Last night I (Roger) went to bed early with a touch of a fever and just a
hint of delirium, and between those moments of sleep and wake some strange
experiences occurred.
"Selection is the very keel on which our ship is built."
Why couldn't I get this out of my mind? Where had I read this? Pirsig?
Nishida? Rich's Bergson quotes? was it something I dreamed? Did it matter?
"Selection is the very keel on which our ship is built."
This thought, along with a slight fever and some half-awake half-asleep
memories of Carmen and Keith's posts and thoughts of strange alien life forms
and weird musings of why John never lets Ruth chat got me wondering about the
whole issue of patterns and quality.
"Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built."
Selection? Selection seems a lot to me like quality, but it is different
too. Is quality "pattern selection and distinction?" Is that what the world
is composed of? I don't know, but my mind began to drift off into a world
that precedes our own. Back to the source ..........
I am an organism....
I can experience the light or the dark......
I experience light.....
I can experience the reflection or the absorbtion of the light.... .
I absorb it....
I can experience the dry rock or the liquid tidal pool.....
I float in the water......
I can experience multiplication or not multiplying .......
I multiply.
Fast forward a few hundred million years......
I am now a colony of algea covering the sunny tidal waters of a Carribean
sea. The sun, the light, the beach, the colony, the waves..... All these are
now patterns of quality based on past experiences. These are moral, good,
high quality.
On the other hand, dark caves and frigid deep water, and dry land are all
evil, low quality immoral and bad.
The decendants of this primordial algea are born into a world of quality
totally unlike the decendants of those ancesters that experienced the dark,
or that experienced reflection, or that didn't multiply (short lived
patterns).
What I am getting at is that the universe has been formed by experiences just
like this. Each of us has experienced a world that has created or brought
forth ourselves and our surroundings. Together we coevolved and were created
out of pure quality.
The patterns that we perceive as quality are the ones that are us. Not us as
in just a subject, but us as in what we are as pure experience. As an algea,
you are the sunshine, the warmth, the flow of the swells and the drag of the
tides. These are not just quality, they are us.
The patterns are patterns defined by selection. DQ is selection. They cannot
be anything but good, because they are sooooo right.
We are at home in the universe, and it is at home in us.
Roger
"Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built."
[From William James in December's Scientific American on Intelligence]
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