these physical cause-and-effect laws of human behavior exist. Moral laws, if they can be said to exist at all, are merely an artificial social code that has nothing to do with the real nature of the world. A moral person acts conventionally, watches out for the cops, keeps his nose clean, and nothing more.
In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn’t come up. To the extent that one’s behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one’s behavior is free.
The Metaphysics of Quality has much much more to say about ethics, however, than simple resolution of the Free Will vs. Determinism controversy. The Metaphysics of Quality says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world, then moral judgments are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world.
It says that even at the most fundamental level of the universe, static patterns of value and moral judgment are identical. The Laws of Nature are moral laws. Of course it sounds peculiar at first and awkward and unnecessary to say that hydrogen and oxygen form water because it is moral to do so. But it is no less peculiar and awkward and unnecessary than to say chemistry professors smoke pipes and go to movies because irresistible cause-and-effect forces of the cosmos force them to do it. In the past the logic has been that if chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms and if atoms follow only the law of cause and effect, then chemistry professors must follow the laws of cause and effect too. But this logic can be applied in a reverse direction. We can just as easily deduce the morality of atoms from the observation that chemistry professors are, in general, moral. If chemistry professors exercise choice, and chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms, then it follows that atoms must exercise choice too. The difference between these two points of view is philosophic, not scientific. The question of whether an electron does a certain thing because it has to or because it wants to is completely irrelevant to the data of what the electron does.
So what Phædrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they’ve done so because it’s better and that this definition of betterness — this beginning response to Dynamic Quality — is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based.
When this understanding first broke through in Phædrus' mind, that ethics and science had suddenly been integrated into a single system, he became so manic he couldn’t think of anything else for days. The only time he had been more manic about an abstract idea was when he had first hit upon the idea of undefined Quality itself. The consequences of that first mania had been disastrous, and so now, this time, he told himself just to calm down and dig in. It was, for him, a great Dynamic breakthrough, but if he wanted to hang on to it he had better do some static latching as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
13
Latching was what was needed all right. Historically every effort to unite science and ethics has been a disaster. You can’t paste a moral system on top of a pile of amoral objective matter. The amoral objective matter never needs this paste job. It always sloughs it off as superfluous.
But the Metaphysics of Quality doesn’t permit this slough-off. It says, first of all, that amoral objective matter is a low-grade form of morality. No slough-off is possible. It states, second of all, that even if matter weren’t a low grade form of morality there still would be no metaphysical need to show how morals are derived from it. With static patterns of value divided into four systems, conventional moral patterns have almost nothing to do with inorganic or biological nature. These moral patterns are superimposed upon inorganic nature the way novels are superimposed upon computers. They are more commonly opposed to biological patterns than they are supportive of them.
And that is the key to the whole thing.
What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just one moral system. There are many. In the Metaphysics of Quality there’s the morality called the laws of nature, by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the law of the jungle where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there’s a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, the law; and there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society. Each of these sets of moral codes is no more related to the other than novels are to flip-flops.